Reincarnation

A Love Story

I can’t remember exactly when I became aware of the idea of reincarnation.  I grew up in the shadow of the counterculture of the 1960s, the music, the politics, the drugs and the weird grab bag of spiritual beliefs from UFO brothers to “Eastern Religions”.  Somewhere in all that dayglow and patchouli I learned that some people believe that, when you die, you can “come back” as someone or something else.  I liked the idea for several reasons.  First, it explained some vaguely formed ideas I had about life and the world that couldn’t be explained by my age or experience.  Second, it suggested that there was some sort of intermediary space between lives.  I wondered if the weird lights and sounds I had always experienced whenever I was in a sufficiently dark and silent place was a memory of the space between lives.  Of course, it was fun to speculate about who I might have been in a past life, who I might like to be in the next.  Finally, “believing” in reincarnation made me feel spiritually sophisticated at a time when I was trying to form my own identity.  My early belief in reincarnation persisted until I started to try to imagine how it “worked”.

I never really abandoned the idea but, like ghosts and gods, I became “agnostic” about it, especially after returning to university in my 30s.  I could never really dismiss the spirit world since I had an ongoing relationship with the I Ching, from which I continued to receive good council and guidance even if I didn’t believe that some spirit “lived” in the book.  My position was, and in some ways remains, that although the material world as described by the natural sciences, lacks meaning or direction, oracles, myths, poetry and music at least provide the appearance of meaning and direction.  In a meaningless world, everything we do is equally meaningless so why not do what makes us happy.  Even when I couldn’t convince myself that the world glimpse through art, dream, divination and synchronicities was anything more than confirmation bias and apophenia, I could still validate these experiences as part of the ongoing “art project” by which humans make meaning in a meaningless world. 

I read the Tibetan Book of the Dead in English translation in my early 20s.  In the introduction there was a passage to the effect that it wasn’t necessary to “believe” in reincarnation to grasp the basic truth expressed in the book, the stories we tell ourselves about who and where we are determine who we might become.  In a sense, we are reincarnated from one moment to the next. These ideas made perfect sense to me without the need to assert the real existence reincarnation or the astral realm.  The world described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead with its bardos, peaceful and wrathful deities and realms of rebirth was a “metaphor” for the normal passage of time and the way our thoughts direct us through it, a metaphor that can help us to understand LIFE.  Or at least it didn’t need to be more than this to be valuable and true.

The truth about spiritual matters is always slippery.  I feel comfortable making assertions about the nature of material reality.  If some assertion is shown to be wrong, the mistake will arise from a lack of sufficient knowledge about some material process.  This is why any science worthy of the name will never claim certainty about the material world.[i]   Science is predicated on the idea that our knowledge is in a continuous state of growth and revision.  Spiritual “truths’ are more like artistic ones.  If I claim that Beethoven’s 7^th symphony is beautiful, I am saying something about myself, not the work.  If I say reincarnation is “real”, I am not making the same kind of claim as when I say that oxygen is essential for life.  The truth of the latter can be easily verified by simply holding one’s breath.  You may hate the 7^th symphony and find nothing worthwhile in it at all but that doesn’t make my experience of it false.  Yet artistic claims seem much easier to dismiss as matters of “taste” than spiritual claims which seem, at least to those who make them, to carry more gravitas.  Whether spiritual claims ARE more substantial than artistic ones is less important than why they feel more so.  People have died for the proposition that Jesus is Lord but not too many have died for the proposition that Beethoven was a genius.  Why?  It is because spiritual claims direct our behavior in ways that artistic ones do not.[ii] 

About 10 years ago I was producing a podcast episode about  thanksgiving, both the North American holiday and the concept.  Among the interviews about food and gratitude, Indigenous stories about the debt owed by mankind to the buffalo and about death I placed this quote from Peter Kropotkin:

“Men passionately desire to live after death, but they often pass away without noticing the fact that the memory of a really good person always lives.  It is impressed upon the next generation and is transmitted again to the children.  Is this not an immortality worth striving for?”

We aren’t really dead until the last person forgets our name.  This is more than sentimentality for cultures who practice ancestral veneration.  The living have a duty to remember the dead, feed them and make other offerings.  Keeping our dead close to us influences the way we behave.  We are reluctant to do things that might bring embarrassment to them and are inclined to do things in a way that might please them.  In this way, the dead continue to have influence through us.  Over the past decade, such ideas have guided my own practice of ancestor veneration.  But this isn’t exactly what most people mean by reincarnation.  What DO they mean then?  What do I mean by it?

