Why Transcendentalists embraced reincarnation

“Emerson viewed our true larger life as a kind of forward-moving yet also spiral drama in which one life follows another, each to some degree imitating the shape and trajectory of the one that came before yet also introducing new material. And this, of course, meant that Emerson accepted an extremely personal and individual version of the concept of repeated earth lives. For if the soul is really and truly to grow over time, if it is on a genuine journey through the temporal and physical dimensions, then in order for that journey to lead somewhere really valuable, not only must the same individual soul keep on returning, time and again, but it must bring with it all the accumulated memories of what happened to it in lives past, even if while on earth, they typically remaining unavailable to the conscious portion of the mind, appearing only in otherwise inexplicable likes and dislikes, and various and sundry other quirks of character.

“The difference here from most Eastern versions of reincarnation is that with the Eastern models, it is the ethical residue of a life that lasts from one life to the next. That is, if you did something bad in one life, then you’ll have to pay for it in the next. This is a hugely important insight, of course, for the idea that the universe actually possesses an ethical component that is as real as the energy patterns of which it is made up is perhaps the central insight of all Eastern philosophy. Not only that, but the thinkers of the East didn’t just hypothesize this fact: through intensive meditative techniques, they experienced it as a living reality. If the first and greatest shock that an individual experiences at death is that they are ‘still here’—still themselves—the second, more gradually dawning shock is that the universe is a place where good and bad exist as more than simple cultural designations but actual metaphysical categories; in other worlds, that the goodness of badness of an action is as real as an atom collision.

“But this insight tended, in the Eastern visions of the reincarnation drama, to remain focused purely on the ethical side of things. Still, if the universe is capable of retaining and remembering our every thought and action, this also might mean that the more personal aspects of our existence can survive, too. The atmosphere of a certain summer afternoon, the particular words of a particular person, spoken on a particular day, when a particular tree was moving in just a certain way outside a half-open window, the pain on which was ever so slightly chipped . . . in this vision of the reincarnation drama, this stuff survives as well. The kind of things that, in our day, are included in poems and novels and treated there usually as magical but tragically singular ephemera: the glimmering bits that float on the surface of a universe that, seemingly for no real reason, gives birth to them for a moment and then gobbles them up forever. All these tiny, complex, and hugely mysterious details of an individual personal life, lived once and once only . . . In this new vision, this is all saved, too. Human meaning, in this view, isn’t just a distraction to reentry into the divine, or sunyata, or whatever one might choose to call it, but in large part the reason for the journey. We are born, and born again, not because we are stuck in a pointless circular honey pit of fear and desire, but because each of us is a complex being, growing and changing not in spite of but precisely by means of the very real individual experiences that happen to us. This doesn’t change the key Eastern idea that the universe is a moral place, but it adds something crucial to it: something that changes the reincarnation process from a trap and a machine of despair into a process productive of, rather than antithetical to, true human meaning.

 

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 135-36.