You believe in reincarnation? - may I pick your brains please?

Great Debates
1

First off, let me say that I’m posting this earnestly; I mean no disrespect to anyone’s beliefs, I just want to ask a question (possibly more later).

The human population of the earth is growing; where are the extra ‘souls’ (or whatever) coming from?

As we’ll probably get a few different answers, it would help me if you could supply a brief summary of the context (i.e. the framework of your beliefs) too.

Oh, and one other thing; what I really DON’T WANT is people posting snide comments such as “see, that’s why religious people are so deluded” or “belief in the supernatural is absurd and unsupportable” - that’s not what we’re looking for in this thread - this isn’t to be a thread examining the validity or otherwise of anyone’s beliefs; if you want to post comments like that, start your own GD/pit thread.

2

No new souls–just one giganitc network of limitless energy, metamorphosing endlessly, creating illusions of separateness/individuality, space and time.

3

Short answer: presumably, from the same “place” that they come from if there is no reincarnation–simply at a somewhat lower rate.

There’s all kinds of long answers, depending on what view of reincarnation one takes. I’ve found that a question that often makes people stop, and their brows to furrow is: “why should reincarnation only work going forwards?” If you define “soul” as something of spirit, spirit being something existing in dichotomy to the universe of spacetime, well then, spirit is outside of “time”, yes? Thus, when it enters into the world of the Quick, I don’t see why its point of entry should be sequential when viewed from within the material universe.

Add to that the possibility of transmigration–souls can go into people or animals. Perhaps even plants, rocks, and more abstract patterns, depending on how, er, drastic you want metempsychosis to be. When all those factors are added, I don’t know that the question of “new” souls stays a meaningful one.

A summary of personal context would be extremely difficult for me. I think that the Buddha had it nailed dead-on correct in that he pretty much avoided such metaphysical questions entirely. I will say that reincarnation appeals to me on an aesthetic level, as a sort of faith-based view of Occam’s Razor: God doesn’t waste a gesture. Bringing a soul into reality for only a tiny span seems to me rather prodigal, wasteful–and those qualities don’t quite reconcile with certain highly personal experiences. If reincarnation is on the money, I’ll bank on the rather heavy-duty version of metempsychosis mentioned above, in the non-time-bound version of it. I also reject a dichotomy between spirit and the universe, but I’m not sure that makes a difference either way.

4

The “extra” souls are recycled from the dinosaurs’. The concept of individual souls is the problem. All life shares the same soul.

5

I’m not a believer in souls, but I always thought it was interesting idea if there was only was soul, and when a person died the soul not only traveled through space but through time. So, there would be only one person, who experiences all lives every lived.

6

According to Tibetan buddhists, when reincarnating, the soul may “split” or “divide” into several different rebirthed entities. Most often in the case of a Rinpoche (reincarnate lama). A crude example, and very simplistically speaking, the deceased was a great physician and poet. Then he became two rebirths instead of one. Both rebirths would share a lot of the attributes of the deceased, but one would likely become a very skilled doctor and the other a renown poet. However, neither would be both a great doctor and poet.

This occured in the movie The Little Buddha.

7

I don’t think you can prove or disprove the concept of
reincarnation through the use of mathematics.

Your question assumes that there was a finite number of
souls - lets say 10 million - who incarnated at some set
beginning time and then kept coming back over and over.

What if there were 1000 billion billion souls created at some set beginning time and not all have as yet incarnated into flesh, let alone reincarnated?

Since there is no source that calculated the number of souls
‘in the beginning’, the question seems to be based upon an
assumption.

JMHO

In the beginning, the rules were different for dogs, too. All they had to do was avoid a solid gold fire hydrant. Needless to say, dogs didn’t last long in the Garden of Eden
either.

8

Though not a believer, I have an interesting take on this - souls are travelling backwards in time. As they go back in time there are less and less bodies for them to fill, so the most enlightened souls get to ascend to some higher plane. The first humans got the oldest, most unenlightened souls, which is why they were so savage - they are basically the souls that have been impossible to ‘rehabilitate’ over thousands of years.

9

Serious answer: there is only one of us. You will not merely be reincarnated some day in the distant future after you die, you’ve already been reincarnated as me, concurrently with your own life.

10

Which is to say the same thing Ruth Marie Bass said, by the way.

11

Thanks for the answers so far, and thanks for answering my question in the spirit it was asked.

12

Reincarnation would not necessarily imply that any given person had lived a prior human life, just that some, or at least one, had. (E.g., John the Baptist as the return of Elijah, from Christian literature.)

I find it most interesting that the idea that reincarnation is something which can be “believed in,” in the sense of being desirable, is a strongly Western concept. For most Eastern faiths, it’s a metaphysical concept, like Hell or sin, which one attempts to get out of. “Get me off this Merry-go-round, Bodhisattva!!! I’m getting sick!” (Sorry to sincere Mahayana Buddhists for the irreverent spin on a Buddhist prayer.)

As with any “survival” concept, the evidence is not convincing to the skeptic, and according to orthodox Christianity, is contrary to the proposition of divine grace (though the option between “You flunked; you have to start over again” and “You flunked; go directly to Hell; do not collect $200” does seem to suggest that mercy would entail reincarnation as one option for typical people).

The metempsychosis concept, on the other hand, does fit the mathematics, in that the terrestrial biomass is fairly constant. The growth in human population has been accompanied by a decline in many other species, and the extinction of some. (And I’ve seen some people who remind me immensely of Steller’s sea cows. ;))

13

I did consider this, but it’s not consistent with the idea of evolution, or at least biogenesis, but if we aren’t going to stick to a fixed ‘one being, one soul’ model, then it doesn’t really matter.

We also probably shouldn’t consider any such ‘group soul’ to be restricted to the confines of our own solar system, or to require to be incarnate at any particular point in time.

