Reincarnation 2 – Europe’s incredible delusion – we have only one life

Transcript

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Hare Krishna.
Welcome back to our discussion on reincarnation. We will discuss in the session about the basic concept of reincarnation and its global prevalence. And we will, in this way, set the intro stage for discussing about consciousness, which is the first strong pointer to reincarnation.
So, the European philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer said in his book Parerga and Paralipomena to, where an Asiatic to ask me for a definition of Europe, I should be forced to answer him. It is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing and that his present birth is his first entrance into life. So, why does Schopenhauer call this idea that this is our only life an incredible delusion? This question is intimately connected with the notion of reincarnation.
The understanding that we are traveling from life to life, the word reincarnation literally means re is again, like in repetition. Incarna is related with the word carna, that means to come in flesh. So, reincarnation means to come back in flesh again, that means to be reborn.
Another word used for this is also transmigration. The word reincarnation is used primarily for coming into a body, whereas transmigration is used for going from one body to another body. Migration is travel, transmigration is travel from one body to another body.
So, now the notion that there is something within us which travels from life to life, from body to body, and that this is not our first life, not our last life, lifetime, this has been widely prevalent throughout history. Let’s look at just a list of civilizations where this belief has been present. So, pharaonic Egypt, polytheistic Greece, imperial Europe, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, and many shaman and tribal beliefs, systems which had very widely different beliefs otherwise, shared a common belief in reincarnation.
And even in the skeptical west, a large number of prominent thinkers have believed in reincarnation. And this list of the believers and indeed the proponents of reincarnation resembles a who’s who of western intellectual history. Let’s look at some of them in the list.
We have Pythagoras, the eminent Greek philosopher. We have Plato, who is considered the foundational philosopher in Greco-Christian thought. Giordano Bruno, the Italian philosopher in the medieval ages.
Then we have Franco Voltaire, the eminent French philosopher. We have the U.S. President Benjamin Franklin, U.S. statesman rather. Then we have John Adams, who was the second president of the United States.
We have Johann Burgmann von Goethe, the German poet and dramatist. And we have the eminent English poet William Wordsworth, the celebrated U.S. philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the English poet Robert Browning, the German composer Richard Wagner, the U.S. social critic Henry David Thoreau, the U.S. poet Walt Whitman, the eminent Russian novelist and critic Leo Tolstoy, the writer Mark Twain, the British writer George Bernard Shaw, Henry Ford, of course, the U.S. automobile pioneer, the legendary name behind Ford Motors. Rudyard Kipling, the English writer.
W. Somerset Maugham, English writer. Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist. And Isaac Bashevis Singer, U.S. novelist and elaborate and eminent literary figure.
Now, according to 2009 Pew survey, 1 out of every 10 people all over the world believe in reincarnation. And in fact, if we consider the global population, it works out to be not just 1 out of 10, but 1 out of every 4 persons believe in reincarnation. And further, what could have caused this shift? Initially, the skepticism that was there at the time of Schopenhauer, which made him comment that Europe is haunted by the incredible delusion.
Why incredible delusion? Because the belief in reincarnation was prevalent everywhere. But during his times, Europe did not believe in reincarnation. And as European colonialism spread over the world, the incredible delusion also spread on various parts of the world.
But surprisingly, things are changing and more and more people are accepting or at least considering the idea that this may not be their only life. What has caused the shift away from the incredible delusion as Schopenhauer puts it? While there can be many factors, surprisingly, one of the most important factors is science. A significant number of thoughtful, incisive writers, researchers and scientists have investigated the material explanation of life and have investigated phenomena like near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences, and have come to the conclusion that only a hypothesis of a non-material self that goes from one body to another, that is the best explanation for the phenomena of consciousness.
So let’s begin by considering briefly what is consciousness. So we have David J Chalmers in The Puzzle of the Conscious Experience, Scientific American, December 1995. He says, Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.
There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness, but it is extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. So let’s look at this quote once again. Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world.
So we all have consciousness, so it is familiar to us. But why is it mysterious? It is, as he says, extraordinarily hard to reconcile it with everything else we know. Much of the knowledge that we acquire today comes from the naturalist worldview of modern mainstream science.
And this naturalist worldview does not have space for consciousness. Everything is considered to be a result of matter and material forces and material interactions. Within such a conception, it becomes almost impossible to explain consciousness.
So we need a new method of knowledge, a new paradigm, a new way of looking at the world to understand consciousness. What the phenomena of consciousness is, how we can understand that it is real and what it signifies, we will discuss all this in our next talk. Thank you.