Here in the “West” our ideas about reincarnation come largely from Hindu and Buddhist spiritual traditions.[iii]  The main difference between the two is that in Hinduism there is the notion of an “Atman” which is the reincarnating core that takes up residence in one body after another.  Buddhism denies the existence of the Atman.  Instead, it is karmic patterns created through habits of thought and behavior which keep drawing us back, rather like the way a stream cuts a channel which, in turn, draws in more water.  In Hindu philosophy the process of reincarnation is more like taking off one suit and putting on another, for Buddhists it is more like an actor stepping into a role.  While I hope that the Hindu idea is closer to the truth, I suspect that the Buddhist might be.  But since I am neither a Hindu or Buddhist, I have a way out of choosing between the two.  I am a magician.  Magicians sometimes draw on religious ideas but only for the purpose of drawing WITH them.[iv]

The nature of reincarnation is of more than intellectual interest to me.  For most of the time that Susan and I have been married I have fought against the notion that such a perfect match was more than a happy accident.  Even though the “evidence” (if one wants to call it that), has been in front of my eyes for as long as we have known each other, even longer really.  In 1985, when I was not even 20 years old I was just learning to work with the I Ching.  I asked, as people often do when first working with an oracle, if my “true love” was someone I already knew (there were a few people who I thought might be that person at the time).  The answer I received was something to the effect that although we had not yet met, she was closer than I knew.  Years later I learned that the verry room in which this oracle was cast had windows that looked out on the back of the apartment building that Susan’s parents lived in when she was born.  There were other synchronistic connections like both being present at two different concerts a year apart, one a recital of Rachmaninoff piano concerti (where we were seated about 30 feet apart at the venue), the other at a Grateful Dead concert.  Or the fact that the first time I heard her voice (on the phone inviting me to the birthday of a friend she was dating at the time), we spoke just long enough for me to get the time of and directions to her apartment where the party was held, I hung up the phone and know that I was “in trouble with this girl” (my oldest daughter had just been born and I was definitely not in the market for a new romance).  

Once we finally began a life together (five years and a lot of drama after we met) I have a distinct memory of a conversation we had about fate.  I said I didn’t believe in it (which Susan didn’t seem especially happy to hear).  All I could commit to at that time was that I was happy we had, against overwhelming odds, met one another and I was going to make the most of this great stroke of luck (which I’m afraid I did not always do). 

At that time, and for much of my life before the past decade or so, I believed life, at both the individual and collective level, followed no preordained plan.  My position was that we “surfed” in a sea of chaos.  The only meaningful relationship we had with this sea was whether we could “stay on the board and enjoy the ride”.  A kind of (mostly) gleeful nihilism or Punk Taoism.  Not that I never experienced any sort of spiritual transport, far from it.  I had a great many interesting experiences, with entheogens, out in nature, in art and love and even in religious practice both formal and informal.  But I experienced these things with a kind of passivity.  These things (with a few noteworthy exceptions), happened TO ME.  Even the art I made was done in a spirit of “as if”.[v]  Once I began to identify as a magician, I began to see that although the world might well be that sea of chaos, in “casting spells” we compel chaos to become order by our will and intention.[vi]

As I began to open myself up to magik, to the deities I invited into my life, the ancestors I invoked at Samhain and in moments when I was doing something that I thought would interest them or that they might assist me with, etc. I began to feel my words and actions gaining a certain “weight”.  One night, after we moved into our cabin, I told Susan that although I didn’t know if there was anything after this (life), if there was, I would try my best to find her.  To that end, we made a consecrated sigil which only her and I are intended to see.[vii]  This sigil will be a mark by which we will recognize one another in another life. 

Maybe it will be a piece of jewelry, a doodle that one of us notices the other making in some café or library, perhaps it will appear as a birthmark.  I imagine scenarios in which one of us will notice it in the presence of the other and, even if we don’t recognize it as a mark made in this life to influence the next, it might bring us back together.  Since part of my magikal “theory” is the idea that all moments exist simultaneously on the spiritual plane, I imagine that as we cast the sigil here, the people we will be (or already were) may already be recognizing that sigil.  Perhaps they are making it themselves in their own timeline.  Perhaps our casting of it in our own timeline was the result of them creating it on theirs.  That our meeting in this life was the result of a spell they cast in theirs’.  Writing these words is itself part of the spell that makes it so.  We create as we speak.