14

Interesting OP. I’ve had similar thoughts for years, especially when you stop to consider just how many billions of humans have died since the first real human was evolved. I mean, in Egypt and similar areas, it seems that you cannot dig a hole without uncovering some ancient human bones and if you have ever seen pictures of these old churches and catacombs lined with thousands and thousands of old human bones, it makes you wonder.

Basically, I believe in reincarnation. I sort of feel that we probably keep coming back until we learn whatever it is that we are supposed to learn, sort of like a grand maturation process. I think that some of these people who recall past lives – the one’s not faking it – probably are actually recalling when they lived before.

I like to think that we have a choice of how we return, in some areas, but we only return as humans. Someone I talked to years ago, more knowledgeable than I on this subject, said that they had learned through others that we pick our parents and that in our reincarnations, they stay with us.

I know that when I was a child, I had a real close affinity with things from both the near and distant past, like I had been there before. I had a book with a drawing of a pioneer scene in it and it just drew me like a magnet, then later on, I found myself drawn to items and pictures of different eras in the past, like in the 1800s and early 1900s. I found this out when I went to visit the Lightner Expedition, in St. Augustine, Florida as a young teen.

The Expedition is a huge, castle-like building that holds nothing but vast collections of everything. I wandered into a section of cubicles where, behind glass, they set up little rooms of past ages like in the 1860s and 1920s and found myself drawn to them. I just had to study them and they seemed familiar. Years later, in one of several rare discussions about reincarnation, it was pointed out that I was probably going on vague memories of past lives, which is why I was so attracted to the period pieces.

They said that the memories are freshest in the young but as we grow older, they fade.

I suspect that I lived in pioneer days and then in the late 18th century and then the early 19th century.

To me, it seems that one lifetime is not enough. Especially when you think about how fast we have progressed since the beginning of the 1900s. I was born in 1952 and our progress has been from horse and buggy to landing on the moon. I like to think that we can come back, to live again, to learn and to progress. I’d like to see what is going to happen in the next 200 years and what it will be like when we finally colonize other worlds.

The Christian religion is somewhat split in it’s philosophy. On one hand it says souls will sleep after death in the ground until the Resurrection, then all will arise. On the other, it speaks of going to heaven or hell after death. Yet, people talk of guardian angels and one branch of the religion talks of purgatory. Even in hell, ‘bad’ souls are thought to spend only just so long there until they learn their lessons and then are shipped to heaven, though I don’t know if the Bible supports that.

All major religions talk of life after death and it would be hard for me to accept that the wonderful spark we call sentience and that ‘thing’ in us which we call human, or the human spirit, just fades out upon death. It seems far to powerful to have that just happen to it. Perhaps even the sexes are variable, that we can come back as either sex, I don’t know, but I like to think that I was here before and after I go, I will be back again to learn, to experience, to grow and to just be, in the future.

15

Well, it can be both, actually. If, through your actions (presumably in conjunction with those of others), life gets better, people kinder, systems more fair and less restrictive, etc, you reap the benefits. If, through your actions or inactions (again in conjunction with those of others), life sucks worse as time goes by, well, umm, “Go back and do it again and again and again until y’all get it right!”

Agreed. In fact, some of us would not confine Self to that which we normally regard as LIFE, let alone conventional sentiency or conventional defs of intelligence. Or, as Melanie once sang,

16

I have only skimmed this thread, so shoot me down in flames if I’m wrong…

I think Mangetout that you are assuming that only human souls reincarnate. What about the souls that reincarnate as an animal? Do these not count ?

No cite, but I’m sure some of the Indian buddhist sects believe that the best thing that can happen to you is that you are reincarnated into a cow (their sacred animal)

Can this soul not become a human again, because it’s been a cow… ?

Your assumption that only human souls are reincarnating, or that they reincarnate seperately from other organisms does not fit into my beliefs. There is no problem with extra souls, or not enough souls…

Who says my soul can not become a part of a tiger, or a tree, or even a part of a stream or a pebble…

:stuck_out_tongue: though I think i may be destined to be a slug… always my luck :smiley:

17

It’s always been interesting to me to recall the fact that I had to be taught that reincarnation didn’t happen. Being blessed with very early childhood memories, I recall being frustrated and angry about being trapped in a female body around age 3, and thinking that at least next time I will be a boy. It didn’t seem odd to me to think that I would live another life in another body, and while I don’t recall details of being someone else, as a child I took it for granted that I had been. Later in my childhood I found out that I was the only one in my family who thought that there was any such thing as reincarnation, and so was taught not to believe in it.

What’s hardest to comprehend is that, as a child, I didn’t have the knowledge to understand that I was younger than my parents and the people around me, and that I had only come into existance three years earlier, I also had no comprehension of life ending, yet I was “aware” that there would be a next time, and that there was a time before I was me. Does that make sense? Looking back at these early memories, I’m frustrated by the lack of detail. My memory recorded statements and thoughts without explanations, so I have a lot of examples of bizarre childhood logic with no understanding of how that logic was determined.

18

My own view is similar, but not identical. I tend to believe that parts of that “collective soul” actually break off for a time, and return at death.

As for whether it’s limitless or just vast, I don’t know, and I’m not sure anyone could. If it’s just large, I presume it could grow, like a living thing, as needed. If it’s limitless, that avoids the problem of “where do the extra souls come from.”

I also tend to believe that all living things draw their life from this, and so part of what now constitutes “me” could wind up in a person, another splinter in a bird, or even in a blade of grass.

19

maybe (this isnt my personal belief, but its vaguely logical) all the animals that are dying because we’re not being particularly nice to the environment are being reincarnated as humans. maybe there has always been the same number of souls, but you dont think that because you wouldnt count an animal as having a soul

?