On Reincarnation, Past Life Regression & the like....
Half the time I suspect we are put off by the people who espouse
certain ideas rather than the ideas themselves. I know that’s
very true of myself and New Agey types. The trouble is I am
interested in things metaphysical and transpersonal, some
of which could well be considered by some as “new agey”.
I have to confess, I cringe at the association. Then again,
we can be attracted to some ideas because the person who’s
into them is so impressive. And that may be as much a bum
steer as avoiding interesting concepts because they are associated
with people who don’t fully grasp them. Instance, a
meeting here in Bali, where a young man fresh from Tiruvanamalai
is telling us all about Advaita and what a walk in the park
it is. Well good luck! Simple it may be, but easy it ain’t.
That or we’d all be realised beings.
Is it Necessarily So....?
Which brings me to Dwarkoji and Reincarnation. I first met
Dwarkoji last year in LA. He had been brought over on a speaking
tour of the US by a friend of mine and I had the good fortune
to spend some time in his company. As a young man Dwarkoji
had met and become a follower of Gandhi. In 1948 he started
a school for the poor in Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha received
enlightenment and what is today one of the poorest and most
problematical cities in Bihar. The ashram has no curriculum
as such. Life is the teacher, and the principles of Ahimsa.
There are no fees. Nor is there any organised fundraising.
No money has ever been solicited. Money, as it is needed,
has manifested. Dwarkoji is a man well into his 80’s,
with a shock of white hair but looks barely 60. He has enormous
energy and a dry sense of humour, combined with a clarity
and simplicity of manner that is immediately experienced as
powerful and attractive. He was an effective public speaker
but not a particularly gifted one. He was too concise for
that. It worked best when my friend Sri acted as interlocutor.
At the end of his short talks his American audiences were
invited to ask questions. Initially they would ask clever
questions, designed to display their own knowledge or spiritual
development, rather than shed light on a particular question.
Without patronising, with no impatience or even hint of mockery,
Dwarkoji treated the questioner with respect eliciting what
was actually important in the question. His audiences soon
got the message and the questions became more real. In what
he said and how he said it, he reminded me a lot of Krishnamurti,
but a lot warmer and a good deal simpler. Cant and dogma,
superstition and ignorance all got short shrift and the essential
vigour of the Gandhian message shone through loud and clear
in all that he said.
Articles of Faith
Much as I loved what he said, and agreed with almost all of
it, one thing niggled. While DwarkojI’s approach was
Gandhian not religious, it was clear that a belief in reincarnation
was absolutely fundamental to everything he had to say. By
this he meant, if I can rudely précis, that we come
back until we get it right and that death is not something
to fear. Well I’m open to that. I would even like it
to be true. But how can anyone know that? They can’t,
it’s an article of faith. And faith it seems to me is
where we can err. Quite apart from all the iniquities inflicted
in the name of Faith, the real danger is that articles of
faith diminish the Mystery. The Mystery is exactly that, a
mystery. We cannot know it. Making it comprehensible in this
way, however attractive the concept, seems too neat, a spiritual
crutch to get us through and, while no one would say that
reincarnation was easy, a cop out nonetheless. However dimly,
it seems to me we are here to feel our way into the Mystery
as best we can. That I venture, is why some our greatest saints,
sages and mystics down the ages suffer their “dark night
of the soul”, as the spiritual support system that has
sustained them collapses and they are confronted with the
abyss, before finally coming to love the Mystery itself. That
may not be a path to which many of us will be called, and
it is hardly something we could or should aspire to, but we
are asking for trouble, it seems to me, if we talk ourselves
into something because it is spiritually neat and tidy, so
to speak. It is no mission of mine to take away such beliefs
from those who have been brought up with them and I envy Dwarkoji
his certainty. I’m just saying for such unfortunates
as I, cursed with a questing and yet questioning spirit ,
it just doesn’t work that way. What is left, if we are
called to it, is the pursuit of self-knowledge, tuning in
to the Mystery as best we can, and the basics of trying to
be kind.
One with the Immortals?
