‘Past’ and ‘Future’ Lives

The popular theory of “rebirth,” the transmigration of souls, which implies the “reincarnation” of some stable unit of consciousness, is merely a therapeutic device intended to overcome the fear of death and is not supported by either empirical evidence or logical analysis.

People often say that day follows night, and life follows death. But all these ideas rest on a fundamentally false sense of the continuity of personality. The personality that lived in a “past” life vanished with the end of that life. The personality that speaks of the “present” will cease to exist entirely after death. Whatever remains is certainly not the same as the ‘I’. It is very important to understand that continuity of the flow of mind does not mean continuity of self-identity.

Indeed, to believe that “I will be born again” or to think that “after death I will enter heaven” or Valhalla or some other place where I will continue to exist as a person is attractive but highly doubtful even on superficial analysis, not to mention the experience of sensing energies. It is easy to notice that even within a single life the mind is heterogeneous, fragmented, and maintains the illusion of wholeness only thanks to its anchor in the body.

The apparent unity attributed to contradictory and conflicting manifestations of mind, subpersonalities and personas is provided only by the anchor in the “same” body as the central element of self-identification.

And although the true basis — the authentic integrating factor of the stream of awareness — can (and should) be its individuality, in practice it is usually identified and manifested too weakly to survive the psychophysical shock at death.

Therefore, when after the death of the body the cluster of consciousness loses this anchor, it typically dissociates into separate parts that are either drawn into new currents or gradually disintegrate or degrade.

Accordingly, no successful afterlife is possible in such a situation.

In order to successfully navigate the intermediate state, one must, during life, build a stable structure of consciousness that will survive without an integrating anchor in the body, pass through all stages of disembodiment, and be able to return appropriately to embodied existence in a new body.

The cycle of births and deaths by itself is not true immortality; it is not eternal existence but an endless repetition of the same mistakes, the same sufferings, the same falls. And if one thinks it through, this cycle in its ordinary form is far worse than final death or non-existence and destruction, since non-existence at least signifies the cessation of suffering.

And to turn this endless repetition, this senseless carousel, into something purposeful and ordered — to turn the circle into a spiral — we must constantly strive for self-awareness and improvement.

In fact, all religions and teachings that support the idea of “reincarnation” also understood and taught this idea of the “illusoriness” of the “immortal soul.”

Kabbalistic texts abound with mentions that one person “contained a fragment of another soul.” For example, many saints, tzadikim, held in their minds “fragments of the souls” of other significant teachers — Rabbi Akiva, the Baal Shem Tov, Moses, Solomon, and others, and often of several of them. For instance, one of the founders of Hasidism — Rabbi Boruch of Medzhybizh — was said to bear in his soul “fragments” of the souls of both King Solomon and Saul; the soul of one of the law teachers — the tanna Rabbi Meir — was present in the personality of Chaim Vital (a student of Isaac Luria) as well as in his grandfather and son; and the prophet Elijah was considered the “incarnation” of the soul of Pinchas, son of Aaron.

In the Buddhist tradition of seeking and recognizing “reborn” ones — tulku — there is an even greater variety of such observations. For example, the mind of the famous teacher Jamgon Kongtrul resided in five or twenty-five simultaneous incarnations (and is currently represented by two tulkus).

Thus, experience shows that it is not easy (and not always desirable) for a flow of mind to preserve the permanence of its composition from life to life.

When, during a single life, various attractions, clusters of interests and motivations accumulate within it, it will most likely split into several streams once freed from the body’s “integrating” basis.

Conversely, related currents that were previously located in different beings (and possibly even in different worlds) may converge into a single stream, into one “personality,” if their basic vectors coincide.

From a deeper perspective, the “merging” of separate sub-streams of impressions — “streams of mind” — into a new system nevertheless occurs on the basis of a single individuality, onto which related vectors of mind are overlaid. And if that individuality is recognized, identified and used as an anchor, it becomes the foundation of the “I,” which nonetheless remains only its epiphenomenon. Individuality is a characteristic of the flow, a set of its basic properties, not evidence of a permanent composition or some stable “substrate.” And if in one life a flow with these features may be formed from one set of psychic elements, in the next the same “package” may be entirely different.

So the “immortal soul” is exclusively the product of the mind’s work on itself during life, and the degree and “extent” of that “immortality” are determined precisely by its efforts.

The cycle of births and deaths has no beginning, and it has no end. If we suppose that certain actions or efforts, or, on the contrary, inaction and relaxation, are capable of extricating “someone” from this cycle — we are mistaken: the cycle exists by and for itself. If we think one can escape it by rising upward, or conversely by descending into the depths — we are mistaken. The cycle has no exit, just as it has no entry. Only what has a beginning has an end, and a beginningless cycle is therefore endless. It is an error to suppose that there exists an “individual” who has “fallen” into the Gilgul and “resides” there. Gilgul is a dynamic flow of consciousness, eternally changeable and impermanent. And before the mind two paths are open — either to continue the endless rotation, the eternal regroupings and infinite repetitions, or to find that which never entered this cycle and identify with it.