My Relationship to Reincarnation

​Many of the world’s religions and a number of indigenous peoples have a belief in reincarnation. Mainstream Judaism, Christianity, and Islam do not. In fact, per the extensive article on the subject in Wikipedia, “The Catechism of the Catholic Church completely rejects any doctrine of reincarnation.” Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), an Italian philosopher and poet, was found guilty of heresy and burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition for his belief in and dissemination of writings in support of the concept. By contrast, the Yoruba religion of Africa teaches that the divine Creator established reincarnation to bring about the “Good Condition” (Ipo Rere), or a balance between heaven and earth (Wikipedia). And a Pew 2009 survey found that at that time 22% of American Christians believed in reincarnation, while in a 1981 survey a startling 31% of regular churchgoing European Catholics did as well (Wikipedia).

Growing up as a secular Jew I did not know about the concept, which I must have first heard of in high school. As a 21-year-old, however, I was initiated into an Indonesian mystical exercise, a kind of Sufi pentecostalism, called Subud. (Full disclosure requires me to state that nearly 64 years later, I am still an active, satisfied practitioner.) In my initial exercise, called “The Opening,” I experienced being a 16-year-old German Jew who was being lined up with many others in a forest where we had just dug a long trench. We were all standing in front of that trench. A number of SS members walked along behind us. One pointed a pistol toward the back left side of my head. “Nein! Nein! Warum? (”No! No! Why?), I exclaimed. Then I was dead. In actuality, I fell down onto the carpeted floor and lay on my back for perhaps ten minutes. I had never felt so relaxed. Then an authoritative voice in my head said, “You have to go back down there.” “No,” I replied. “I want to stay here where it’s so peaceful.” “I’m afraid you have no choice,” the voice replied. Immediately I found myself descending through the clouds like the Angel-in-Training Clarence in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Soon I saw Manhattan Island, where I was (re-)born on November 6, 1939. At this point in the sequence I felt very happy, got up, and started dancing around the large, empty room on the 11th floor of a downtown Chicago office building where a dozen or more other male Subud members were each doing their own thing.

​Many years later I was a summer faculty member at a Lutheran Retreat Camp, Holden Village, above Lake Wenatchee in Washington State. For entertainment one evening, a Lutheran pastor from the Seattle area gave us a demonstration of hypnotic regression. Apparently, he used this technique to treat individuals suffering from PTSD. I volunteered to be regressed. Again I experienced my death by pistol shot in the Holocaust and my reincarnation into my present life.

All of this, to be sure, does not prove the reality of reincarnation. But if we truly have a loving Creator, one shot [!] at human life and you’re done regardless of outcome seems both wasteful and out of character for that kind of deity. As an educator, I have always believed in the fairness of retests, so-called Mastery Learning. But what, dear reader, do you think?

With thanks to Stock Images and its collection of images on this subject.