The Concept Of Soul (cont.)
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org, please feel free to visit the school website)
“It is important to note that all these generalizations or laws are seen by Cayce in a cosmic frame of reference, one which acknowledges that God exists and that every soul is a part of God; that human life is purposeful and continuous and that it operates under law; that love fulfills the law; that the will of man creates his destiny; that his mind has formative power; and that the answer to all his problems is deep within himself.”
Lopez, in his forward to Wentz’s translation of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, points out that the Buddhist doctrine holds that every intentional act, whether it be physical, verbal or mental, leaves a residue in its agent. That residue will eventually produce an effect at some point in the future, an effect in the form of pleasure or pain for the person who performed the act. Thus, Buddhists conceive of a moral universe in which virtuous deeds create experiences of pleasure and non-virtuous deeds create experiences of pain. These deeds not only determine the quality of a given life but also determine the place of rebirth after death. Depending on the gravity of a negative deed (killing being more consequential than criticism, for example, and the killing of a human more consequential than killing an insect) one may be reborn as an animal, a ghost, or in one of the hot or cold hells, where the life span is particularly lengthy. Rebirth as a god is the result of a virtuous deed, and is considered very rare; the vast majority of beings in the universe are said to inhabit the three unfortunate realms of animals, ghosts, and the hells. Rare still is rebirth as a human who has access to the teachings of the Buddha.
In The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky put forward a different theory of reincarnation, said to be based upon the ancient Book Of Dzyan, written in the secret language of Senzar. Here, she describes a system of seven rounds. The earth has passed through three rounds during which it has evolved from a spiritual form to its current material form. The earth is currently in the fourth round. Over the final three rounds it will slowly return to its spiritual form.
The universe according to this doctrine, is peopled by souls (or monads), themselves individual and ultimately identical with the universal oversoul. These monads are reincarnated according to the law of karma. During the present fourth round, these monads inhabit the earth in the form of seven races. Rather than the races as we learn them in sociology and biology classes, Blavatsky asserts that the first of these “root-races” was of spiritual essences; the “Self-born,” who had no physical form and inhabited the Imperishable Sacred Land until it sank into the ocean. (Though why a race of spiritual essence without physical form would be bothered by this is unexplained.) A second race, also without physical form, inhabited the North Pole. The third root race [Lemurians] were the first humans, but lacked the sense of taste or smell, and were destroyed when their entire continent was destroyed by fire. The fourth race was the Atlanteans, whose civilization ended in a great flood. The last sub-race of Atlanteans was absorbed into the fifth race, the Aryans, whose early sub-races included the Greeks, Egyptians and Phoenicians. These Aryans supposedly defeated the other remnants of the Atlantean race (the “yellow, and red, and brown and black”) and drove them into Africa and Asia.
Since the Atlanteans, Blavatsky contends that a finite number of souls or monads, has reincarnated again and again, and will continue to do so throughout the entire cycle of evolution. Only rebirth as a human is possible, in this doctrine; however, animals may reincarnate as a higher species, never vice versa.
Sri Chinmoy, in his book, Death & Reincarnation. Eternity’s Voyage (1996) writes of karma thusly: “In one lifetime on earth we cannot do everything. As long as we remain based in the world of desire, we will continue to be reborn into it. It is only the achieving of selflessness and contentment of our at-one-ment with God that frees us from the cycles of rebirth and death in the physical world. Suffering in this life may not necessarily be from bad karma, or some past wrong. Perhaps our soul wants to experience suffering, or enter the depth of pain just to know what pain is.” He continues by saying, however, “The law of Karma is, ‘as you sow, so you shall reap.’” It seems like a contradiction in terms, but karma may not be as cut and dry as “an eye for an eye” thinking. Karma, since truly it is just an educational structure, can provide for “experiential” lifetimes just so that something can be experienced just for the sake of the experience itself. A science student is often taught how to do something wrong in an experiment, in a safe and controlled way, so that he or she knows what happens when he or she may be experimenting with more dangerous chemicals later.
If we do something wrong, either today or tomorrow, in the physical world or the inner world, we will get the result. The law of karma is inevitable and binding. However, there is divine Grace. To have done something in ignorance, and to become aware and through genuine repentance and cries for forgiveness, karma can be nullified. Grace is actually the only way out of karma. Otherwise it will keep going around and around in a circle. Karma cannot actually be fully “paid.” Only by realizing that one is on a wheel of rebirth and death, going around in circles of learning, can one be freed from karma. At that point, there is no more necessity for karma, for in the end the purpose of karma was to “wake up” and realize oneself as eternal consciousness, independent of form and a physical body. Once this is realized, karma is a moot point.
