The concept of reincarnation ("reincarnation"), according to which our consciousness does not disappear without a trace after the death of the body, but passes into another state, was present at all times. The doctrine of reincarnation was recognized by many world religions and philosophical systems.
Reincarnation is part of the evolutionary process of consciousness. According to ancient teachings, a person lives many times, incarnating in different eras, until earthly experience makes him wise, perfect and "enlightened."
Consciousness also develops in the intervals between lives.
Reincarnation is repeated birth and death through which a person goes through in accordance with his karmic activities.
The concept of karma, the law of causation, is inextricably linked with the concept of reincarnation.
Karma is one of the basic concepts of the philosophy of Hinduism and Buddhism. Karma is a program of future incarnation that a person sets in his present incarnation.
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Reincarnation and karma in religions, philosophical systems and mythology
Samsara's worldview
Samsara - samsara (transition, a series of rebirths, life) - the cycle of birth and death in the worlds limited by karma, one of the basic concepts in Indian philosophy.
Samsara teaches that immediately after death the soul is reborn in the material world and continues to revolve in the cycle of birth and death until it completely clears its consciousness of materialistic desires.
Hinduism
The transmigration of souls is one of the basic concepts of Hinduism. Just like in the philosophical systems of other Indian religions, the cycle of birth and death is accepted as a natural phenomenon of nature.
The transmigration of souls was first mentioned in the Vedas - the most ancient sacred scriptures of Hinduism. The description of the doctrine of reincarnation is contained in the Upanishads - ancient philosophical and religious texts in Sanskrit, adjacent to the Vedas.
- Bhagavad Gita:
- "Just as the soul transmigrates from a child's body to a youthful one, from it to an old one, so at the moment of death it passes into another body."
- “As a person throws off his old clothes and puts on new ones, so the soul accepts new material bodies, leaving the old and useless ones.”
- “The one who is born will surely die. The one who died will undoubtedly take a new birth, i.e. get the body again."
Buddhism
The concept of rebirth is characteristic of Buddhism. The enlightened state (buddhi) cannot be achieved in one lifetime, it will take many thousands of years.
The state of Buddha is one of the highest perfections, to achieve which it will take great efforts over many lifetimes.
Numerous stories about the transmigration of souls are recorded in the "Birth Stories" - 547 stories about the past incarnations of the Buddha. The stories describe the reincarnations of the Buddha in various bodies and describe how a person can achieve enlightenment by following certain principles.
"The Tibetan Book of the Dead" - "Bardo Todol" contains a detailed description of the states - the stages through which, according to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, a person's consciousness passes from the process of physical dying to the moment of the next incarnation (reincarnation) in a new form.
Buddha said:
Buddha's teachings:
“What do you think, about students, what is more:
Water in a huge ocean or tears that you shed, making this long pilgrimage, rushing from new birth to new death, again meeting those you hate, and again parting with those you love, suffering over these long centuries from pain, sorrow, disease and oppression of the cemetery land, long enough to get tired of existence, long enough to want to get rid of it all?"
Zen Buddhism
Zen Buddhism teaches that material existence, with its illusion of endless bodily enjoyment, is the main obstacle for one who wants to achieve enlightenment, and that a person must accept the reality of death without fear, opposing the latter with its full awareness.
Zen teachers have traditionally taught the ideas of reincarnation, but Zen's focus has been on sophisticated meditation techniques rather than questions involving the concept of reincarnation. However, there were several prominent Zen teachers who preached reincarnation and the eternal existence of the soul.
Taoist philosophy
Taoist documents say that Lao Tzu reincarnated on earth several times.
One of the scriptures of Taoism states: “birth is not the beginning, just as death is the end. There is unlimited being; there is a continuation without a beginning. Being outside of space. Continuity without beginning in time."
The basis of belief in reincarnation in Taoism is the six stages of existence in the reincarnation of living beings. These six steps include both people and animals and insects, each of them correspondingly reflects an increasingly strong punishment for living beings who sinned in previous incarnations.
Lao Tzu said:
Judaism
According to Kabbalah, we are all immortal. Death is one of the stages of internal development that determines the next phase of our existence.
Death opens the door to the next life so that our mind becomes as clear and serene as possible.
Souls must return to the Absolute, where they came from, but in order to complete this path, they must develop in themselves perfection, the embryo of which is embedded in everyone.
And if they do not develop such qualities in this life, then they must start another life, a third, and so on.
The Book of the Zohar:
Christianity
The idea of reincarnation was adopted by early Christian philosophers. This concept was rejected in the 6th century, at the fifth Ecumenical Council. All texts that could serve as confirmation of the idea of reincarnation were removed from the Bible.
According to Edgar Cayce, Christ not only believed in reincarnation, but also reincarnated about thirty times before appearing in the world in the guise of Jesus of Nazareth.
Islam
In the verses of the Quran, there are references to the resurrection, which with equal probability can refer to reincarnation: “I died as a stone and rose as a plant. I died as a plant and rose again as an animal. I died an animal and became a Man. Why should I be afraid? Has death robbed me?"
Zoroastrian mythology
"One fifth of the deceased reappears on earth, possessing the same bodies and characters as at the time of their death, in the same place where the breath left their bodies."
"Popol-Vuh" of the Maya Indians
The Maya believed that the soul of the deceased followed the path of the Sun, that is, it descended into the underworld, like the Sun at sunset, in order to rise high in the morning, to the heavenly deities.
The Maya believed that the world is born and dies, following certain cycles. According to their sacred book "Popol-Vuh", the world will be born and die four times.
