A Very Brief A Priori Demonstration of the Immortality of the Soul and of Reincarnation
by Eric S. Fallick
An understanding of the immortality of the soul or self and reincarnation1 is among the very most basic elements of a genuine spiritual life. Although a basic feature of the weltanschauung of the Indo-hellenistic systems and those at least in part derived from them,2 and despite their being, in fact, obvious, these concepts do not seem to be acceptable to many moderns today. There are, perhaps, two reasons for this that readily suggest themselves. The first is the dominance of the Abrahamic systems and their belief structures, as well as the influence of these on Western thinkers, even if such influence is not recognized or acknowledged.3 The second is, in these dark times, the dominance of realism, positivism, reductionism, materialism, etc. Although materialism is, in fact, extremely implausible (for one thing, it denies the existence of the very entity constructing the theory!) and certainly requires as much if not more justification than any other theory of reality, it seems to be considered by its adherents today as self-evident and not requiring explanation. Further, the general “intelligentsia” who do not actually think philosophically or examine their assumptions accept this position simply because it is the outlook of the age. The present discussion will, for brevity, assume an idealist position as understood. The reader who requires a refutation of materialism and an establishment of the idealist understanding may be referred to various works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (when some people could still think) for this purpose.4
The idealistic premise or axiom that will, for purposes of this demonstration, be taken as granted is as follows. There are and can be no objects without subjects and no subjects without objects. The self or center of experience and its object-world are both aspects of a single reality of knowledge or experience. They are logically distinguishable, but cannot and do not occur separately, independently and in isolation. It is not meaningful to speak or think of an object or event existing without any subject to experience it.
This premise being granted, the conclusion of immortality of the soul follows simply: For the object or event of death to occur there must be a subject or self or mind or center of experience to experience it (we are here talking about an individual's actual experience of death, not an external observer merely having the sense experience of observing the destruction of an external body). For an object or event to be experienced, it must be experienced in its entirety, through its beginning, middle and end; otherwise it is not the object or event that is experienced, but another, different object or event partial with respect to the first one. In other words, the subject must be present and existent on both sides, so to speak, of the object or event. Thus, for the event of death to occur, for it to be meaningful to speak of an individual experiencing death, the soul or self or mind or center of experience must be present through or around or on both sides of the event and thus must be present or continue after the event of death. Since death by definition is the only event that can constitute the destruction or discontinuance of the soul, and since the soul must continue after death in order to actually experience it, however many times and in whatever intervals it occurs, the soul is immortal.
At this point, it may be objected, particularly by conventional Abrahamists, that while it has been proved that the soul is immortal, the fact of reincarnation has not been demonstrated—there could be only one occurrence of death and the soul may then just continue forever in the state following that. Here, it is necessary to observe that the whole discussion, and the whole matter of death, pertains only to the lowest realm of reality, the level of soul and individual souls or selves in space-time. At the level of the Divine Mind, there is only the one divine mind as the only subject with the real beings as the only object, distinguishable, but not separate to the extent of the realm of soul. There, there is neither time nor space, and only life, not death at all. Further, at the level of the Absolute itself, subject and object are not distinguishable at all, and there is only absolute unitary knowledge beyond even eternity, life, and being. At the level of soul that we are discussing, for individuated souls to exist as such in space-time, they must be associated in some sense with body and matter, not body or matter in a physical sense, but in the sense of experiencing a certain set of changing sense-perceptions with an apparently given means of perception. It is an inherent property of this realm that all things in it, the whole possible object-world of the soul, change and are subject to coming into being, existing for a while, and then decaying and being destroyed. This includes all possible 'body', all possible sets and means of sense-perceptions that a soul could have. (The soul itself is sort of amphibious—the lower soul changing with its objects, the higher soul remaining always unchanging and connected to or part of the higher realms.) Thus, as long as we remain in the realm where it is meaningful to speak of the lives and deaths of individual souls, it is not possible that a given soul could retain a given body or perception set indefinitely. Each body or perception set must eventually cease and other ones must arise, so each individuated soul must experience a series of bodies or perception sets and lives and births and deaths, so reincarnation is a fact. (The details of this process, the rise and fall of souls to higher and lower perception sets, and the means of a given soul escaping from individuation and the whole cycle to 'return' to the higher unified state are beyond the scope of this short demonstration.)
Thus, the immortality of the soul and the fact of reincarnation have been demonstrated. This a priori proof is far more reliable than any sort of attempt to ascertain the facts of such matters through allegedly empirical observation or appeal to revealed texts, which are, after all, just more sense phenomena appearing in the object-world of the soul itself and incapable of determining the structure of the actual overall unity of experience or knowledge that includes the mind or soul and its objects. This demonstration is, at least in substance if not in expression, not at all new, but goes back at least to the divine Plato. It has been stated here in the form of ordinary 'logical' reasoning and may, perhaps, be attacked at that level, but it is really intended as a contemplative experience based proof. Genuine spiritual understanding can only be attained by attempting the conjunction of the individual mind with the Divine Mind through contemplative asceticism. If you don't really know for sure what death is, then you don't, in fact, know what life is!
© 2010 by Eric S. Fallick. All rights reserved. platonicascetic (with) (Gee) mail (period) com
Notes
1 Reincarnation has been selected here as the most common and standard term at present for the process of repeated births and deaths. (Some systems, such as Buddhism, may object to the term and the use of the terms soul, self, etc.) Other terms are rebirth, transmigration, metempsychosis, metensomatosis, and gigul (Hebrew). Perhaps the best terms might be the Greek palingenesis and the Sanskrit punarbhava, both of which mean 'again-becoming'.
2 These include Platonism, Orphism, Pythagoreanism, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Manichaeism, etc.
3 There are notable exceptions. For example, the Jewish mystical systems of Kabbalah and Hasidism (and likely Hellenic Judaism) include reincarnation in some form, as does the philosophical system of J. Ellis McTaggart.
4 Here are just a few examples:
John Caird, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1901
George Plimpton Adams, Idealism and the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919
Viscount Haldane, Human Experience: A Study of Its Structure, NY: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1926
F. H. Cleobury, God, Man and the Absolute, London: Hutchinson & Co., (no date—late 1940's).
