Exo and Eso
As soon as you make a sect, you protest against universal brotherhood
Swami Vivekananda
God has no religion
Mahatma Gandhi
I was about to re-read Genesis when I discovered a book called Discourses, written by a man called Meher Baba. I flipped through the pages and found that he was talking about the same things as Yogi Ramacharaka, and in an equally readable manner. Karma and reincarnation were explored in great detail. If Yogi R and Mr B had met, they would have found they had 95% of their philosophy in common. So what? Put two vicars together and you’ll get the same result: vague pieties by the schoonerful. Yes, but the difference here is that the Yogi is a Hindu, and Meher Baba is a Muslim. At first I didn’t appreciate the relevance of this, but then I searched the Koran again. There is no actual mention of Karma in it, apart from the broad notion that everyone will be judged for his bad deeds, as in
‘Whatever affliction may visit you is for what your own hands have earned’ (42:30).
No mention of reincarnation either, apart from a rather ambiguous
‘How can you deny Allah? Did He not give you life when you were lifeless; and will He not cause you to die and again bring you to life; and will you not ultimately return to Him?’ (2:28)
‘Ultimately’?
So why might a Muslim make explicit references to both Karma and Reincarnation? Wasn’t the Koran the absolute fount of Muslim dogma?
I then discovered that Baba was a Sufi. I’d heard of Sufis, but imagined they were some sort of sect, perhaps as Adventists are to Catholics, but the truth is much more interesting. The reason Baba’s and Ramacharaka’s writings are so similar is that their philosophies actually are the same. In other words, the Yogi and Sufi doctrines had more in common than the Sufi has with the (‘normal’) Muslim or the Yogi with the (‘normal’) Hindu. To put it crudely: every few years Indian Hindus and Muslims massacre each other, stirred up by politicians and/or fanatics. But the Yogis and Sufis, will never be involved with such outrages (except, perhaps, in self-defence). Their joint philosophy of respect for all, backed by an understanding of the Laws of Karma, could never allow them to attack anybody, particularly not for the ‘crime’ of being ‘A Hindu’ or ‘A Muslim’.
This came as a positive surprise. I remember the circumstance well. I was sitting in the conservatory, too tired to work, on a lovely sunny morning, while Anne was hauling a dilatory April in for milking.
§ Not in the conservatory, no. We milked her in her shed, just across the yard from the conservatory. Less messy.
So some Hindus and Muslims share identical values which are held to be compatible with mainstream Hinduism and Islam. Why then didn’t all Hindus and all Muslims share the same philosophy as the Yogis and Sufis?
This connection provoked a second thought: if Hinduism and Islam could be united at some level, maybe Judaism and Christianity could also find a link to the karmic system of the more easterly religions?
But the Old Testament was no more help than the Koran. Nothing on Karma except for the constant promise of judgement and the threat of a burning hell. The NT was much the same, except that some people wondered whether John the Baptist was Elijah (aka Elias) reborn; thus the notion of reincarnation seems to have been current in the local populace.
§ Also John 9:2 ‘And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Both Karma and Reincarnation are hinted at here (but Jesus rejected the notion).
So maybe this Yoga-Sufi connection was just an Indian thing (except that the Islam-derived Druze of the Levant are keen on reincarnation too).
Then I came across the Kabbalah, a deep-rooted aspect of Judaism which held reincarnation as acceptable. Kabbalah is a tricky thing to pin down, and no one follower agrees with any other about everything. ‘Very Jewish’, I thought. But the point is, that reincarnation was not anathema.
§ Jonathan Sachs, a Chief Rabbi in the UK, went on record as saying that Judaism is strong on leaders, but not on followers.
Kabbalists accept reincarnation and (some/many) also accept Karma. You are reborn in order to Get It Right. Each time you come to Earth with a task to do: to ‘pay off’ some of the bad Karma you have piled up in previous lives, just as Yoga claims.
