Ok, I’m a believer that much of our existential angst along with many of our behavioral erraticisms is due to a latent fear of death. I’m also convinced that that fear is at the root of much attraction to all the worlds religions. From a psychological viewpoint reincarnation is no different though it offers a less dogmatic investment in our immortality. But does it hold up to the kind of scrutiny I think any belief system must in order to amount to more than mental and spiritual masturbation?

The religious impulse is finding more and more corrolaries to parts of the brain and our biological and physiological evolution. This is not much in dispute outside of the anti-science world of the Bushites. Of course people drift to religion for many other reasons and religion has it’s power for many other ones as well. It’s a form of control, an excuse to justify criminal acts and atrocities, a means to keep people mollified and content, and so much more speaking from the motivations of its purveyors. As far as its subjects go beyond those genetic roots there is a need for people to feel connected to something larger, for the ego trip it provides those who bask in its automatic sense of superiority over those they are are usually inferior to in most real and tangible ways, a romantic chimera to keep them warm, brainwashing of the community and families that are dependent on their investment, and more.

But at root, it and most of our psychological issues are being traced more and more to the fear of death if not necessarily in overt proximate causal ways.

I feel this need to rise above death too. I wonder about what comes next. Is this all there is and every missed opportunity and bad decision, lesson learned, and regret will all mean nothing and never find their recompense. Occasionally I’ve clinged to the idea of reincarnation as a hope for more. The idea that even if it’s not me and my memory that what I do with myself now, how I live my life, the form I condition my “soul,” in, will determine what some eternal essence of me goes onto next.

But is this more grasping at straws bullshit no less delusional and crazy then the condolences Christians, Muslims, and Jews use?

Reincarnation has some fundamental flaws in it for me. I’ll throw them out there and see if anyone has a reasonable hypotheiss for or against.

First off the amount of people on the planet has been growing exponentially. Where are the souls coming from then? Is the Before Sunrise Ethan Hawke explanation of souls divided and split up, and thus explaining our sociiety of growing differentiation and specialization, valid?

And what of the fact that all the professional and scholarly work in this field has been done, for the most part, in India? With rare exceptions all the work comes from there. This would appear to suggest that its a societal power of suggestion thing similar to the phenomena of people of the West seeing the “virgin” Mary in a Waffle or random wall stain. And isn’t it curious that in both cases, those that see these figures of church lore or those in India that are constantly seeing a past loved one in a young child, are from societal groups who are at the lower ends of the financial ladder. This suggests psychologically that people with less to look forward to in this life and more readily living with thoughts of their ends in lives that offer so little to divert them from unhappy thoughts, see something that gives them a superiority and value they can’t get from the now, here, or real.

And india in general has much of the country living in squalor and with much more of a regular likelihood of dying young due to violence, accident, disease, or malnutrition. Indeed reports of reincarnation studies done throughout the country offer little in the way of rebirths or belief in them in the more urban areas of India. Why if it’s such an excepted belief system that they are more open to enabling to see what we don’t, does it only occur among the most destitute and desperate?

And where these reports are abundant the villages are all very much alike making the striking similarities that children report about life in another village less stunning. And just why is that these souls travel so little distance between lives? Is it likely that any kind of astral projection or travel would be so limited by distance?

Now of course some Americans have talked about past lives and gone through the whole past life therapy thing. But is this just the dilletantism of comparitively rich Americans with alot of leisure time? It’s interesting to me that there are so many reports of these types of searchers having past lives of such noteworthiness, often greatness, while their Indian counterparts are all reproting on coming from a life of diminshed expectations just like theirs. How much then of all this comes form the subconcious minds expectations. Americans grow up with fairy tales and movies revealing so much of the worlds possiblities, often mixing our pop cultrual experiences and their memories with the memories of our true lives. In India the village life and stasis of class in the caste system are all many people know.

In this perspective the idea of some kind of rebirth seems as far fetched as Christians cavorting in Heaven with angels and relatives. Or rising from their graves at the Rapture to ascend with the J man while the rest of us are “LEFT BEHIND.” And which is it exactly? Do they go to heaven or do they wait until the rapture? Is it only the bodies rising at the rapture to join the souls? If so why, if the soul is so important and you still can see each other the way they looked in this life if you believe the light and tunnel folks whose bodies “died” momentarily? Seems like there is at root a deep need to still connect it all to our bodies and ground it all in materialistic impulses.

