I had a text from my scientist friend yesterday negating the idea of reincarnation as a dualistic idea separating body from spirit, which is simply reflecting humanities fear of death. He sees it as an extraordinary claim needing extraordinary evidence (although interestingly there is ample evidence from past life regression therapy and examples such as those in acclaimed books like 'The Children that Time Forgot' by Peter Harrison).
I wrote a considered answer back. Reincarnation is really the idea that there is no death, that we are constantly transforming whilst at the same time staying the same. We are the same singular consciousness (God, the Universe, Source, Brahman etc) experiencing itself as the myriad of different forms in the material universe. We are thus both eternal and transient, unity and diversity (which is where the word ‘universe’ comes from).
The purpose of this is so that consciousness can evolve, to understand itself from all these different perspectives. Reincarnation is not actually dualistic; our consciousness and our body are not separate things, they are one and the same. Without consciousness there is no form, no body. The body is a manifestation of consciousness, it is the dream of consciousness if you will. And because matter is the dream of the Divine Mind, consciousness can take on many different forms. It is not just stuck in one body for one life, and then dies when the body dies.
That is why all matter is conscious, because matter comes from mind, not mind from matter. Western thought has got it the wrong way round, which is why subject-object duality is so entrenched in our thinking. Everything in the universe has this cyclical nature of transforming from one thing into another as systems morph into different patterns of consciousness. We know that energy cannot be destroyed, merely transformed, and this is why - because it is consciousness. It is just consciousness seeing itself from a new perspective, as it transforms into something else. There is thus no subject-object duality, this is an illusion, because ultimately ‘we are one’.
Subject-object duality is the product of the Cartesian split. In the Age of Reason three hundred years ago Descartes split mind and matter, spirit and body in Western thought. The trinity of Descartes, Bacon and Newton formed the scientific method based on this split, which allowed the church to be in charge of spirituality, and science to have its own domain of matter without encroaching on the church’s territory and getting heads chopped off in the process. That’s where all this confusion arises from.
Yet if you understand spirit to mean ‘consciousness’, and that consciousness creates matter not the other way around, then reincarnation is perhaps easier to understand. It is also easier to understand if you think of reincarnation simply as transformation. The Chinese understood this - reincarnation is a key tenet of Taoism, although it is taught in a less reductionist way than we in the West think of it. There's no perceived “end” to one life and “beginning” of another. Instead, Taoists see reincarnation as a continuation of the eternal, flowing Tao process, like the river flowing to the sea. There is no real separation between the mountain stream to the brook to the river to the ocean - although we might call them separate things, it is all water, one being. The universe is thus “the undivided wholeness in flowing movement” (to quote David Bohm).
Reincarnation is an essential tenet of Buddhism, Hinduism, all Eastern traditions. In fact reincarnation was part of western religions until relatively recently when the Church put an end to that with the ‘one life’ hypothesis. There is an argument to be had that the one life hypothesis was propounded to have more power over people - so that people would have more motivation to do the Church’s bidding and thus get into ‘heaven’ if they only had one life to prove themselves worthy. It was a way of creating more fear and thus more control. Certainly in all the western mystery traditions reincarnation was expounded; the Christian Gnostics, the Kabbalists, the Sufis. And in every indigenous culture, and indeed every ancient culture, reincarnation was an essential feature. And why not - the circle of life is evident everywhere in nature, and nature is always our best teacher.
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