This was very exciting. Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism were all (to a degree) unitable. Buddhism, of course was very much into K+R, and was very upfront about it. That made four out of the Big Five…. Just Christianity seemed to be missing.
§ But it occurred to me that the Old Testament principle of ‘an eye for an eye’ was all about the principal of exact ‘karmic’ repayment, via the Emotional route. The New Testament law of ‘turn the other cheek’ was more of a Mental approach: ‘Avoid bad consequences by avoiding the crime’. Was this a connection with the Law of Karma, perhaps, and the two ways of repayment? Maybe, but I wasn’t persuaded. Leave the door ajar…
What of other religions and philosophies?
Sikhism? Karma and Reincarnation are central to their philosophy.
§ ‘You shall harvest what you plant. O Nanak, by God’s Command, we come and go in reincarnation.’ SGGS p4
‘Because of your past actions, you shall be consigned to the womb of reincarnation. Your past actions will not just go away.’ SGGS p900
Jainism ditto. Confucianism? No, but then Confucianism isn’t a religion. It’s more of an ethical doctrine, aimed at promoting social harmony. But the other ancient Chinese system, Taoism, does recognise reincarnation, at least to some degree. For example, old Taoist documents claim that Lao Tzu appeared on earth as different persons in different times.
§ And: ‘Birth is not a beginning; death is not an end. There is existence without limitation; there is continuity without a starting point. Existence without limitation is space. Continuity without a starting point is time. There is birth, there is death, there is issuing forth, there is entering in. That through which one passes in and out without seeing its form, that is the Portal of God.’ Chuang Tzu
Is this reincarnation? No, I guess not, but ‘issuing forth’ sounds pretty close.
And Taoist writings seem to be connected to something very like Karma.
Voodoo? No, not really, although the Yoruba culture of West Africa, has a tradition of sometimes calling children ‘Father Returns’ or ‘Mother Returns’. Voodoo certainly believes very strongly in ‘spirits’ though, and many of the Afro-American derivatives like Umbanda fully support the Karma + Reincarnation doctrine. Umbanda claims that humans evolve via this system. Now that was interesting…
§ The general African approach is neatly put at www.afrikaworld.net/afrel/atrreincarnation.htm.
Native Americans? Yes. The notion of reincarnation is, or was, very common, it seems, especially among Inuit peoples.
Native Australians? There seems to be no absolute agreement here, although as there are over 500 tribal groups, it’s quite possible that some do and some don’t. Some authorities claim it was a widespread belief.
§ Others disagree. In Voices of the first Day Robert Lawlor is clear that reincarnation is not an aboriginal doctrine. But, he explains, they do have a sophisticated cosmology involving Higher Beings, and ancestors who dreamed this world into being, which chimes with other cosmologies I’ve read of. They also have a sophisticated system of initiations. So what’s that all about? Another mystery. Meanwhile, dreaming a world into being was pure Idealism.
Maya and Aztec? Not sure, although the Aztecs note 22 layers of heaven and hell. But they do have initiations. Come to think of it, African cultures are strong on initiations. So are the Native Americans. It was looking as though I would need to look into initiations at some point.** Wiccans? As in modern day ‘pagans’? They too believe in the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation.
§ Please don’t write and tell me I’m wrong in any of the above details. I’m sure you will be partially right, and what I have presented here will be partially right also. What matters to me is the big picture.
Some cultures believe in reincarnation for specific people (leaders or ‘gods’) rather than everyone.
A full and interesting book on the subject is Reincarnation: the Phoenix Fire Mystery by Joseph Head and SL Cranston.
So it would seem that the idea of reincarnation, if not universal, was at least not limited to India. A more common idea was that you must pay in the next life for the harm you do in this one. That belief does seem to be pretty universal, even if it’s not spelled out as precisely as the Law of Karma.
§ Connections, connections… Either just about every culture in the world was mad, or they all knew something I, as a Westerner, didn’t know.
