Reincarnation: An Incoherent Doctrine?

David Begelman

The term “reincarnation” often summons up images of exotic mind-sets and religions suffused with alien notions. Not always. Ever since the turbulent decades of the sixties, many Americans have looked to an Eastern heritage they find beneficial, consciousness-raising. The doctrine of reincarnation, like other imports, now attracts a population far removed from being chanters with shaved heads and saffron robes. And the list of embracers of the doctrine in yesteryear is endless: Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon, Tolstoy, Henry Ford, General George S. Patton, and numerous others. Even Hollywood celebrities have cottoned on to the doctrine. Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise and John Travolta are enthusiasts, as was the deceased Peter Sellars. Shirley MacLaine has authored best sellers touting the doctrine and reproaching those Doubting Thomases amongst us who pooh-pooh it as the intellectual rubbish of the gullible. At one point, she was convinced that in a past life she was a jester who was beheaded by King Louis XV for impertinent remarks.

As it turns out, King Louis of France was fonder of debauchery than he was of cruelty. He was even prepared to forgive a would-be assassin, Robert François Damiens, for stabbing him between the ribs with a knife. There is no historical evidence for the potentate beheading anyone—a minor detail lost in the shuffle of enthusiasm for a doctrine that seemingly provides relief from a purely materialistic ethos or philosophies in which matters mental or spiritual are irretrievably wedded to as prosaic a medium as brain tissue.

Despite the attraction reincarnation has for some, the very notion of having lived a previous life is a derivative one. The possibility we existed before is but one strand in a much wider mosaic called the problem of personal identity. Philosophers from David Hume (1969) to Robert Nozick (1981) grappled with the issue and came away chastened by its complexities. Voltaire observed that it is no more awesome to be born twice than it is to be born once. If the self can have multiple identities, forms, or representations, as in reincarnation, what makes us the singular persons we are at the outset, even before a point of identity exchange, or before the idea of a self passing from one individual to another taxes our imagination?

A number of published works about reincarnation in recent decades have stirred up fresh controversy over the doctrine. Their point of departure has been the ground-breaking studies of Dr. Ian Stevenson, of the University of Virginia (Stevenson, 1975, 1977, 1980, 1983). This investigator believed a good case for the doctrine can be made based upon alleged memories of thousands of children whose statements concerning previous lives were purportedly independently verified. The philosopher Paul Edwards in his tome, “Reincarnation: A Critical Examination,” (2002) has disputed Stevenson’s claims on the basis of what he considered to be the shoddy empirical support the latter mustered for the doctrine. Others, more sympathetic to Stevenson’s approach, found Edwards’ analysis a less than searching—if somewhat intemperate—critique that foundered on the very empiricist principles the philosopher purported to honor (Almeder, 1997; Matlock, 1997). In their opinion, Stevenson’s research is more empirically grounded than Edwards grants.

The controversy swirling around the doctrine is more often than not put forth as a disagreement over the empirical support for the doctrine. In this respect, constituencies on opposing sides of the issue would appear to run different epistemic risks. Parapsychologists conceivably falter on the sometime deficiency of the evidence marshaled for the doctrine, while the case for skepticism would be weakened by instances in which the evidence is stronger than the doubters suppose. Should the confirmation of either stance await arbitration by data that clinch the issue, both may be likened to empirical works in progress. There is, however, another possibility: mischaracterizing the real nature of the problem.

In Alexandre Dumas’s novel, “The Corsican Brothers” two brothers, Lucien and Louis deFranchi, were originally Siamese twins separated at birth. One of the twins informs a guest, "…however greatly we are separated, we have one and the same body, as we had at our birth. When anything happens to one of us, be it physical or mental, it at once affects the other." Of course, the Dumas novel involved anachronisms. While history records the anomaly of conjoined twins occurring as early as 1100 C. E., the first successful surgical separation documented was in 1953, over a century after the novel was authored in 1845. Similarly, there is probably no documented case of separated conjoint twins who experienced each other’s feelings, memories, or presentiments after being surgically separated. (It might be up for philosophical grabs whether sensations in a common liver compromised by cirrhosis before surgery meant that each twin was feeling the same pain, much less whether they felt each other’s pain.)

The fictional case of the deFranchi twins is intriguing from yet another standpoint. We might describe it as a paranormal case of two people sharing each other’s feelings, memories and thoughts. Indeed, one might argue that there is no known naturalistic explanation of the deFranchi phenomenon—were it true. That it is a fictional case invented by a French novelist is consistent with the skeptical outlook holding that instances reportedly resembling it in any way should be relegated to the dustbin of imaginary psi-capabilities like telepathy, clairvoyance, or E.S.P. As I understand it, the skeptical position about even these latter abilities is that empirical evidence for them has been paltry, due to myriad factors. One has been the failure to reliably replicate findings when such abilities are examined under controlled conditions in numerous case studies and experiments. Another is the all too frequent record of fraud perpetrated on observers. For a defense of parapsychology, see Utts (1991) and Braude (2002).

