On Reincarnation

Thoughts accumulate, and memories such as encode oppositions to oneself, the way which, when thoroughly lost in the forest, your bare feet might trip over the same exposed root on the trail you were meant to find. A place where doors become two-way mirrors, a light laugh from a friend is almost enough to bend your heart backwards.
What if it were just you, dancing in the room, alone; your own figure looks back through the mirror, smiles as if this moment lasted forever, yet you who are the origin of the smile realize that it does not, and the smile you return to yourself is something lesser, lilting in the dim light of the club where you have convinced yourself you are alone, while you have obviously multiplied. In fact, the same is true for everyone. Facets of the glass emerald ring I had wanted as a child to take from my grandmother’s jewelry box to bring home with me. Then it wouldn’t be special, would it, she said, when it dropped out of my shoe.
When I include you in the multitudes, I mean to evoke a sense in which you share the same fate. To be, again. A form like this, again. I mean to articulate to myself for this unimaginable event some placeholder for what will transform, again.
It must be the product of a considered judgment, but the attitude toward reincarnation, envisioned as an unending series of similar arcs such as this life, is a firm sense of tiresome dread. Buddhists thought this the proper attitude. It must be the product of a considered judgment, not merely in the sense that the reflexive attitude of youth when faced with the question of multiple existences of the same would be jubilation.
Nor solely can we reflect on this judgment as a product of received knowledge, a life spent in the stacks reading about the best ways to live and indeed whether there is some enduring purpose life must have in order to be meaningful. Rather one wants to make out a simple idea. That the judgment in question is mature, depends on lived experience. Yet isn’t that to say that it depends on arriving at the judgment in question after having lived? Long enough for reversals of judgment to have been permanently shelved?
Of course, there are normative considerations. And it needs to be considered whether those normative considerations can be so simply set aside for purposes of answering the question. Questions such as, whether it is enough to have lived to some mature age though without having thought through the best way(s) to live, and yet in spite of this having arrived at the attitude in question. But perhaps we have to bracket off such questions as they may not in the end be relevant, and also for the reason that it is unclear whether the attitude in question, if it is proper, isn’t just another way of expressing one normative sentiment towards one’s own life. Further, there is an argument to be made that even supposing normative considerations were relevant to the question at hand, we should want to set them aside for the reason that they almost inevitably lead to a principalist stance towards meaningfulness, one that is arguably not that useful to anyone considering the question.
Philosophers sometimes speak of forming an equilibrium between general moral principles and particular moral judgments, where the former are tested against the latter, revised accordingly, or abandoned. What then of this particular judgment: ‘the prospect of my reincarnation is dreadful’ (you will have to run this in your own first-person case)? Is there something like a general principle from which the judgment flows?
An idea from ancient Greece suggests itself. The gods envy us because we are mortal and hence filled with finite passions; mortals envy the gods in their cool immorality. What if the gods are right? (Similarly, children, without knowledge of mortality nor of immortality, are the least detached. What if the value of detachment would be lost on a being who is either immortal or unknowingly mortal? For the former there would be no rationale for detachment, it would appear that given the cycles of things one only need bide one’s time; for the latter the time needed to appreciate any need for detachment and its precious value would have impatiently elapsed). If immortality, existing in a state of immortality, were dreadful, and reincarnation guarantees immortality, then perhaps that explains the specific judgment in question.
Yet the answer is incomplete. There are too many forms of immortality which are neither here nor there, or even representative of a good. For instance, the immortality of nature, perhaps of life itself if it finds a way to continue past the heat death of the universe. One senses an intergenerational striving toward a post-human condition which while cast in this paucity of a human vocabulary still feels as if it could be shaped by some positive telos. Then it seems it would have to be something about the personalization, or perhaps individualization, of immortality which if we meditate on it, accounts for immortality’s valuational rope-a-dope.
It isn’t the fact of individualization, being neither a self nor world totality, which seems unbearable; the rock Sisyphus rolls has that much going for it.
One picture is this. Imagine someone who lives part of their life as a mortal, then is granted immortality. Prior to becoming a god their life had its ups and downs, as any life does, a certain trajectory whose personal worth might be approximated in terms of how happy the person was, whether they by and large got what they wanted. Then, here is what is supposed to happen (if our supposition is correct): gradually, or perhaps not so gradually, their life effects a downward slope. Maybe it is punctuated here and there through certain events, surprises. Maybe after a thousand years as a god someone finally tells you a joke you have not heard.
