Reincarnation

The recycling mechanism of life itself

by Patrick Quanten MD

The concept of reincarnation is part of all major cultures, including the early Christian church. But later on it was decided to write it out of the bible as part of the drive to gain control over people’s lives. In other cultures, people are threatened by reincarnation in so far that ‘if they don’t behave and do as they are told, they may return as a lower form of life’. The various interpretations about reincarnation and how the concept must be seen in reality always reflects the needs of the cultural powers. Going back to ancient knowledge, can we truly begin to create more clarity in what has become a cloudy pool of discussions and disagreements?

Since virtually all societies have a belief in some form of reincarnation it is safe to say that humans ‘know’ that reincarnation is a fact of life. For those of you who still are doubtful about that I would encourage you to study the major religions on this point and to listen to what shamans and traditional medicine men have to say. It will soon dawn on you that all people that talk with knowledge on the subject have a formula to explain how life keeps on progressing.

Once we have accepted that life carries on from one into another, the big question is what it is that passes on into the next life. It seems obvious that it is not the body. Again, all major belief systems seem to agree that the body is mortal, dies at some point and disappears. It will never return. However, there is the concept of the soul, which is said to be immortal.

All living creatures have a soul, so they say. We are gifted a non-physical part of our Self, called the soul, that is immortal and remains intact after death. Many religions believe that it is this soul that reincarnates and can start a new life. The soul is described as something personal, something that defines the person you are, without being dependent upon materials to express itself. It is, however, the non-physical, the energetic, part of the individual person. It belongs to the individual and is in no way part of another person. In other words, it is an energetic part of an individual that is completely separate from the energetic part of other individuals.

This causes problems in so far that energy has no beginning or end. It has no ‘separate’ parts that are clearly defined. Energy flows and changes from one form into another in a gradual way and it is impossible to draw a line through an energy field demarking separate areas. So, the energetic part of a living creature, including humans, cannot be separated from the energetic part of other humans. The ‘separation’ only occurs on the physical plane, i.e. when the body is formed. This means that if we attach the soul of the person to the person directly, it will have to stay with the separated part of that human being, and that is the body. This would mean that if the soul does not die with the body, it would remain in the same unaltered state it is in at the time of death. In other words, we are here talking about an energetic part of a living creature that we believe never alters after the death of its physical existence. Energy that never changes doesn’t exist anywhere in this universe. It is impossible. So, that kind of soul does not exist; a soul that solely belongs to a physical structure cannot exist.

Buddha, who teaches that we are stuck in samsara – a cycle of birth, death and rebirth -, includes as one of three main principles the concept of non-self. Here he emphasises the fact that no life is separate from any other life; that no human being exists in a separate way from other humans. Only the body is separate, but the mind, the energetic part of the human being, is connected and intermingles with other parts of the human energy field. Information is exchanged all the time, as modern science now has proven, and this information cannot be divided up into this is mine and that is yours. It is all there, and it belongs to all of the human field. And yet, he also teaches that by doing the ‘right’ things the individual can collect good karma, which will advance him/her on the path towards nirvana, the liberation of desire which in turn liberates humans from suffering.

Karma simply states that for every action, word and though we have there will be an effect. This effect may become obvious in a short or very long period, from immediate to many hundreds or thousands of years later. The concept of good or bad is not inherent in karma as such, only that there is an effect. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ indicates a direction in which this effect goes and a point of view from which to observe the effect. When Buddha talks about ‘good’ karma, he refers to the achievement of positive effects in the sense that the effects will enhance your experience of life and puts you on the road to eventually lift you out of the cycle of birth and death. The ultimate purpose of life itself is to break out of the samsara cycle, whereby a person no longer has a need for further human experiences in this material form. To achieve this and to guide people on their way Buddha teaches some simple principles (like our own Ten Commandments) to follow that will help you to do ‘the right thing’.

But if the individual has a need to collect good karma so that the next rebirth he/she will benefit from the learned experience and find him/herself a step closer to nirvana, how can that good karma be passed on to the individual’s next life other than through the soul, the individually attached non-physical part of the person? And how does this fit together with the knowledge that there is no separate self?