What if something like a deFranchi phenomenon were investigated, and found to be authentic? That is, under a rigorous a set of experimental conditions some of the feelings, thoughts, and even sensations of one twin matched, echoed, or were a precise duplicate of those of a separated twin examined in another geographical area. What would the conclusion be?

The surprise is not what skeptics and parapsychologists would say, but, ironically, what they wouldn’t say. They wouldn’t conclude the twins are each other. Why not? The question should be posed because ordinarily certain facts constitute a possible case for reincarnation when one person is dead and another living, but apparently not when two persons are contemporaries. In the latter case, the same data become presumptive evidence for a paranormal ability like ESP or telepathy. Accordingly, there is a disconnect between dead/living persons confirming reincarnation and living/living persons only supporting a psi ability like telepathy. Do the differing implications of both categories of cases incur a charge of philosophical double-standards? If the claim that I was someone else in a previous life is an intelligible one, it should likewise make sense to say I am someone else who is my contemporary for similar reasons. Conversely, if it makes no sense to say I am another living person on the basis of certain phenomena, it hardly makes sense to say that I was a deceased one for analogous reasons. Thereby, said the kangaroo sitting on the edge of a precipice, hangs a tale.

A similar, albeit different kind of challenge to our theories about individuation is provided in the case of Krista and Tatiana Hogan, a pair of twins who are a case of craniopagus, or being joined at the head. Their neurosurgeon, Dr. Douglas Cochrane of the British Columbia’s Children’s Hospital, has determined that the girls share a common thalamus, or “thalamic bridge.” The condition has been described by other experts in the field as “unprecedented,” “ridiculously compelling,” “mind-blowing,” and a “new life form.” The twins share each other’s sensations. When one of the four year olds uses a pacifier, the other twin is soothed; when one twin is pricked with a pin, the other feels the pain. Neurologists marvel at the anomaly, yet none among their ranks has ventured the conjecture that the twins may be each other, although they are not above considering that they may be sharing one mind.

To summarize: if and when we experience another living person’s thoughts, feelings, perceptions or sensations, the parapsychologist opts for designating them cases of ESP or telepathy, not incarnation. In other words, when I experience something you are likewise feeling, the occult wisdom is that I am sensing or receiving something from you, not that I am you. The logic is a stunning piece of intellectual legerdemain contrived to avoid the dizzying prospect of having to become saddled with sharing identities with extant others. Thus, a “memory” of a past life inevitably confirms reincarnation, yet similar intimations in relation to living others (if and when they occur) only suggest the operation of paranormal broadcasting and receiving systems.

The problem gets more complicated. First, in reincarnation what distinguishes a  “memory” of myself in a former life from a merely batch of factual information about a deceased person recovered in an admittedly mysterious way? What gives the information the property of personal ownership, entitling me to call it a “memory” of mine? In other words, one approach to the paranormal phenomenon to be explicated may only be why someone comes to possess information about a deceased Egyptian pharaoh, a far cry from his being that personage.

Second, we have referred to hypothetical cases in which two contemporaries are discovered to share feelings and sensations, and have posed the question, “Why not a case of contemporary incarnations (CI), rather than homespun ESP or other forms of psi phenomena representing paranormal messages between senders and receivers?” If CI were true, it would be this on the basis of data likewise confirming reincarnation (RI) when one of the individuals was deceased. Going on, it is also necessary to distinguish between a paranormal doctrine and the evidence relied on to confirm it. Any theory can be distinguished from its evidential basis. Relativity Theory was true before the data gleaned during a solar eclipse confirmed it. Accordingly, are we entitled to say that CI might be true without the necessary data to confirm this?

Let’s cut to the chase. Could I be you without being able prove this surmise? Could we all be each other? Or are we from the outset playing havoc with the deployment of pronouns like I and You? The comedian Jackie Mason used the paradox to comic advantage in one of his routines. He relates an anecdote of consulting with a psychiatrist who informed him that he had to find his “true self.” The fee for the visit was $50. Jackie remonstrated, “What if you were my true self and you owe me $50. Let’s call it even.”              

ESP and telepathy, it turns out, are more than unusual talents; they are also each a deus ex machina of doctrinal spin. They relieve us of the necessity of distributing our identities in the here and now, relegating the phenomena in question to categories of receiving “messages” from others who are our contemporaries. Thus, the uncomfortable prospect of sharing identities with the living is preempted, because when phenomena appear to be—or at least qualify for—cases of contemporaneous incarnations, we’ll chalk them up to ESP or some other familiar psi ability between senders and receivers!