Still it remains the case, if we are really trying to imagine this response, that facts about personal identity, about you being you, must account for the undesirability of immortality. For some might be so brimming, even to the point of paralysis, with self-love, that even in a state of eternal sameness of themselves they who no longer sleep, who no longer need to dream to flee from the worlds they have constructed, might simply relate their inexhaustible self-love to themselves and exist in that relation for all time. If incapable of detachment, renewed attachment to themselves would suffice.
Yet for those of us less tainted by self-love, what should we imagine except an unending and fruitless quest to find new objects of love, new sources of consolation in our loneliness as we continue through the millennia to create worlds only to see those worlds die or give rise to new forms not even we can comprehend though we stride alongside them, stardust in cosmos, what new enlargements of the self should be able to satisfy the amoeba we will have become, roving from one galaxy to the next, consuming only faint rays of light which flow into our eyes become stone-like transparencies, how, if we had desired it once, to keep ourselves rooted to an earth like this one, to cease the spread of an immolating, dehumanizing disinterestedness?
Yet one could just as well attempt to imagine an earth-sized furrowed tract of farmland. No, this answer is not so much incomplete, as it is empty. It doesn't capture that sense of aged reckoning, the fatigue of wisdom itself, the limb-slackening walk to the edge of a suicide forest, as one feels is expressive of the judgment: ‘I would not want to be reincarnated’, which one supposes (according to the received wisdom) intensifies with each new life cycle. If we focus on just this ‘I’ which is supposed to be the same, or a part or aspect of it, which is the same, from life to life, how might we imagine it being like the ‘I’ of this life, the narrative ‘I’ which has occurred in every first-person conscious thought we have expressed to ourselves or others over the course of our lives, and insofar we have been with each such expression, the same being. Imagine all those ‘I’s excised suddenly from their mental contents, the ‘I’ of a simple desire, the ‘I’ of I love you, the ‘I’ that says its sincere prayer, the ‘I’ as it hears itself in dreams, the ‘I’ at a job interview, describing its history, the ‘I’ when it admits it doesn’t know, or when it has done wrong, or failed, the ‘I’ when it regrets, the ‘I’ when it is elated, the ‘I’ when it is hopeful, or uncertain, this nearly endless array of ‘I’s assumed to be so central to leading an enriching life, imagine them all squeezed together, pulsing in a dry heat like stores of larvae buried deep within an anthill, added onto until the very end of one’s life at which point a winter comes and one by one they are consumed. But they are all gathered there, now, and if there are many lifetimes there are many anthills as far as the eye can see, filled with the same, hidden away from the buzzing, blooming realm of experience. Is it good? Is it bad?
If it is not a principle, then a background condition set against which at least makes the judgment intelligible—we ought be able to suggest this much if the judgment is true. The background condition is a rather simple one: presumed reliable testimony. You are a boy, eight years old. You learn about reincarnation from an old man in your village. He tells you what it means, but tells it with a wink and nod that make you stay up at night and think. At first it seemed so exciting, to be a fish, then to fly as a bird. Then to live as a man, to grow into someone stronger than yourself, richer. And then? You remember the gleam in his eyes, how he said it with a sigh, as though he were holding back some untold truth. The next morning your father tells you to stop daydreaming if you want to be successful. The fortune teller says you will be a successful businessman. So you stop thinking about it, until much later in life.
If you think you have already strayed from the question, it is important to recall the eyes of a friend, alive, in conversation, as those eyes gleaming contain already so many lives if the person has lived, that you can see them in a glimpse and allow yourself to be held there, transfixed; as the same is true for them, when the gaze drops its pretense, its catcall of social expectation. Similarly, worn religious iconography as in its faded eyes, the last of the wooden painted façade to eclipse into indiscernibility, offers the illusion of looking into whilst being looked upon: answering mystery with mystery, suffering with suffering, even to the point that a tear might seem to shed.
If our faces are sometimes masks which wear us out, isn’t it possible that our entire lives might be this way, a wearing out of whatever this is which ‘has’ experiences, at which point the time comes to wear a new mask, to put on new scales or a new skin, to endure a kind of careful iconography restoration which leaves nothing of the original except the eyes—or perhaps not even those are left but that we blindly fill the details in, pareidolia-wise. The respect, the commiseration, the twisted face in agony, the stern or passive love we project back onto these images if we look long enough is just one conduit between ourselves and ourselves, as all states of elevation and emotion are possible for those with an infinitude of lives to live.
In perceiving, you are remembering something ancient. In knowing, you are perceiving. Even in the worn Cycladic idol you recognize features of a face.