To say that the result of this spell has been to deepen our connection and the passion we feel for each other would be a massive understatement.  To say more would be impossible if the reader has never experienced a successful spell and unnecessary for those who have.  Since we have undertaken this work, I have set other goals for future lifetimes – who I’d like to be and what I’d like to do.  More and more I feel that the things I do now – the studies I undertake, the readings I do, even the writing of this blog are both the preparation for and results of other incarnations.[viii]

Afterwords.

To embrace ideas like the real existence of gods, the presence of ancestors in our lives, the meaningfulness of our astrological charts or reincarnation, requires an act of faith.  To recognize that we can make these things real by the strength of our will and intention is to move from the passive role of believer to the active role of creator.  If you are inclined to take up magik, or to realize the extent to which you are already doing it, instead of asking yourself what might be possible or true, ask what you wish for and try to experience yourself as already in possession of it. 

Blessed Samhain from Little Meadow

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[i] Insistence that this is the only world, although popular among people who consider themselves “scientific” is NOT a scientific claim.  A scientific claim must be potentially falsifiable.  If I state that the clear liquid before me is water, this claim could be verified or falsified by appropriate chemical tests.  If I say that God assisted my in beating an addiction, there is nothing to verify OR falsify here except that I have or have not continued in the addictive behavior.  I cannot prove that it was God and the skeptic cannot prove that it was not.  Yet people attribute their recovery from addiction to the intervention of a “higher power” all the time.  Such claims are and must remains statements of faith. 

[ii] In truth, the difference in impact between “spiritual” and “artistic” claims might not be as great as we often suppose.  People live their lives by ideas from Tolkien or Star Wars in the same way they do by the stories of The Bible or the Gita which are likely to be equally fictitious.  The power of a story doesn’t depend on its historical truth.  This is why Shakespear seems like more that a mere play wright. 

[iii] Some ancient Greek philosophers, Empedocles for example, also had “theories” about reincarnation which, like those in Buddhism and Hinduism, seemed to imply that our future incarnations were influenced by our behavior in the present.  However, the ideas of these thinkers are not as well known in the west nor as well documented in either ancient literature or modern scholarship.

[iv] Practitioners of both religion and magik engage with archetypal entities like ghosts, gods, elemental spirits, etc. But while practitioners of religion conceptualize these entities as something like unchangeable laws (or law makers), objective truths which are more or less immune to our influence, magikal practitioners see them as entities that can be negotiated with.  Religionists see reality as a thing set at the beginning of time to which one must simply conform.  Magicians see themselves as co-creators of reality.  In truth this is not a hard binary.  Religious people might pray to their deities to influence, outcomes but seldom see these prayers as acts of magik.  This is because their attitude is (or should be) “thy will be done”.  In fact, the reason that many religious practitioners take a dim view of magik is that it seems to place the will of the magician on a par with that of the deity.  Magicians tend to think of spirit entities as something like peers.  Powerful yes, but also with their own needs and agendas to which we can lend (or withhold) our will and intention.  This is why magicians see their own will as contributing to the shape of reality.

[v] The main difference between art and magik is that the former allows the artist to maintain a distance from their work.  The artist is like a documentarian.  This is why many artists object to the notion that what they say represents who they are, claiming that they simply hold a mirror up to the world.  The magician, by contrast, has, sometimes literal, skin (blood, hair, other bodily materials) in the game.   For magik to work, the magician must mean what they say since it is their saying which creates the meaning.  Abracadabra, I create as I speak.

[vi] The terms “casting” implies pouring a formless material (the chaos from which magik is made) into a form.  Spelling, as in “casting a spell” carries a similar connotation.

[vii] An unnamed coconspirator has been instructed to find the sigil in a concealing envelope, burn it and add the ashes to those of which ever of us dies last.  Magik works best with such cloak and dagger style theatrics.

[viii] I have come to think of reincarnation in terms of “other lives” rather than “past” or “future” lives.