When it comes to selfhood, curious and contradictory adjustments of doctrine betray the proprietary feelings we harbor about having to piece ourselves out. Identity exchange in reincarnation, even across hundreds or thousands of years, may be mysterious; it nonetheless seems to be a safe bet compared to the troubling notion of a current double self. After all, in RI one of the entities is, to be sure, quite dead. The same economy of doctrine is captured in connection with that controversial psychiatric anomaly, multiple personality. We prefer to imagine the disorder to be a case of one “self” with several facets or aspects, not several “others” or “persons” earmarked for being housed simultaneously in one body. We feel Eve or Sybil has several faces or “alters” because she is at bottom conflicted or ambivalent, not because she has actually subdivided in the manner of an overripe paramecium. As if to drum home the point, a subcommittee of the American Psychiatric Association has elected to rename the disorder “Dissociative Identity Disorder,” lest the misinformed read too much into the older diagnostic designation. Of course, the same committee provides no reasons why the misinterpretation implicitly suggested by the notion of “Multiple Personality Disorder” is the wrong one. If the disorder cannot be said to qualify for the mantle of “multiple contemporaneous incarnations” or CI, what currently documented data-base would?

So reincarnationists want to have their cake and eat it too. Under their doctrine, souls—or at least many of them—never perish since they are always passed on to new bodies that house them; and they are never split or fragmented in the present because when they seem to be, we’ll chalk up a case of ESP, telepathy, or Dissociative Identity Disorder. The double standard, needless to say, is not without risk, for consider how it all may backfire on an even paranormal playing field. (The reader should assume that the tone of the following remarks is ironic.)

Suppose the dead pharaoh whose “memories” I have was not me in a past life, but only a sender to me of a telepathic thing beamed into the future, whereas my true incarnation is not deceased, but a living person with whom I share some experiences. What a cosmic pickle! I have forfeited the immortality I had banked on in being  reincarnated, and have to settle for the demeaning plight of being split and redistributed in the here and now by sharing my identity with a contemporary other.

Reincarnation as a doctrine comes in many forms. As conceived in Eastern religions, it has another subtext, sometimes called “Karma.” Here, multiple incarnations are not without an ultimate raison d’etre. Identities supposedly move toward higher or lower levels of existence or enlightenment, until the process ends. (Even a thinker as inveterately downbeat as Nietzsche viewed the notion of “eternal recurrence” as attractive.) Each sequentially reincarnated soul represents a way of resolving the “drawbacks” or “incompleteness” of the previous one. Some sort of unraveling through ascent or descent on a spiritual journey is implied in certain forms of the doctrine. A past life accordingly teaches a moral lesson about the spiritual game plan for this one. But what?

I learn through a guru that I was a sheep in a previous incarnation. What does this tell me about the game-plan for this one? Am I to be less sheepish, more assertive, bold, or enterprising in this life? Am I to be more humble, or cowed like a lamb? Should I be another kind of “shepherd,” and become a spiritual leader, general, corporation head? Should I become a real shepherd tending flocks? Of what, cows, sheep, ponies, parishioners? Should I campaign against Australians on account of their inordinate mutton consumption? There are countless “directions” suggested by a past incarnation, but precious little in the way of rules for interpreting its significance for the present life’s game plan. Gurus may wax eloquent about lessons to be extracted from the character of a past life; but they are notoriously short on understanding the complexities involved in delivering them. But then again, humility was never a strong card among the spiritually elect.

Reincarnation as a doctrine can play yet another role in our lives: it permits us to pass the buck. Shirley MacLaine (1983) writes about her romantic liaison with a married man—a harried, insensitive type who fails to meet her emotional needs. Unable (or unwilling) to terminate her relationship with him, the actress asks him to consider the possibility they were lovers in a previous life. The surmise is revealing. Rather than confront the drawbacks of the relationship squarely, the actress preferred to fetch around for a metaphysical alibi to rationalize her inaction. After all, if one harbored underlying misgivings about a liaison, but for some reason was unable to sever it, wouldn’t reincarnation confer upon it a certain stamp of inevitability? It’s difficult to envision how being lovers a second time around dramatizes the need to end the match at the earliest opportunity! If the spiritual whatchamacallit has the thing recycled, who are we to resist the divine repatterning?

 Reincarnation is certainly intriguing from the standpoint of what belief in it teaches us about ourselves. Even our self-deceits are endearing, because no doctrine, religious or otherwise, is as beautiful as we are—nor as slippery.

References.

Almeder, R. 1997. A critique of arguments offered against reincarnation. Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 2, No. 4, 499-526. 

Braude, S. E. 2002. ESP and Psychokinesis: A Philosophical Examination, Revised Edition. Parkland, Florida: Brown Walker Press. 

Edwards, P. 2002. Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Press. 

Hume, D. 1969. A Treatise of Human Nature. England: Penguin.

MacLaine, S. 1983. Out on A Limb. New York: Bantam Books.

Matlock, J. G. 1997. Review of Reincarnation: A Critical Examination by Paul Edwards. Journal of Scientific Exploration, Volume 2, No. 4, 570-573. 

Nozick, R. 1981. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 

Stevenson, I. 1975. Cases of the Reincarnation Type (Volume I). Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia.

__________. 1977. Cases of the Reincarnation Type (Volume II). Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia.

__________. 1980. Cases of the Reincarnation Type (Volume III). Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia.

__________. 1983. Cases of the Reincarnation Type (Volume IV). Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia.

Utts, J. (1991). Replication and Meta-Analysis in Parapsychology, Statistical Science, Vol. 6, No. 4, 363-403.