If our bodies are immortal, it is that we are stardust. Matter
is matter and cannot be destroyed, however manifested. Can
we really be so sure about our soul? Is that not a matter
of faith? How can we know that our consciousness is not a
matter of chemicals and neurons interacting while we live
and which simply ceases when we die? We cannot, we can only
believe otherwise. But how about cellular and collective memory?
A lot more probable and a form of immortality as wonderful
as any other construct, however deflating for us a species,
let alone as individuals.
Moving from the sublime to the absurd, what then are we to
make of past life regression? It’s one to thing to be
the reincarnation of Cleopatra or the High Priestess of Isis,
not so nice to find you were some wretched felon on his way
to the gallows at Tyburn Tree and maybe it is understandable
if we pass over such lives for the grander and more interesting
ones. Is past life regression merely a fanciful imagining
or is there anything in it?
Mouldy Old Dough....
My own experience is slight. One acquaintance of mine, a nice
enough woman, gave me a “session” for which I
paid a pretty penny. She laid her hands on various parts of
me over an hour (she’d done reiki you see) and just
shared whatever came into her mind. First I was the lion tamer
in some Balkan travelling circus. I was in love with the beautiful
but frail young ballerina, who danced on the horses. She was
of course my partner in real life. Next I was a dashing young
RAF fighter pilot shot down and badly injured in the Battle
of Britain, nursed back to health by my partner in real life
. Then I was a young poet/anarchist in pre-revolutionary Russia,
betrayed to the Cheka but saved (yes, you’ve guessed
it) by my lover who was none other than my partner in real
life. There was a succession of this stuff, all of it similar
romantic candyfloss that had a lot more to do with her than
me.
Much more interesting was a 3-hour session, also not cheap,
with another woman who had a real gift for inducing such regressions.
She put you into a very relaxed state and you did the talking,
which she wrote down. In brief chronology: first I was a Sumerian
despot hated by my people, the barbarians were at the gate,
I knew the city was betrayed and would be sacked. I didn’t
give a fig. As the city fell I was torn to pieces by my own
people as I laughed at them. Next I was an 11-year old boy
in the Imperial family of Rome, a nephew of the Emperor (Caligula
no doubt, given the tenor of my regressions). I was on the
brink of an incestuous relationship with my mother. To avoid
this she told me she was going to marry the head of the Praetorians,
a man I hated. In a rage I stabbed and killed her. My Grandmother
was not pleased and sent me to my room. Then, as a much-needed
corrective for all this degenerate high-born stuff, I was
in a peat hovel in the cold and rain on the edge of a 14th
Century forest. Cold and damp under my sacking, through the
gloom I dimly saw another pile of sacking, which as I looked
moved. My heart sank as I knew that the rotting clump was
my wife. I concluded this odd chronology as a handsome strapping
lass, daughter of a clan chief on the Anglo/Scottish borders
in the early 16th century. Troubled and violent times they
were. I was passionately in love with this adventurer/politician
who was playing some dangerous game between the Scottish and
English crowns, fomenting trouble on the borders. My uncles
caught him and very brutally did him in right before me.
I Ching as Oracle....?
Whoa! What was all that? I don’t recall I’d just
been reading “I Claudius” or “Armstrong’s
Last Goodnight”. Am I seriously to believe I had been
all these people? Hardly. No, the interesting thing is why
did the 30 billion odd neurons fire up these particular images?
The gift, if gift there be, must be the contact with the unconscious,
where nothing is as it seems and insight only comes via contemplation
and intuiting the relevance of the symbols and patterns revealed.
Jung’s foreward to Wilhelm’s translation of the
“I Ching” is great reading on this. Fascinated
as he was by the I Ching and and its synchronicity, nowhere
does he validate it as an oracle. The value he finds, is in
what contemplation of the process and the readings evoke in
you. That is where the work begins. Life, the Mystery, call
it what you like, and the sheer infinite scale of it, is quite
weird and wonderful enough. It certainly need not preclude
any moral or religious beliefs you may have. If anything it
transcends them. But for us to attempt to fit all this into
our own puny constructs, revealed or otherwise, and for us
to assert that “This is so!”, seems to me just
a little inflated.
And on that note, I wish you the best of questing for 2006.