(However, a Harris Poll of 2008 found that some 24% of American adults believed in reincarnation. I don’t think this proves anything, but it is a sizeable minority, especially as some 70% believe in orthodox Christianity which does not believe in it.)
***
Back to the Big Five: if four of them, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism each recognised, at least to some degree, the twin doctrines of Karma + Reincarnation, why didn’t Christianity, the greatest world religion? Was it really the odd one out? More reading and musing….
***
Meanwhile I noted another huge commonality: The Big Four all presented a split between their public face and their private, or hidden, face.
It seems that the public face of religions, meaning the services, rituals, processions, bells, chanting and so forth, is called the Exoteric (outer) face. These public displays are designed to appeal to people who are led by their emotions: ‘Believers’. The bells and smells help to focus the mind. The more private (‘secret’?) doctrines, are called the Esoteric (inner) face. These are for people who are led more by their intellectual mind: ‘Seekers of Understanding’.
§ Buddhism is much less split between ‘public’ and ‘private’ than the other three, presumably because it was a reformatory movement, determined to bring Hinduism back on-beam and away from the cultists who were strangling the original message with complexifications.
As the intellectual approach aims at reasoned truth, rather than emotional solace, it is not surprising that religions should all share similar Esoteric doctrines. After all, you can’t have conflicting truths. If you appear to have, then one of these ‘truths’ must be wrong; or both may be wrong; or, most likely, both may be only partially right (see the problem with philosophers in Chapter 9). There can only be one ultimate Truth, way back, beyond all the little truths. There may be many facets of the one Truth, but if they be true, they will never be paradoxical or contradictory. Truth is truth and paradox is non-truth, or more likely, badly-thought-through partial-truth. The fault lies with the thinker, not the Truth.
While the Big Four all had Exo and Eso sides, Christianity seemed to have no Esoteric side at all, apart from the occasional eccentric mystic, given to bleeding from the palms or floating up into trees?
§ As in St Francis of Assisi who apparently had a vision in 1224, resulting in the first known occurrence of the stigmata: the five wounds to the hands, feet, and side, as received by Jesus on the cross. Brother Leo, who was with Francis, left a clear account: ‘Suddenly he saw a vision of a seraph, a six-winged angel on a cross. This angel gave him the gift of the five wounds of Christ’.
And St Joseph of Cupertino… On St. Francis of Assisi’s feast day in 1630, Joseph, a friar, soared into the sky and remained hovering over the crowd. When he came down, he was so embarrassed that he ran home to his Mum. This was the first of many flights, which earned him the name ‘The Flying Saint’. Eventually his superiors banned him from community duties as he was becoming a major distraction, especially when he once caught fire by flying too close to a candle.
Each a promising candidate for a White Crow, but too remote in time to be absolutely fool-proof examples. And how impartial and accurate were the witnesses? Hard to say. But flying up into the air isn’t something you can spin. He went up or he didn’t.
What about cultures of previous times?
Herodotus, some 2,500 years ago, wrote that:
‘The Egyptians are the first who propounded the theory that the human soul is imperishable, and that where the body of any one dies it enters into some other body that may be ready to receive it; and that when it has gone the round of all created forms on land, in water, and in air, then it once more enters the human body born for it; and that this cycle of existence for the soul takes place in three thousand years.’
That’s quite clear, and supplies a lot of extra detail, including the idea that Human life may enter other living forms.
The Egyptians had a dual system of priests and hierophants. The priests handled the Exoteric, public-outer-emotional stuff; the hierophants the Esoteric, private-inner-mental stuff. Our word ‘hermetic’, meaning ‘tightly sealed’, derives from ‘three times great’ Hermes Trismegistus, aka Thoth, known as the bringer of Esoteric wisdom: pearls of wisdom too powerful to be ‘cast before swine’ as Jesus would put it later on, and hence held as closely guarded secrets.
§ Wisdom too dangerous to be publicly released? What on earth could that mean?
Here we already see the split between Exo and Eso that was to mature in the later Desert Religion/s. Did we inherit it from Egypt? Or is it a constant?