It’s important also to sincerely attempt to imagine a kind of stasis. An empty time in which no perceptions occur, as no events occur. All that flow of color squishily circulating as dirty laundry whirls in the spin cycle of species’ existence halts; there are only disconnected patches of color, crumpled forms, braided gunas that have come to a rest in the universe’s machine, with nothing of agency to pull them out of that darkness, to try them on in the blaring chit-chat light. Nor are there discontinuities within the empty time that result from reflections which also take a certain form: how things might be, and why, and when, the contingencies of planning, the inevitabilities of peace, or war, as the case may be. Nor that cycle of expectation sometimes called ‘progress’, vacillating across times and cultures and individuals and even within the lifespan of a given individual seeming so pronounced as they might burst, only to be flattened by some inescapable whim.
In more theoretical terms: life’s resistance is resistance to a state of complete equilibrium; for biological life, this means chemical equilibrium (i.e. death). For life in general, it must be a generalized state of equilibrium, i.e. stasis. Then reincarnation as a continued form of life might be seen as a sort of perverse nihilism, the unflagging denial of any such state of stasis I have called ‘empty time’.
The inestimable degrees of felt loss of control do not belong to what I am calling empty time, but which might be called finality if this word is meant to denote even more than an endless sleep in which there could still be tortured dreams, but a cessation of reincarnation, a cessation of being subject to all the ills attendant to reincarnation. Still, how in the world can such a thing have a valuation?
At times, chess pieces seemed to move of their own volition. Yet you would find yourself having reached the same position time after time, as they say ‘a known position’, or ‘theory’ or ‘prep’. The particular configuration of pieces on the board, the time, and the opponent; taken together these were different, but the position was the same, even the type of play that might result from the position, given the abilities of chess players, or the general thrust of the idea of playing in such and such a way, these were the same. Still the two players, you and your opponent, did not therefore cease playing. Did you not cease playing simply because there was something new, some new position to be arrived at in this unsolvable game? Was it novelty, or the feeling that somehow this continuation, or what you thought would proceed as this continuation, was that what you had in mind all along, and leant a sort of continuity, enriching the experience of the game; or, in some cases, couldn’t it have been precisely that clash in personal styles that we witness from time to time—tactical vs. positional, impulsive vs. prophylactic, that made us want to throw gold pieces upon the board, as though it were no longer a thing of wood or tiles and pieces, but a sort of theorem playing itself out, testing itself against the raw, indefatigable materials of the world? Yet imagine both players having reached the same position time and time again, yet, omniscient, they knew how it would all unfold, or if not omniscient, had at least the presentiment of knowledge that it would be the same—would they still desire to play? Or, supposing they still did desire to play, then would the game still be the same, would a complete knowledge of the solvedness of the game make a difference to the attitude of its outcome?
To know the sense of ‘again’ or approximate it, we have to know ‘the same’ and how it is fatigued, if we are to understand the sense that reincarnation is tiresome. To know ‘the same’ entails nothing less than understanding cycles of human desire.
(Sisyphus should be thought to generalize the myth of Tantalus; Tantalus’ desires forever go unsatisfied, sapping his life of its meaning, but Sisyphus shows life’s meaning to be drained by any repetition of the same).
Suppose I say to myself, sincerely, this experience appears to me to be the same as before. Now I question whether I should want it to continue, other things being equal, simply in virtue of its being the same experience. Is any better than none better than different? I find myself unable to distinguish the content of this desire from its being the content of the desire that I should want a similar type of experience to continue to occur. This appears to show that either there are no types of experiences, that they are a sort of illusion, or else that the sameness of experiences contributes nothing to our desire that they should continue.
If experiences are unique, then how can experiences as of one life vs. another be compared?
The main thing, I think, when considering a question of the heart, and whether reincarnation is true is a question of the heart, is to not proceed in haste. Proceeding in haste means proceeding in a way that it doesn’t feel to you as if you are considering the question for the first time. In other words, you would be proceeding with the question as if it were already settled, as if you had already lived out its answer many times. It should therefore become tiresome to you. As for lives, so for questions.
Then what would it mean to proceed as if for the first time in considering whether one ought view reincarnation’s prospect with an attitude of tiresome dread? Remember, we have to separate reflective answers. One reflexive answer would say that it depends on whether the thesis of reincarnation is true—is it even possible that you might live on in one form or another again and again until the end of time? We can bracket this out easily by noting that we cannot know whether it is true or not, as the thesis depends upon facts which cannot and will not be experienced. Nor does it seem plausible those supposed accounts of past lives as an empirical basis to ground the justification for reincarnation. Wouldn’t they also depend on one’s views in an epistemology of testimony, in any case? And even if reincarnation were grounded by them, and even accepted as likely or at least coherent as a thesis, shouldn’t we still be left with the question of whether we ought to see it as a welcome event which occurs postmortem, as opposed to the spirit’s sly saddling up on a lame horse meant to walk from desert to desert, agelessly until every known sand dune has worn down to a nub, to the very quantum of experience, if there can be anything at all that remains of individual personality, that survives the event of reincarnation?