Dr Ian Stevenson has done the most work on the subject, writing volumes over decades of following leads and traveling the world. But mostly he has found nothing outside of India and has shown nothing that impartial clinical examinations could not find holes in.

Now I too have heard stories about hard to explain things right here in the U.S. and I’d like to believe they mean something. But many of the greatest ones have been investigated and come up lacking. I’ve heard some personal stories too, from friends over the years, which have not been investigated professionally. And not having been there or experienced them I can’t do more than say how interesting it is and suspect another explanation is behind it.

Bob’s got me thinking about collective unconscious again. Maybe what alot of these experiences come down to is an ability that is latent in most of us, and more pronounced in some, to tap into the collective unconsciousness. It seems many of them involve kids who are less muddled and stifled, or filled with so much mental detritus that they can best tap into the cc and see the emotional imprints others have left behind like radio waves that you have to be tuned to in order to pick up. This would speak to something extraordinary about human existence, but unfortunately does not lead to the conclusion that we have immortal souls that either hang around or are reborn.

Though are bodies may be recycled after we’re gone, and we’re all part of the same group of matter that has always been here since the Big Bang, and will presumably be here until the big crunch or whatever awaits us, there is no evidence to support the theory that something non-materialistic suffuses that matter. It seems highly unlikely that the scattering of our remains and incorporation back into the substance of life could all congeal in a physical and mental re-representation of our neurons and synapsial connections along with all the other vague brain matter responsible for our memories and impressions. It seems more likely that society evolves as our bodies do, and that as we act in it we change the physical landscape and leave an impression that is both cultural and emotional. Those impressions become part of that evolving unfolding of the body politic. Like Hegel and the Idealists believed, history is god unfolding and revealing itself over time and the steady progressive trending forward. Perhaps as we live our lives, some or all of us, leave an impression of own godliness as creators of this world, and most if not all notions of god as well, and some tap into that in a gifted way that some children can just pick up an instrument and feel how to play it.

Part of me also believes that those aforementioned pshysiological corrolaries that invole the spiritual formed to accomodate some reality. Most likely they formed as a survival mechanism taht granted those who believed an advantage over those that did not. But there is the possibility that they evolved in a manner similar to the way our brains ability to recognize mathematical equivilents evolved. Or spatial dimensions. There is an undeniable external support of our various numerical skills, Newton’s calculus was supported by the world as is a childs putting 2 apples together with 2 others and concluding that they have 4. Our brains evolved to parallel an inherent reality. We don’t walk around bumping into corners, or into walls because our brains work withing real world geometrical dimensions. So maybe the spiritual impulse accomodates something in the real world that those genetic, cortex and temporal lobe triggers evolved to allow us to see or feel.

I don’t think Judaism, Buddhism, Chritianity, hinduism, Islam, or any other extant belief system is the real world equivilent of that bio-psychological tendency. More likely, if there is something to this idea, our past religions and beliefs are stepping stones towards that greater spiritual truth. Like our bodies, brains, and perhaps our cultures, religions have been though evolutionary steps and still need to do more evolving before they get close to any kind of maturity. Relatively speaking they are in their infancy and acting like it. But maybe these early and clumsy spiritual outgrowths are referencing deeper and more complex spirtual realities we’re evolving towards understanding and actualizing.

Unfortunately we live in a world where our technological evolution is far outpacing the spiritual and giving these overgrown stunted religious philosophies modern tools to play with is very dangerous.

Whether this last theory is true or not, it is as close as a strict adherence to evidentiary and empirical supports can get someone like me to this thing we call god. Or the unproven numous known as soul or spirit. And either way I think we’re wasting our time doing anything with the worlds heretofore major religious belief systems besides studying them for their insights and metaphorical value, and then taking that knowledge to a higher ground where we can transcribe a more inclusive code and hope than what the archetype called Moses brought down from Mt Sinai.