Hermes T’s axioms were collated in the Kybalion… which sounds a little like Kabbalah, don’t you think? And Moses, owing to his rank and his role as leader to the Jews, must have known about the Egyptian Esoteric mysteries, and presumably stuck to the tradition of not releasing hidden wisdom to the masses, or his writings in the Torah would contain it today. The Kabbalah, however, does contain many elements of this Esoteric teaching.
§ Interestingly, the Talmud (the basic book of Jewish law) claims that the Torah (especially the Oral Torah, passed down by rabbis) does contain Esoteric truths, but they are ‘concealed’, and are revealed only to those who have reached the level of the righteous. This means, presumably, some sort of encodement or symbolism. Again.. concealment of information from the morally lowly. What and Why?
The Greeks borrowed heavily from the Egyptians, whose culture was at least a thousand years older; possibly much older, as the Sphinx shows signs of water erosion, which some geologists think occurred some eight thousand years earlier, when the climate was very different.
The Greeks definitely had an Exo/Eso tradition. On the one hand were the gods of Olympus, with their human lusts and eccentricities, and on the other hand were The Mysteries. We all know about Athena and Apollo, and randy old Zeus, and the endless stream of godlets and godlettes, but few know about the Mysteries of Orpheus or Eleusis, inherited from the Egyptian Mystery of Isis. This is because they were, as the name implies, kept secret from the masses. But do have a few details, like this extract from an Orphic hymn:
‘When souls return to the light, after their sojourn on earth, they wear upon their more subtle bodies, like searing, hideous scars, the marks of their earthly sins. These must be obliterated, and they go back to earth to be cleansed. But the pure, virtuous and strong proceed direct to the Sun of Dionysus.’
These ‘scars’ sound very similar to the Yogic notion of unpurged bad Karma for which the ‘soul’ must ‘go back to earth to be cleansed’.
The Romans came next: the hard men of Europe, not much given to nancy flights of the intellect when there were aqueducts to be built and barbarians to be slaughtered. Their distance from the Egyptians, Jews and Greeks is shown by Julius Caesar’s rather surprised comment in The Gallic Wars that
‘The principal point of doctrine (of the Druids of Gaul) is that the soul does not die and that after death it passes from one body into another.’
I wonder if that came as a promise or a threat to the butcher of a million Gauls?
§ Lucretius had definite views on the prospect of an afterlife: ‘The fear of eternal life should be banished from the universe; it disturbs the peace of mankind, for it prevents the enjoyment of any security or pleasure.’
No namby-pamby après-vie for the father of Materialism, then.
There were occasional philosophical moments though. Cicero said:
‘Nothing perishes, although everything changes here on earth; the souls come and go unendingly in visible forms; the animals which have acquired goodness will take upon them human form.’
Animals becoming human? How does that relate to the Egyptian notion, above, I wonder? And Virgil says:
‘After death, the souls come to the Elysian Fields (…) and there meet with the reward or punishment of their deeds during life. Later (…) they return to earth.’
The Romans were tolerant of cults as long as they did not threaten the State. But they did lose patience with the Jews, who fought endlessly for freedom despite being allowed concessions not granted to other provinces.
Forty years after the murder of Jesus, the Romans lost their rag and destroyed the Temple. Still the zealots persisted, so fifty years later, they destroyed the whole of Jerusalem and rebuilt it under another name, and forbade Jews from living there. However, one ‘Jewish cult’ blossomed: Christianity.
St Paul and St Peter went to Rome and rapidly made converts. Three hundred years later Christianity became the religion of the emperor himself. Soon afterwards it became the state religion. The almighty and world-altering Roman Catholic Church was just a whisper away.
Then something astonishing happened, both for Christianity and for my research. In one of my history books I came across a reference to the Second Council of Constantinople, convened by the emperor Justinian in 553. It was at this Council that Origen, a church philosopher of 300 years earlier, was denounced as a ‘foremost heretic’, and his writings were declared anathema.
