Not All Can Fit Under The Warm Blanket of Reincarnation

Do you believe in life after love? Cher, forever the queen of pop music and autotune, certainly does as she taught millions of young people, little girls with their Barbie dolls and drag queens in masks of makeup alike, to believe that life goes on after the loss of a loving relationship. But do you believe in life after life? I certainly don't. Show me positivist, tested, double-blind data with rich internal and external validity with an alpha coefficient of p < .05 -- then we'll wax over death.

Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, certainly believes in that distortion of that time-old lyric. Rinpoche proposes that death, undoubtedly, is not the end of life. They propose that death is simply a middle-ground in which a person shifts into another life, a reincarnation of the ethereal soul into a new physical body. Thus, they do not opine that death is something to fear, which is in stark contrast with Erika Hayasaki's assertion in her Atlantic article Death is Having a Moment in which she shows that the Western world, no matter how sanitized death may be, that death is still something to fear -- that there is no life after life, that no religion followed largely in the West teaches, save for a heaven that the deceased call their forever home.

As a flower grows from seed to sprout, it learns to face the sun and drink in the waves of nutritious rays it readily provides. The petals, multicolored and delicate, sway with the wind until nightfall as they close, turning into a cocoon in which the flower hides from the moon, waiting until that bright new day of dawn. The flower does not fear its nightly death, yet it protects itself -- a metaphor of the mixture of the Tibetan and American schools of thought. However, we are not flowers: we are human beings that, evolutionarily, have adapted to view death with negativity, with a sense of morbidity that Hayasaki so eloquently echoes the words of Ernest Becker, a cultural anthropologist:

"... fear of our own mortality [is] the fundamental motivator behind all human behavior."

No matter how many metaphors are created by my ten digits that click-clack on my keyboard, somewhat unkempt with fingerprint after fingerprint on every key, I cannot support the Tibetan idea that life is a series of reincarnation. I see this as a defense of the inevitability of death, as fear masked as confidence and blind faith that there is hope in tomorrow. Yes, the sun will rise and dawn will come and flowers will no longer cover themselves in the shield of a pseudo-death, but the idea that a phoenix will burn and come back to life from its ashes is simply preposterous without evidence. Call me anti-spiritual, call me a skeptic -- I would rather be skeptic than blinded by rose-tinted glasses. Moreover, I'm not the only person to doubt reincarnation, as Yemisi Illesanmi so poignantly states:

"So, let’s talk about Karma, Reincarnation and Destiny.

• Are you blaming Karma for the calamities in your life?

• Do you wish you had known about Karma so that you could have averted the calamities?

• Do you believe the Karma you accumulated in your previous life is why your life is a mess?

So tell me,

• Was it bad Karma that got 3 million Jews gassed?

• Is bad Karma responsible for the death of millions of African children from preventable diseases?

• Is Karma the reason many African children go to bed hungry or starve to death?

• Do you seriously think accumulated bad Karma is why a gay person is born into a homophobic society?"

Her assertions got me thinking: how can we, as a society moving toward the lack of religion into a culture of empiricism, truly put faith into something so beyond comprehension, so beyond test-retest reliability, that reincarnation is nothing but a lovely myth? It would be so comforting to know that death is only a new beginning, that death is nothing to fear -- but until we know for sure, we might as well listen to Benjamin Franklin, who so popularly stated "In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, but death and taxes."