All great thinkers in the East agree that human life is one but goes through several evolutionary stages. They also admit that the spiritual-moral content (karma) from one stage of life is not nullified by physical death, but goes to the next stage, with its positive and negative elements.
The common idea in the West, that a man may be
compelled neither to progress nor retreat, or even to suffer forever because of
mistakes made in any of his evolutionary stages is rejected by them, for such
a process would destroy the Law of Cause and Effect, which rules the entire
Cosmos. If there were eternal punishment for sins or mistakes committed, the
effect, eternal punishment, would be infinitely greater than its cause, and
this disproportion would convert the order of the Cosmos into chaos. No
fleeting sins, however great, can produce eternal suffering since the eternal
is not measured by the sum of fleeting sins or errors.
If man's freedom is an attribute of the spirit,
and it does not die with the destruction of the material body, consequently,
the spirit remains free and can correct its error whenever it wants; it can
undo what it did!
Yes, the very spirit, as stated by Teilhard de
Chardin, French Jesuit priest, scientist, paleontologist, theologian,
philosopher, idealist and professor, however much it shocks materialist
sceptics, that: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience... we
are spiritual beings having a human experience”.
This eternal evolution of man, however, does not
necessarily require a “reincarnation”, that is, a return of the spirit to a
physical body; and, even if this reincarnation was necessary, it could take
place in other dimensions scattered throughout the Cosmos, as life is not just
a privilege of planet Earth.
Reincarnation would only take place if a
disincarnated person had strong material desires because it did not create,
during its earthly existence, sufficient spiritual wisdom to guarantee
compatibility with an environment superior to physical matter in other levels
of the Cosmos.
Ramana Maharshi, a famous Indian sage and a being
freed from ego tendencies, stated that the concept of reincarnation is based on
misconceptions about the individual self (the ego) as being real. For the sage,
the rebirth of the spirit, in a material body, exists as a step of renewal for
those who lived in illusion and did not have the ability to comprehend the
non-reality of the individual self. But when this illusion is realized, there
is no more room for ideas about reincarnation. When identification with the
body ceases, so does any notion of death and rebirth, for there is no birth or
death within the dimension of the higher Divine Self.
It is known that an intense desire, long
nourished, gradually materializes, for mental forces are creative forces. The
force of mental magic creates the object corresponding to its desires, whether
on the mental level, whether on the astral or material one. Thus, when out of matter,
a materialist materializes his desire to return to matter, while out of matter,
he does not find an environment conducive to its happiness. It is like a fish
out of water; it cannot live in a subtle atmosphere and will return to its
aquatic environment.
Therefore, while fulfilling a possible intense and constant
desire, reincarnation cannot be considered the only way for someone to pay off
its debt, or negative karma, contracted in a previous existence. The payment of
this debt is possible at any evolutionary stage, even outside of physical
matter, since the basis of this debt is not in matter but in the mental level
of man, for only the mind or intellect, errs and sins. This mental element,
however, does not abandon man when he physically disembodies. It was the man's
mind that sinned, and it can undo what it did in any setting in the Cosmos.
Many philosophers also try to explain through reincarnation the inequalities of individuals during earthly existence - diseases, poverty,
premature or violent death, etc. However, although these inequalities are, to some
extent, explainable in the face of negative karma brought from a previous
existence, this explanation fails when we go back to the first link of this
long chain of successive existences; it does not explain why a certain human
being created this negative karma, when, in the first incarnation, there was
nothing negative to justify this abuse of freedom. What is the reason why the
person “A” created negative karma, sinning, in its first existence, when people
“B” and “C” and thousands of others, just like it initially, created
positive karma? The appeal to reincarnation to explain the inequalities of the
present life does not, therefore, provide a final solution.
While a physical reincarnation, as a historical and
objective fact, is possible, there is no necessary causal link between material
reincarnation and spiritual rebirth. Spiritual rebirth can take
place without reincarnation and vice versa. All the spiritual rebirths narrated
in the Gospel, the New Testament and the history of mankind in general -
Nicodemus, Magdalene, Zacchaeus, the thief on the cross, Paul of Tarsus, Francis
of Assisi, and others, apparently took place without any material reincarnation.
Hence, it is concluded that rebirth by the spirit is not necessarily linked to
the relationship of cause and effect, that is, to reincarnation through matter.
Rebirth by the spirit is an autonomous process, independent
of any external factor, dependent only on the rational or spiritual Self in
man; dispenses the intervention of external third-party factors, as in the
incarnation, which depends on the physical level, the cooperation of the bodies
of a woman and a man. The rebirth by the spirit is an eminent and exclusively
individual duty - whereas reincarnation is only possible through the
relationship between two individuals. This reincarnation may be a historical
fact, objectively real - but the rebirth by the spirit represents a
subjectively realized human value. Reincarnation is on the horizontal level of
external quantities, which can happen to a man. Still, the spiritual rebirth is on
the vertical level of internal qualities, which man must perform.
True evolution or self-realization is not a fact that
happens to man - it is an achievement that man realizes.
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