Is there reincarnation after death?
One minute after death
(Rusty Wright)
“I was dying. I heard the doctor declared me dead. As I lay on the hospital bed, a strong and harsh buzz began banging on my head. At the same time, I felt that I was moving through a long, dark tunnel. Then, suddenly, I found myself outside of my physical body! As a spectator, I noticed the doctor’s desperate attempts to revive my corpse.
“Soon… I found a being of light that showed me a snapshot recap of my life and helped me evaluate my past deeds.
“I finally understood that my time to die had not yet arrived and had to return to my body. I resisted, because I had found that my experience after death had been quite pleasant. But nevertheless, somehow I met my physical body again and lived”.
This is one of many experiences told by people who were close to the end of their lives. In this article we are going to ask the question: Is there reincarnation after death? through several different approaches. Let’s begin by defining some basic concepts.
Human death
Death is considered the interruption of life and is an irreversible phenomenon for any living being. Physiologically a person is dead when no brain and heart activity is recorded. There are cases of people whose heart is still beating, but the brain is dead. These cases have been discussed as morally it can be seen as living or dead. But in general the irreversible death of the brain is considered death.
At the precise moment of death the body begins to experience certain changes: temperature decreases, blood clots, etc. Events that science can easily explain. But where does the light of life go? Do we just die and nothing else? What about the thoughts, memories? Are those gone forever?
Most religions agree that life does not end with the physical death of the body. It is a very human feeling that everything man does is worth, that death is not the end of it all, that something beyond will continue after death.
General beliefs adhere to the following:
Man is composed of body and soul (dualism), and death is the final separation of body and soul. The soul then goes to a certain place. Location will vary depending on belief or religion.
What happens after death? Is there reincarnation? This is a very controversial issue and is usually determined by the beliefs that people have. Are there people who have returned from the dead in some inexplicable way? These are some of the most common questions that we ask ourselves. Let’s go deeper to find out whether there is reincarnation after death.
What is the spirit?
The classic understanding says the spirit is a substantial principle, along with the material principle, the body. Spirit would be the immortal, intelligent part, with capacity of transcendence. It coexists a certain time with the other party, the dull and heavy body. Death separates these two parties, with different destinations: the spirit goes to the afterlife, eternity, and the body becomes cosmic dust. This view is dualistic and does not explain the experience of unity in which we live. We are a complex whole and not just the sum of parts.
Modern design says: spirit is not a substance, but the way of being of human beings, whose essence is freedom. Surely we are free beings because we capture life and the world, but the spirit is not unique to humans and can not be disconnected from the evolutionary process. It belongs to the cosmological picture. It is the highest expression of life, supported in turn by the rest of the universe.
The contemporary design, the result of the new cosmology, says the spirit has the same age as the universe. Before joining us it is in the cosmos. Spirit is the ability to relate that keeps everything together. Form increasingly complex relational warps generating always higher units. When the first two topquarks began to interact and form a relational field, then the spirit was born. The universe is full of spirit because it is reactive, relational and self-organized. To some extent, all beings are part of the spirit. The difference between the spirit of the mountain and the man is not of principle but of degree. The principle works in both, but in different ways.
The uniqueness of the human spirit is to be reflective and self-conscious. Through the spirit we feel connected to the Everything, from a party that is the animated body and, therefore, bearer of mind. In the reflection level, spirit means subjectivity that opens to others, communicates and thus transcends itself, gestating an open communion, even with the supreme otherness. Conscious life, open to all, free, creative, determined by lovingness and caring, that’s precisely the human spirit.
This understanding makes us aware of the link that connects and reconnects everything. Everything is wrapped in the immense and very complex process of evolution at all stages traversed by the spirit, emerging, increasingly, in different forms, sometimes in a conscious way and sometimes unconscious.
In this sense, spirituality is every attitude and activity that promotes respect, life, communion, subjectivity and transcendence towards increasingly open horizons. In the end, spirituality is not thinking about God but feeling God as the link that passes through all beings, interconnecting them and creating the cosmos.
Reincarnation
Overall, reincarnation is the belief that after death the soul separates from the body and takes another body to continue with another mortal life. According to this belief, the souls go through cycles of deaths and new incarnations. A human being, for example, could return to live on earth born as a new character. A reincarnation belief called “transmigration” teaches that the great sinners can be reincarnated as an animal or a plant.
Perhaps the belief in reincarnation emerged when man observed the cycles in nature: The sun and the moon appear and disappear. Also the seasons, foliage, flowers and many other things in nature have a cycle. So it was possible that man died but returned again in another form.