Chinmoy presents the following illustration of a man who wants to become a millionaire. He becomes a millionaire, but has no peace of mind because his sense of self and security are based in having that million dollars. What if something happens to it? What if I lose my money? Therefore his sense of security is no security at all. It is based in the transient nature of physical desire. Only when we subjugate ourselves to become one with the Divine Purpose do we achieve the enlightenment that frees us of the cycle of reincarnation.
The Tibetan Book Of The Dead
The Western world knows of this ancient book from a translation by W.Y. Evans-Wentz (Oxford University Press, 1960, 2000). First transcribed in 1927, it is less a scholarly work, per ser, than a book of cultural wisdom and religious teaching. The English speaking world found the book both astounding and earth-shattering when these teachings appeared in print. Despite its flaws (in the translation, and in Evans-Wentz personal biases of theosophy which somewhat taint the original text) it remains the main, purest source of the reincarnationist teachings. The text comes from a group called the Mahatmas, a secret order of enlightened masters also referred to as the Great White Brotherhood. The brotherhood was a group that had once lived throughout the world, but had congregated in Tibet to escape the onslaught of civilization.
The Mahatmas instructed Madame Blavatsky (a turn of the century theosophist) in the practice of “Esoteric Buddhism,” of which the Buddhism being practiced in Asia, including Tibet, was a corruption. Blavatsky attempted to found a scientific religion, one that (progressively for the time) attempted to accept the new discoveries in science, geology and archaeology while at the same time proclaiming the ancient and esoteric system of spiritual evolution more sophisticated than Darwin’s scientific theory. This Theosophical Society enjoyed great popularity in America, Europe and India in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
The text describes the process of death and rebirth in terms of three intermediate states of “bardos.” (Life Between Life) The first, and briefest is the bardo of the moment of death when, at the end of a process of sensory dissolution that presaged physical death, a profound state of consciousness, called the clear light, dawns. If one is able to recognize the clear light as reality, one immediately achieves liberation from the cycle of rebirth. If the clear light is not recognized at that time, the consciousness of the deceased person moves into the second bardo (which appears to be a completely Tibetan invention) called the bardo of reality. The disintegration of the personality brought on by death again reveals reality, but in this case not as the clear light, but in the multicolored forms of a mandala of forty-two peaceful deities and a mandala of fifty-eight wrathful deities. These deities appear in sequence to the consciousness of the deceased in the days immediately following death. If reality is not recognized in this second bardo, the third bardo, the bardo of mundane existence dawns, during which one must again take rebirth in one of the six realms of gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, or in hell: consciousness is blown to the appropriate place of rebirth by the winds of past karma.
One of the purposes of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, is, as the title suggests, a meditation to be read to the dead or dying so that he or she would hear how to find liberation in the intermediate state, or, if that did not occur, to find a favorable place of rebirth, ideally in a pure land. The book also is the foundation for a series of meditational and ritual practices based on one of the central premises of the text: that death is not something to fear, but instead provides a rare opportunity in which the reality that is one’s true nature (often obscured by the mental and physical processes of incarnation) becomes manifest upon the dissolution of these mental and physical processes at death. Liberation is achieved by recognizing that reality.
The Tibetan Book Of The Dead points out that, “so long as the mind is human, so long as it is individualized, so long as it regards itself as separate and apart from all other minds, it is but the plaything of Maya, of Ignorance, which causes it to look upon the hallucinatory panorama of existences within the [physical world] as real, and thence leads it to lose itself…”
In his preface to the second edition, Evans-Wentz points out that the various churches of Christendom, Greek, Roman, Assyrian, Anglican, and more, all fall into the camp of the reincarnationists rather than the scientists when it comes to the problems of confronting death and dying. While science is limited in its abilities, and in fact can offer no suggestion, comfort or resolution beyond the death of the physical body, every religion suggests the comfort of re-birth and the afterlife, albeit not necessarily through reincarnation.
The eminent psychologist Carl Jung wrote a preface to one of the printings of the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, and actually suggests in some of his other writings, that his famous archetypes may have their roots in the level of pre-incarnate awareness, that is, the archetypes are essential qualities that are devoid of personality. In other words, Jung envisioned his famous archetypes as fitting more within the framework of the soul state, that of essential being without human personality, than within human psyche and psychology.