What if instead we tell another story? We picture the processes of the natural world, in which all things that live, live on in some form or other. When a lemur finds itself being chased by a panther grips onto a rotting log that it breaks and in falling impales it, it falls where such a ground is moist and welcoming and awaits it. The mycelial network just beneath expands, the ants accrue to the biomass of dead log and flesh. The sky overhead continues shining its blue. What our distant ancestor was becomes something other, at least corporeally. Even at the corporeal level, imperceptible changes occur which no distant ancestor could have observed, no matter how observant.
But still there were the gross changes. The lively lemur that grew to know a hand to feed it, that grasped fruit in its ringed tail and whose eyes stared out into the proto-heavens dreaming, became something other, shifted in form as one might change positions beneath the covers of the night sky, seeking some final form, as if to pare off the inessentials from a skeletal remains. There was not simply rot and no other life renewed.
When in spring the grass grew more brightly in the same place where the mushrooms bloomed in fall and where the dead animal had been—such changes represented something profound enough to generalize. If it could happen to an animal, it could happen to anything, including this living breathing thing which has an awareness of its falling, its occasional degradations, its returns to form and its relapses, the graces of its ebb and flow, it blights and worries and illnesses.
That any departure from recognized form, of how things ought to feel and be, might be rechanneled through other forms, of how things ought to feel and be, according to this momentous event. That the question of reincarnation, received in the first instance, was less a question of its meaning, than its being.
And yet, conceiving of its origin, its certitude in first conception (and not all ideas are like this, some are communal, owed to no one), there stood in the doorway between these changing forms an ‘I’ which must persist, an unconscious urge to deny one’s mortality through the channels of changing forms. Wasn’t this the original daring self-conception, that would eschew all other natural cases of changing forms, and thereby eschew corporeal nature, as the only form of ‘I’ which might survive such changes had to be some different substance entirely?
Yet if this ‘I’ truly were a different substance, wouldn’t different laws need to govern it than govern the non-human world? Wouldn’t it necessitate a moral law of karma?
Yet I feel as though I have strayed from the topic, whether one ought to view reincarnation with a sense of tiresome dread. Can that be due simply to the idea of a lawlike governance of the lasting self? To be subject to reincarnation meaning being subject to its laws? Yet even ephemeral selves (say if materialism is true, or even ontology) is subject to physical laws, and it seems that by itself reincarnation can not be assumed to set up upon a given individual the negative expectation of being subject to moral law.
Sometimes it is stated in a certain tone by learned philosophers that it amounted to early Buddhists as an ‘endless cycle of rebirths and redeaths’, with emphasis on the ‘redeaths’ part, as if death were some event to be experienced each time, with each life, anew. As if to imply, if dying is bad, death must be worse.
Yet such a tone falsely assumes that death is an event one experiences. It is not inconceivable, that if reincarnation is true, death represents a kind of void in experience, similar to the neoplatonist idea that ‘evil’ is merely a deprivation of good, that is not have any positive reality of its own, and hence no positive reality to be experienced, and hence dying outweighs its concern (at least insofar as it bears only on individual well-being, obviously our deaths affect others). This I think we should take as a serious possibility. Put differently, if reincarnation is true, there is just life, an alternating sequence of different yet interrelated lives, each of which intersects with every other.
But if it is not the reflection on the ‘redeaths’ part of the wheel of reincarnation which makes it seem dreadful and tiresome, as we are attempting to conceive of it in its first instance, then what?
Here I am tempted to provide the hardest answer. It is pessimism. It is the idea that, although there are special configurations which govern the inmost self and elevate it beyond the natural world if reincarnation is true, whatever they are they are insufficient to rebut that basic fact of individual suffering which yields living its net negative value.
To see this, let’s begin with a nod to Nietzsche, who thought that affirmation was everything and life was worth living, even under the condition that one live the same life, over and over again1, like Sisyphus working his boulder up the mountain as punishment from the gods, only to see it role back down again. To him it was either part of a person, or not, to have this yes type attitude, no matter their path. Even Sisyphus has a moment where at the height of his labors and before gravity takes over, rests; he might in that moment hope to be free.