§ Anathema: ‘A formal ecclesiastical curse involving excommunication’, which meant essentially ‘damned in the eyes of God.’ Heavyweight and extremely spiteful stuff.
What’s more, anyone not agreeing with this judgement was also anathema. So what? Why did this matter? What was Origen’s appalling crime that called for such heavy-handed treatment….?
It was that Origen was a known supporter of the doctrine of reincarnation.
I let out a loud whoop when I first read this. I checked it in another book. It was true. I told Anne. She was politely interested, but asked to be excused so she could listen to The Archers. I cast around a little more and found that reincarnation had been a perfectly acceptable Christian doctrine for well over 500 years. Saint Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, had written in the fourth century:
‘It is absolutely necessary that the soul shall be healed and purified, and if it doesn’t take place in one life on earth, it must be accomplished in future earthly lives.’
Various other bishops agreed with Nyssa. It was a prominent doctrine. So there it was: the link that united Christianity to the other Big Four. I found more details. There is little doubt that Justinian’s Council was deliberately packed to ensure the removal of the doctrine of reincarnation. But why? The explanations I came across ranged from the lurid to the cynical.
§ Broadly: Theodora, the emperor’s wife, didn’t like the idea of reincarnation to pay off sins, so she lobbied hubbie to get it banned. She was the daughter of the imperial bearkeeper and ‘a bit of a courtesan’, so perhaps she knew of what she spoke.
Alternatively, The Church power-brokers thought it would be better for their murderous flock not to know about reincarnation, as the option of a second chance would cause backsliding. ‘Truth’ was irrelevant. Political expediency and social engineering were what mattered to the men of power, the religious professionals. Control by fear…. The Chinese knew about these things. Lao Tzu, the Taoist, wrote 800 years earlier: ‘If you cannot scare people with death, then you have nothing left to scare them with.’ From now on the fear of death would become central to Christianity, and in this respect, jar it out of step with most of the other great religions.
Emperor Justinian ordered a mass burning of unapproved books (this was regular behaviour for the early Christian Church).
§ To be fair, The Church fathers knew that if they didn’t get their story straight and stick to it absolutely, then the Good News Gospel would be certain to be diluted and ultimately depraved by competing dogmas, possibly of ancient orgiastic tradition.
He also ordered the torture and murder of all the non-Christian inhabitants of Antioch. This too was traditional behaviour for the early followers of the Lamb of Peace. Mutilation and murder in the name of Love had happened many times before across the newly-Christian empire. It would become synonymous with the new Roman empire of The Church for centuries to come. One example will do: in 1014 the emperor in Byzantium captured and blinded most of the 15,000 strong army of the Bulgars.
§ Again, to be fair… mass slaughter of anyone who didn’t agree with you absolutely was the currency of the day. It still is, in some cultures.
§ As matter of interest, reincarnation was a central doctrine in Celtic Christianity right up to the Synod of Whitby in 664, when it was elbowed out of official Church dogma by the Romanists. They never gave up.
***
So, at last, some sort of unification. The key point was ‘Is reincarnation a theory or a fact?’ As Idealism was the only ism in town, I could not reject reincarnation a priori, but that wasn’t enough. Meanwhile, it was impressive that all of the Big Five had strong links with the doctrine, despite varying attempts to sideline it.
What was clear was that the Exo/Eso dichotomy was a fact, and now I thought I could see the reasons for it. These ranged from the expediency-of-power to the fear of misuse.
- Christianity (ie, ‘The Church’) seemed simply to want to keep power through fear, and in this it has been very successful, as Esoteric Christianity barely exists today. The few mystics do not easily fit into the hierarchical requirements of Big Dogma, so they are played down, and little attempt is made to align them with The Church’s main job of acting as the ‘vicar’, or intermediary, between hoi-polloi and the Almighty. We have recently seen the growth of groups which enjoy an Esoteric element, but their explanatory background seems to be feeble.