Reincarnation is also the result of the human desire to give explanation to differences in intelligence, health, talent, wealth and more between humans. According to the doctrine of reincarnation these differences would be punishment or credit for behavior in previous lives. Therefore we can blame the poor, the sick and the afflicted by their wretched condition and nothing is done about them because they are paying their fault. The Gospel, on the contrary shows us that God became man in poverty, and that in the poor we find Christ himself.
Read also: Reincarnation In The Bible: What Does It Say?
Reincarnation after death was linked also to the concept of “Karma”, whereby each pays for their good or bad behavior in their next reincarnation. The soul of one who has good karma “transmigrates” and is incarnated in a higher being. The one who has bad karma will reincarnate as an inferior, whether, for example, a cow or a cockroach. In successive incarnations the soul could evolve towards perfection to become a pure spirit which does not need more reincarnations. Then it is immersed forever in eternity.
The belief in reincarnation originated in India in the seventh century BC. That means it’s not as old as the faith of the Jews or the Sumerians, Egyptians, Persians and Chinese. None of these believed in reincarnation and so they built magnificent tombs for the afterlife.
So, is there Reincarnation after death?
Reincarnation is a reality. Nothing dies, it is only transformed. Death is, as Socrates said, dreamless sleep. Let’s dive into the reality of Reincarnation
“I’m just a soul, said Rumi, the greatest poet of love of Islam. – But I had 100,000 bodies. I have seen 2,000 men who were myself…”
Nature normally prevents from remembering past lives so that the subject does not lose its sense of identity and because otherwise the weight of each existence, with its countless shock, trauma and samskaras (reactions, tendencies, desires…), would become an unbearable burden. Normally the actions of a life are paid in the following, that is the reason why many times the real reasons for the tragedies of fate or fortune can not be understood. Normally the awards, errors or crimes of a life are paid in the following, that is the reason why many criminals can live happily as if they had done nothing. But nobody escapes the karma. It is mathematical.
Everything is Karma. Nothing is Casual
Everything has a logic when researching past lives. Nothing is casual, no death, accidents, friends, couples… Even your tastes, sexual desires, partner choice, musical preferences, culinary, ideas, obsessions, phobias, often have an origin in your past lives. Twins usually come from past relationships and even love stories, tragic or happy. In some cases the subject can remember their past lives and be born at will, as in the case of yogis. This is known as Jatismara.
The Christian Church believed in reincarnation until Justinian
Christianity accepted reincarnation until the Council of Constantinople II in 553 at the time of Justinian the Great. This council banned Reincarnation. The early Christian Gnostic (as Carpocrates, Basilides or Valentine) also believed in reincarnation. The Vatican has hidden all the esoteric side of Christianity and everything related to it… In the Quran we read: “God generates beings and, therefore, they come back again and again, until everyone returns to Him”. The Chinese Taoist Zhuang Zhou had said that we pass “through countless transitions having ahead of us only the Infinite”.
Reincarnation after death is Universal
Transmigration of souls is a universal belief. Found in Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, gnosis, theosophy, Egyptian mysteries. Also people like the Eskimos, Zulu, Essenes, Pharisees, Phoenicians, Atlanteans Lemurian, Chaldeans, Indians of Alaska, Celtic Druids , Australian Aborigines believed in Reincarnation after death..
Many important men believed in reincarnation. Plato, father of philosophy, and Voltaire, father of rationalism, both believed in reincarnation.
Read also: Reincarnation Facts That Science Has Proved
Studies and scientific evidence
Reincarnation has been scientifically studied by many authors, scientists and psychologists, as Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia, Arnold Bloxam, Dr. Mortis Stark, Albert de Rochas, CD Broad, Alexander Cannon, Morey Bernstein, Joe Keeton, Edith Fiore, etc… These authors have recorded huge amount of regression hypnosis sessions.
In many regressions they have remembered past lives with verifiable data, or produced phenomena such as cryptomnesia and paramnesia (hidden memory) and xenolalia (speaking foreign languages otherwise unknown). Scientists and documentary evidence supporting the reality of reincarnation are overwhelming.
The vast majority of people are afraid of death, perhaps by ignorance and lack of knowledge about what can happen; or perhaps the fear of death comes to us by a natural instinct. There is reincarnation after death, so we should always think about the consequences of our actions in this life.
This concludes our article regarding the question Is there reincarnation after death? Keep reading this website to learn more about reincarnation and the afterlife.