Whatever psychological laws govern the condemned are possible to transcend for an ubermensch (not Nietzsche himself, of course, but a hypothetical being). Part of self that had to reveal itself as outgrowth, or aspect of self that lay hidden all along?
But you need to honestly ask yourself, given what you have experienced, would you want to live the same life over again? There seem to be two answers. The first is, yes. If a positive answer is given then (so says the pessimist) it only seems given because a person has either not lived enough or has not lived enough to outgrow themselves. In the first case the answer is born of ignorance and thus excluded from consideration; the latter case perhaps suffers from passivity—not living a very good life in the first place, so that reincarnation is presented as a sort of hope—or lack of imagination, assuming subsequent lives will have less trauma than this one, which cannot be assumed and if there is a hell is false.
When the question then is answered in a mature, attentive frame of mind: no, then we need to reflect on the reason. For most, the answer will be ‘I can’t live again to experience such and such’. Which is reasonable. But now assume that if reincarnation is true, and a meaningful thesis (not merely changing forms), then whatever substance one is, is continually transformed by all the experiences in all past lives. Then it follows that if one should not want to live this life again, on account of various sufferings, then assuming there is anything of the personality that survives in subsequent lives one should not want any of them to be subject to the same fate.
Pessimism not only exhausts the will to live in this life, but by extension subsequent lives which retain a sense of personal identity as it is transfigured by suffering. In this case, one must admit to lacking the Nietzschean ‘bring it on!’ attitude of Amor Fati. (Yet a note of reservation: isn’t this only true if the totality of individual suffering across lives outweighs the totality of joyous experiences across lives, and isn’t this just an ‘across lives’ expression of pessimism? Nonetheless, all I have attempted by way of gesture to argue here is that pessimism is an underpinning for the received attitude of spiritual exhaustion toward the prospect of reincarnation; I leave aside the question of whether pessimism can be independently supported, or even felt in the marrow of one’s bones for some reasons unrelated to reincarnation).
If Sisyphus quits then we must imagine him as rational, and thus as having sufficient reason to quit. We who are partly rational pronounce these reasons to ourselves when considering to quit a job, soldier on in a relationship, etc. but perhaps due to our limitation fail to appreciate their full force, they fail for whatever reason to be decisive for us, as they are in the case of Sisyphus. Every alternative, every step, every imagined possibility decays into its merely carrying-on. If only we lived long enough perhaps we could then imagine the eternal futility of our labors, that there will never be release in the form of the gods who themselves, after having given it enough consideration, descend upon us to reveal the intelligibility of our apparent purposelessness—or else if this does not occur the fact that it will not occur is one we can appreciate, having been granted the same eternity as the gods, lived an infinitesimal part of this eternity yet tragically greater than the life we are actually allotted. Then what besides the Forms, unchanging ideas inscribed upon our mortal heats can console us, what reason besides an emptied, reasonless faith, a love of fate—
We can put this differently. The kernel of suffering, which from the Christian point of view is expressed in man’s altered nature initiated by the Fall, and empties out in divine redemption, is in Buddhism and other philosophies which devalue reincarnation, expressed as a seeking of nirvana, an intimate wish to be released from the wheel of reincarnation. Remember that the Buddha in The Dhammapada exalts us to view ourselves as our thoughts—thus momentarily escaping corporeality—as all that we are. He doesn’t mean just that our experiences inform what we think about; he means our thoughts literally compose ourselves. There is no self that has them.
Now suppose those thoughts accumulate, live on not only year after year, staring into the memories of tear-streamed faces of our loved ones, of broken limbs, of deceased pets and the impossibility of helping, let alone looking squarely into the eyes of the homeless people we meet, but suppose they live on across lives, in different forms according to whether or not it was possible to love, or to care enough. Look into the eyes of whomever you love and ask if you could forgive them of everything, no matter what form forgiveness took. Could even your beloved then seem like the thief crucified across from Jesus who cried in his corporeal desperation for the God that had forsaken him?



The so-called ‘eternal recurrence’ of the same Nietzsche seems to have thought was guaranteed if we added to determinism about the physical world the idea that there is only a finite amount of matter which over the course of the duration of the universe will combine in an infinite number of configurations; one of these combinations existing at a given time we can say is ‘you’, that such an identical ‘you’ will recur is not obviously entailed by facts about the physical universe. For my purposes I can remain neutral on the question of the materiality of the soul, as my interest is rather in our attitudes towards the prospect of reincarnation, whether or not it is consistent with some view about physics.↩︎