Egyptian mythology
The Greek historian Herodotus believed that the Egyptians were the first adherents of reincarnation.
The ancient Egyptians believed that every deceased had to appear before 42 judges and plead innocent or guilty of sins. The soul of the deceased was weighed on a scale balanced by the ostrich feather of the Goddess Maat, the daughter of the Sun God Ra. Libra was held by God Anubis, the verdict was pronounced by the husband of Maat - God Thoth. If a person lived his life "with Maat in his heart", was pure and sinless, he revived for a new happy life.
The papyrus scrolls that accompanied the deceased contained excerpts from the Book of the Dead, authored by God Thoth, and were illustrated with incantations. The traditional plot was the weighing of the heart in the hall of justice before God Osiris.
The basis of the belief of the ancient Egyptians in rebirth after death was the dying and rebirth of the star Betelgeuse from the constellation Orion.
After the death of the pharaoh, a religious ceremony of "opening the mouth" was performed, which the priests performed inside the Great Egyptian Pyramid in the sarcophagus of the King's Chamber.
It was believed that during the ceremony of "opening the mouth" from the body of the pharaoh, the soul flies away and through the tunnel of the Great Egyptian pyramid, falls on the judgment of Osiris, which took place in the constellation Orion.
In their religious texts, the Eye of Orion is the star of Betelgeuse, the ancients called Kaa Ain - the Fading Eye. The Egyptian priests knew that after thousands of years the position of the stars in the sky would be the same as in the days of the pharaohs. They believed that the mummy of the pharaoh and Osiris, who had passed the judgment, would be transferred to the Great Pyramid, the soul of the pharaoh would be reborn through a ray of light from the star Sirius.
Esotericists, philosophers, writers, scientists about reincarnation and karma
Helena Blavatsky ("Karma or the law of causes and consequences"):
Pythagoras: The soul, falling now into one creature, now into another, moves, thus, in a cycle prescribed by necessity.
Socrates: I do not in the least doubt the existence of what is called a new life, and that the living rise from the dead.
Plato: The human soul is immortal. All her hopes and aspirations have been transferred to another world. A true sage desires death as the beginning of a new life.
Giordano Bruno: The soul is not part of one specific body and can be in one body, then in another.
Voltaire: The concept of reincarnation is neither absurd nor useless. There is nothing strange about being born twice, rather than once.
Benjamin Franklin: I believe that in one form or another I have always been in this world.
Johann Goethe: At the thought of death, I am completely calm. Because I am firmly convinced that our spirit is a being, whose nature remains indestructible and which will act continuously and eternally. I am sure that I have been here thousands of times, and I hope that I will return thousands of times.
Honore de Balzac: The qualities acquired by man, slowly developing in us from one life to another, represent invisible connections that connect each of our existence, which only our soul remembers.
Victor Hugo: When I go to the grave, I will be able to say, like many others: "I have finished my work," but I cannot say: "I have finished my life." The next morning my work will begin again. The grave is not a dead end, it is a transition. It closes at dusk. And opens again at dawn.
Gustave Flaubert: I think I have always existed. I clearly see myself at different times in history, engaged in a different craft, a person with a different destiny.
Leo Tolstoy: Just as we live thousands of dreams in our present life, so our life itself is just a form of one of the thousands of lives that we enter from another more real world, returning again and again after death. Our life is just one of the dreams in another life, and it is endless.
Arthur Conan Doyle: When asked where we were before we were born, the answer is: in a system of slow development on the path of reincarnation with long rest intervals in between.
Henry Ford: Genius is experience. Some people think that this is a gift or talent, but in fact it is the product of a long experience of being in previous life incarnations. When I discovered rebirth, time was no longer limited.
Carl Jung: I can clearly imagine that I have lived in the past centuries. Probably, many of the questions posed to me remained unresolved. That is why I am born again, to, someday, answer all the questions.
Modern theories of reincarnation
One of the modern theories about human consciousness is that there are three worlds, determined by the speed of movement of their constituent elements.
The first is the "sublight world" - the world of matter, subject to the laws of Newtonian physics and gravity. This world consists of bradions - particles whose speed is less than the speed of light.
The second world is "light". This world consists of particles - luxons, moving at a speed close to light and obeying Einstein's laws of relativity.
The third world is "superluminal" space-time. This world consists of particles - tachyons, the speed of which exceeds the speed of light.
These three worlds correspond to three levels of human consciousness: the level of feelings, which comprehends matter, the level of consciousness, which is a light thought, that is, that which moves at the speed of light, and the level of superconsciousness - a thought moving faster than light.
Thus, the concepts of past, present and future mix and disappear, all events occur simultaneously in the Field of Events. With death, our "superluminal" consciousness reaches another level of more developed energy: tachyon time-space.
Perhaps we live simultaneously thousands of lives in thousands of different eras of the past and future. What we think of as regressions is really just the awareness of these parallel lives.
In our four-dimensional space, both forward and backward passage of time exist simultaneously. A person simultaneously lives with all his incarnation images in a multidimensional Field of Events, where not only the past affects the future, but also vice versa.
The hypothesis that microscopic forms of rebirth underlie the entire material world has come to the fore in modern science. In his book "The Tao of Physics" Fridtjof Capra calls the smallest particles "destructible and at the same time indestructible." It is this principle that underlies the theory of reincarnation - at the very moment of death, we get the opportunity to transfer life to another body: "we are destroyed, but we are indestructible, we are dead, but at the same time our life continues."
Author: Valentina Zhitanskaya