§ Some can handle snakes without getting bitten to death (very often). Others can speak ‘in tongues’ now and then, possibly while trembling on the floor. But what does it mean? What is the point? I’ve not yet heard a sensible answer… Quakers sit in silence. Is that ‘esoteric’?
- The Sufis are traditionally the Understanding, out-reaching, wing of Islam, while the current Wahhabi-inspired fundamentalists are the Believing inward-looking wing, determined to bring back the good old days of the sixth century, but with iPhones and oil revenues. The Koran is generally Exoteric, but many Sufi saints have gone their own way and preached reincarnation. Do I detect the same whiff of tolerant confusion that the Church of England is famous for? Not sure.. Islam is very keen on keeping the story straight, even insisting that every Muslim should learn Arabic to read the Koran in its original language so misunderstandings could not arise in translation. A nice idea, but doomed to failure, as naïve learners rarely reach the level of competence of educated native speakers, and anyway many only learn by rote and not by meaning.
- Judaism has its Kabbalah and its Hasidic traditions, both given to Esoteric beliefs. Here the Exo/Eso split is more clear: the secrets of the Kabbalah (Kybalion?) used to be thought to be too dangerous to be proposed as doctrine to the general populace. (Why dangerous? This still intrigued me.)
- Hinduism has an endless variety of Exoteric ‘gods’, but also a very powerful Esoteric tradition as in the philosophy of the Yogis (and others). Again, some Esoteric elements seem to be kept secret.
- Buddhism is very strong on the Esoteric side, some of which is public; some of which is not.
- Historically Eso-Understanding led to Gnosis: Direct Knowledge via revelation. Gnostics of various tints flourished in the early decades of Christianity.
I’m aware that these ‘conclusions’ leak like a factoryful of sieves, but they are broadly true, I think. It is certainly true to say that the Eso view of Reality is little known in the Christian world. To be more accurate, it is slightly known, but is rejected or ignored by The Church (the ‘vicar’) and mocked by Science: two heavyweights who between them effectively stifle it.
The Exo/Eso split can be porous. Probably all exoteric Hindus believe in the doctrine of Karma and Reincarnation. Substantial numbers of Jews and Muslims, and even a few Christians (perhaps up to a third) are inclined that way as well, although some must have a hard time reconciling K+R with the rigours of their religion’s dogmas. The leakage of Eso Understanding into the Exo world of Believing has always been of concern to the keepers of the ancient Mysteries, as in the metaphor of casting ‘pearls before swine’.
Jesus said to the disciples ‘unto you is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but unto them that are without (the general public), all these things are done in parables.’ Mark 4:11.
***
Reincarnation had obviously exercised greater minds than mine down the centuries.
§ Other fans of reincarnation include (all dates approximate):
Pythagoras (Greek philosopher and mathematician, c.582-c.500 BCE)
Socrates (Greek philosopher, 469-399 BCE)
Plato (Greek philosopher, 427-347 BCE) ‘I am confident that there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead.’ (Attributed to Socrates.)
Plotinus (Greek philosopher, founder of Neoplatonism, 204-270)
Giordano Bruno (Italian philosopher, 1548-1600) ‘The soul is not the body and it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.’
François Voltaire (French philosopher, 1694-1778)
Benjamin Franklin (US statesman, philosopher and inventor, 1706-1790)
John Adams (Second president of the United States, 1735-1826)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German scientist, poet and dramatist, 1749-1832)
Napoleon Bonaparte (French Emperor, (1769-1821) repeatedly told his generals that he was Charlemagne reincarnated.
William Wordsworth (English poet, 1770-1850)
Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher, 1788-1860) ‘Europe is that part of the world which is haunted by the incredible delusion that man was created out of nothing, and that his present birth is his first entrance into life.’
Honoré de Balzac (French writer, 1799-1850) ‘All human beings go through a previous life…’
Ralph Waldo Emerson (US philosopher and writer, 1803-1882) ‘The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew… it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.’