Through our physical presence and interaction with the outside world we collect experiences or information. Although we experience everything in a physical way, the actual lesson behind that experience is energetic, is in fact information (a term used by the New Physicists as well). When the body expires, the information, the non-physical, part of that life remains in the energetic human field. As it is energy it disperses throughout the energy field and the information is past on to its own energetic environment. This is the homeopathic principle of passing on of the information the water is carrying to the next water molecules it comes in contact with. Now the information that this one single life has collected is being passed on and spread around in its environment. This means that there is a larger part of the human energy field that ‘knows’ what this individual life has learned. This knowledge is past on to the field. When at a later date another physical life will appear out of this part of the human field it will bring with it part of the knowledge it has gained from previous lives. Only it isn’t knowledge from one specific life, and it will never be the entire knowledge and nothing else, as the energies have also evolved from the time that individual life’s knowledge was taken on board. So indeed, the kind of stuff the individual learns and experiences is passed on and used again, somewhere else in a different life all together, but in the interim period the information of that individual life is also enriched with the knowledge brought in by other lives. It is in this way that the whole of the human energy field evolves by gained knowledge, which it collects from individual passages through the physical part of existence.

We can visualise this process by looking at the ocean as the representation of the human energy field. Within this field the individual water drop represents one single human physical life. When you look at the ocean itself it is impossible to distinguish the individual water droplets that make up the complete ocean. We know they must be there, but in the whole they are undistinguishable. There is no individuality. That only occurs when a droplet jumps out, either on the edge of the field or as a result of forces within the field that creates places of tension, which results in waves that under certain conditions break and allow water droplets to jump out into the air. This individual drop has an independent life, for a short period, before it falls back into the ocean and disappears once again, losing its identity immediately. During its individual journey it gathers information. For instance, a water droplet that sails through the air may enrich itself with oxygen. It takes this oxygen back into the ocean with it and ‘delivers’ the information of oxygen to the rest of the field.

We can visualise how this exchange takes place by using a few drops of coloured water. As we release these gently into the ocean, we can see the colour disperse slowly, first to the immediate environment in which we have released the colour and then gradually to the wider environment. The colour fades away and the further we go away from the initiation site the less colour we encounter, the vaguer the information becomes. So, the information that an individual life brings to the human field has the strongest value close to where the droplet, the life, has occurred. This explains why people in different parts of the world interpret the information they receive from other lives regarding pain, trust, happiness, fear, etc, all experiences common to the human life, very differently. This results in separation of groups of people with different ‘truths’. The water droplets in New York will have specific information that relates to the local situation and which makes them have different experiences of the truth than the droplets in Scarborough or Istanbul. All water, all human life, but very different, even though the manner in which that human life arise as well as the purpose of the life is the same everywhere.

Each human life is an incarnation of information with the intention of experiencing this information and making it real through the physical presence in a physical life. In this way we make what is unconscious conscious and take that conscious information then back to the field. Here all those experiences are shared in order to increase the consciousness level of the whole human race. It is a part of evolution. Reincarnation is about the information that incarnates again. That is as seen from a high advantage point.

What if you need to explain incarnation to the simple people of your community who have no inkling about how big the universe is and what may or may not be behind it? You will have to try and explain it in terms that their every day lives can connect with. So, you will have to make things personal, as that is how they experience life for real. They do not experience the human energy field, they experience the separation of human life into individuals. Hence, you could use the explanation of the individual soul who has to collect ‘good’ karma on the way, because this will be paid back (law of action and following effect) to you and give you a better life next time around. ‘Better’ refers in this context to a life that will bring you closer to nirvana. At this point you won’t have to tell them that they will suffer just as much next time as they are doing now, because there is only one way to escape that and that is through breaking out of the cycle of birth and death. In order to do this, eventually, they will have to follow this path anyway.

This means that the introduction of the individual soul is done to help to explain things in ‘real’, in physical terms, rather than the non-entity terms of the reality of life itself. Confusing as this now may be, it has served a very real purpose for a very long time, but now that human beings are becoming more and more familiar with the energetic part of life we can start to clear up the confusion and throw out old and outdated models.

This way we can see reincarnation for what it is and how it works.

October 2008