REINCARNATION

There is a view of the nature of Eternal Life that is
common to all the Worlds Great Religions though, more
often than not, censored, suppressed or else kept
hidden.
This section deals with one of the eternal questions of
life, that is 'What happens when I die?'. Closely related
questions are 'Is there a soul?', 'Is there an afterlife?'
and 'What is the nature of the soul?'. I hope to provide
the reader here with answers to these timeless
questions.
So what is the truth about eternal life? To the Atheist or
the Materialist, the whole idea of life after death is an
absurdity. To them it might seem like some invention
designed to deal with the fear of death, or some fantasy
that allows religious people to better cope with the
passing away of loved ones. The debate between those
who believe in eternal life and those who dismiss the
idea of it, has been going on throughout history. The
kinds of people who deny the reality of eternal life will
often also have materialist assumptions. That is they
will usually suppose that our existence is based on our
physical bodies with nothing else being in existence
apart from the material Universe. They will find it
impossible to see how anything of what we are can
survive after our bodies have stopped working and
decayed away. Or else they'll counter the idea of eternal
life with the objection that it is something which can
never be proven. In another section of this website I
show how the truth about eternal life actually works
(See Nature of Reality section) and I also show how
indeed it can be proven (See Everyone is God section).
Here I shall present the common truth about eternal life
that is found at the mystical heart of all world religion
namely reincarnation. And I also show how it is that in
religions not normally associated with reincarnation,
such as Christianity, the truth has been censored, made
heresy and then suppressed.
The religiously minded believe and have believed
through the ages, all sorts of different stories
concerning the details of the passage of the soul. Most
Christians and Muslims of this world believe in the idea
of 'resurrection'. That is after death we return to life
with the same physical bodies that we had during our
lives on Earth. This 'resurrected' body will then inhabit
for all eternity either some sort of paradise i.e. Heaven
or else will be condemned to some sort of Hell. Often it
will also be believed that we may meet again deceased
friends and loved ones, who will also be similarly
physically reconstituted in this imagined afterworld.
Another version of the afterlife believed by people of the
Mormon faith holds that when a good Mormon dies then
he or she will become a god of a new universe and
inhabit a planet of their own along with their spouse or
spouses. Then eternity is spent in a state of bliss
producing star children who are the new souls for the
new lives that will inhabit the new universe in which the
perfected Mormon has become God. This is what is
implied by the much quoted aphorism invented by one
of the early presidents of the Mormon church which
goes 'As man is, God once was and as God is, man
may become.'
However there is another widely held belief about
eternal life which is common to the mystical heart of all
world religion. This is the well known but not universally
believed idea called reincarnation or the transmigration
of souls. At first it may seem that this is an idea which
is exclusive to the Eastern religions such as Hinduism
or Buddhism. However when we examine the other
religions more closely then we find one of two things.
Firstly that the idea of reincarnation has either been
once prevalent but then later suppressed. Or else
secondly we discover that reincarnation is believed by
the mystics at the heart of their respective religions and
also by the members of certain esoteric sects within
World religions that we don't normally associate with
reincarnation. We when study closely all the main
religions of this world, then we find that the idea of
reincarnation occurs again and again.
It is true that there exists in the Worlds religions many
different and conflicting ideas about eternal life. But it is
when we examine the history of the World's great
religions and understand how doctrines become
changed for political ends, that we see how truths and
in this case truths about eternal life may be suppressed.
I will be showing how in the case of Christianity, the
idea of reincarnation was quite systematically made
heresy and banned even though it was a widely held
belief in the early church. Also in world religion, it has
often been the case that important and ineffable truths
have often been communicated through the invention of
fantasies and simplistic stories that the common people
could more easily grasp. That is, religious truths are
often two tiered. There is the actual truth for the
mystics and the more esoterically minded followers of
religion, i.e. the kinds of people more deeply involved in
religion and also more interested in knowing about
matters of life after death; then there are the fairy tales
and stories of miracles which are created to capture the
imaginations of the laity and common folk. These would
be the majority of the followers of their respective
religions, who don't actually want to spend a lot of time
thinking about the true nature of eternal life but are
looking for reassurance and a view of the afterlife that
they can easily digest and absorb. Hence we have
popular stereotypes of what eternal life is, such as
heaven being a place in the clouds or else some other
plane of existence where we go spend the rest of
eternity with our deceased friends and loved ones.
Scenarios such as these are useful fictions which
through history have served a necessary purpose.
However when taken literally they don't stand up to
critical analysis and deflect attention from the real truth
about the nature of eternal life, which is reincarnation.
Therefore I will show how this has been the case in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Also I'll show that in
all these three major religions, reincarnation has been a
central and integral aspect, even though this is
sometimes in the background or else is hidden for
various reasons.
I'll now go through some of the major religions of the
world and discuss the idea of reincarnation in relation to
these main faiths. Firstly we'll discuss the religious
traditions which are not commonly associated with
reincarnation. To start I will discuss judaism,
christianity and islam in this order which reflects the
order in which they first emerged. I will show that the
belief in reincarnation is or has been an important
aspect of all these three faiths. Later on I'll be dealing
with Hinduism and Buddhism. We'll deal with these two
faith traditions last mainly because the idea of
reincarnation is a central belief in both, therefore the
case for the importance of reincarnation in these two
religions is very straight forward and easy to make. Also
because the idea of reincarnation is commonly identified
and closely associated with both Hinduism and
Buddhism, the case for reincarnation in both these faiths
is a less interesting one to make. Anyway... we now
examine the idea of reincarnation in some of the major
religions of the world.