Robert Browning (English poet, 1812-1889)
Richard Wagner (German composer, 1813-1883) ‘In contrast to reincarnation and karma, all other views seem petty and narrow.’
Henry David Thoreau (US social critic, writer and philosopher, 1817-1862)
Walt Whitman (US poet, 1819-1892) ‘I know I am deathless…We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, / There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them.’
Leo Tolstoy (Russian novelist and social critic, 1828-1910)
Mark Twain (US writer, 1835-1910)o
Houdini… (where’s he gone??)
Friedrich Nietzsche (German philosopher 1844-1900)
Gustav Mahler (Austrian composer, 1860-1911)
Rudolf Steiner (Austrian philosopher, 1861-1925)
David Lloyd George (British Prime Minister 1863-1945) ‘The conventional heaven …. made me an atheist for ten years. My opinion is that we shall be reincarnated.’
Henry Ford (US automobile pioneer, 1863-1947) ‘Genius is the fruit of long experience in many lives.’
Rudyard Kipling (English writer, 1865-1936)
W. Somerset Maugham (English writer, 1874-1965)
Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, 1875-1961) ‘I can well imagine… that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me.’
Sir Hugh Dowding (British Air Marshal during the Battle of Britain, 1882-1970)
George S. Patton (US general, 1885-1945)
Robert Graves (English poet, 1895-1985)
This list proves nothing of course, as one could easily produce a list fifty times longer of famous people who think reincarnation is baloney.
But the list does show that people who are well thought of for their creative intellectual (and other) achievements, and who are thus not idiots, have been convinced enough to speak up, braving the ridicule of the currently accepted wisdom.
The list fifty times longer, suggested above, would include most Scientists, although probably not the ‘99.9%’, as that Scientist on the radio had claimed.
Voltaire, the supporter of French rationalism and anti-popery while the French Revolution was looming said: ‘It is no more surprising to be born twice than to be born once’. A cursory glance at the millions of closely interlocked designs and processes that go into the production of an embryo must surely give pause for thought.
§ For example: an embryo creates an average of 250,000 brain cells every minute during its 40 week gestation. Spontaneous accident?
Add to that the astonishing difference between a still-born and a live baby, which will both share those designs and the results of those processes, and maybe even (near) identical DNA, but nothing could be more different than a live baby and a dead one, despite what my old biology teacher might say. Something else that was a surprise was a quote from TH Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, famous for his relentless defence of the Theory of Evolution:
‘I am certain that I have been here as I am now a thousand times before, and I hope to return a thousand times.’
Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
First Darwin not being an atheist; now his bulldog believing in reincarnation. I now felt even more (unwittingly) deceived by my Materialist education and the constant thunderings of Big Science. I could sense something waiting just round the corner.
§ ‘For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, everexisting, and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.’ Bhagavad Gita 2.20
I once read that Mahatma Gandhi called himself a Hindu, a Muslim and a Christian. Now I understood.
Idealism requires Mind, or other non-physical powers of some sort to lie behind the physical universe. What could I now find out about Mind?
***
§ Meanwhile, another trawl of the Koran and the New Testament came up with a couple of quotes that seem to be consistent with the Law of Karma:
‘Good deeds annul evil deeds. This is a reminder for the mindful’ (Koran 11.114).
‘Give and it will be given to you… for the measure you give will be the measure you get back’ (Luke 6:38). 88
Another way of looking at the Exo-Eso split is to consider it thus: that Materialists treat us as others see us: externally as a physical entity, while Idealists see us internally as what we know we truly are: conscious entities whose being is one of personal experience and understanding.
Dreams and Hypnosis
I had a dream which was not all a dream
Byron
I was now faced with three interlocking notions:
1. That the universe is very much stranger than I had been educated to think.
2. That Mind (and/or other non-physical forces) lies behind it all.
3. And that a rational explanation of (at least some of ) it was possible.
‘If you think the ideas and info in this book are worthwhile, please tell your friends. Thankyou. Enjoy your day.’