Masked Zebra responds to Pal Gap:
Dear Robin,
> It would have been better for me to just admit that in
> the most profound sense I feel and intuit it is a lie.
That's fine Robin - but our intuitions differ.
RESPONSE: That poses an interesting question: is there any way by which one
could determine the relative validity (i.e. the truth-tracking objectivity) of
one intuition that points one way (no reincarnation) and one intuition that
points the other way (there is reincarnation)? I will make a bold claim here,
Pali Gap, and that is: I hold the idea of reincarnation to be false with a far
greater sense of confidence than you hold to the idea that reincarnation is
true.
Hold it. I am not saying I can prove this. And of course you will maintain,
where two intuitions are in conflict with each other, there is no way of
determining which intuition is deceived, which intuition coincides with reality.
The way I have worked out my own personal philosophy, I hold to the notion that
one's first person subjectivity swamps one's third person perspective whenever
there is some objective (but unknown to the individual) gap between what one
professes to believe (in the defence of that belief at least) and the actual
structure of reality. Therefore, the extent to which you can maintain your
equanimity in the face of my strong disbelief in reincarnation partially at
least goes towards demonstrating the viability of that belief (that
reincarnation is true).
I think I am reduced here, Pal Gap, to just declaring the most profoundest of
*experience* that reincarnation is false. I would even go so far as to say that
It has been *revealed* to me to be falsenot in some Biblical or mystical way;
not at all. But in the force and potency with which the idea of reincarnation
appeared to me to be the result of my susceptibility to intelligences seeking
to deceive me (the intelligences which essentially created my enlightenment).
But you are obviously a thoughtful and deep thinker, and I sense in your reply
here that the chances of ever persuading you against your belief in
reincarnation to be zero.
I think the only way I could ever make any kind of headway in this debate is to
pose the question to myself: Why do you, Robin, disbelieve in the idea of
reincarnation?
Put in that way, I think a context would open up for me whereby I could argue
with something more than my passion or intuition, but could establish a pretty
good case for the probability of there being such a thing a reincarnation being
significantly less than the probability that it is true.
For instance, apart from the temporal problem of simultaneity of individual
existence, according to reincarnation I could be you, you could be me.
This strikes me as manifestly absurd and more than trivializes the significance
of our individual and discrete sense of selfhood. Butapart from the
difficulties of existing as two persons at the same timethere is nothing,
abstracted conceived, which represents a contradiction here. Anyone could be
anyone. There is just no reasonable or meaningful way to decode what
reincarnation means in terms of: who really am I? Who do I know myself to have
been? Why is is that I cannot consciously become aware of over time the
objective and exact reasons why I am having to live in this body, after having
been in that body? Bodies having no resurrectional potential at all; once gone
they rot away into mere atoms.
> From every point of view since I rejected Maharishi and
> all things Eastern I have had the deepest kind of
> repugnance for the idea of reincarnation.
Again our intuitions differ.
RESPONSE: But you see, Pali Gap, having experienced what it is like to know
that reincarnation *is* true (via TM and Maharishi and LSD), I now have had the
experience of knowing (or, if you like, disbelieving) reincarnation to be
false. I can subjectively compare these two experiences in terms of their felt
purchase on reality. And I can tell you, from a first person perspective, as
well as from a third person perspective, there is no comparison, even though I
remember how satisfied and convinced I was that reincarnation *had* to be true.
I have the advantage of having gone from 1 disbelief in reincarnationjust from
simply growing up in the West 2. belief in reincarnation (via TM and MMY and
LSD) 3. disbelief in reincarnation. And I can tell you my epistemic confidence
in the falsity of reincarnation has assumed a very form than it did before I
let the East into my brain.
> Let us say that reincarnation *is* true, that it really
> is the case that we have lived many many individual lives
> before this one, and that we will continue to incarnate as
> different individual persons until we realize that we are
>just the Self.
>
> Where does this truth make itself known inside our life in
> some natural or empirical way? Compared to the implicit
> sense that reincarnation is *not* true, it seems to me the
> notion that reincarnation *is* true just so much weaker of a
> propositionweaker, for instance, inside the context of how
> a child senses who he is and what the world is.
Well no belief about death is EVER "going to make itself known
inside our life in some natural or empirical way", no?
RESPONSE: Well, how about the belief that your mother loves you. Or that your
love for your child is true. Or that you are who you think you are. These are
beliefs that make themselves known to us "in some natural or empirical
way"albeit subjectively. I am arguing that there are no signs in anything we
come upon in our experience of being created contingent beings living in this
universe that we have a prehistory as having been someone other than who we
are. I am saying that, if reincarnation were true, then God, or reality would
have made this incontrovertibly truetrue as the theory of gravity.
No such proof has been forthcoming from science or philosophy or literature or
art etc etc etc. If reincarnation is true, Pal Gap, why isn't it obvious it is
true? What is the providential or existential reason for its concealment? Can
you think of a reason why we are supposed to believe in something about which
we can gather or glean no reliable information whatsoever? What is the point of
a belief which cannot be proven on the pulse of one's being? or which appear to
have no practicaland immediateapplication to our lives?
Do you have any means of determining within the framework of your belief in
reincarnation why you are living as the person you are now? Have you ever
obtained any data which you would trust such as to make purposeful and
meaningful your realization that you had a previous existence and that the
reason you are the person you are now is because of xyz?
No, Pal Gap, reincarnation must be untrue because it can yield up no
information such as to be able to incorporate it (the belief in reincarnation)
into the conscious and spontaneous way we live our livesnor can it enter into
anything in our life where we find our deepest love or commitment: such as
romantic love, such a having children, such as seeing someone we love die, such
as living for a purpose which takes as primary the singular and unrepeatable
fact of our own unique selfhood.
Tell me where and in what way, reincarnation has ever been able to forge a link
between itself, as a belief, and your decision-making as a human being. The
whole pattern and context of our life simply leaves out reincarnation as a
means to frame or understand our present life. Or am I wrong in this?
And again our intuitions differ.
RESPONSE: Yes, they do. The only point at which our respective intuitions will
collapse into mutual agreement will be when you and I go through the death
experience. Then and only then presumably will the intuition gap suddenly
close. It should be interesting. I am going with the 'tendency' of the
Westbased on my Judaeo-Christian legacy and ancestral DNA. And not pagan
mysticism and the East.
But, and here's what I want to get at, you seem in your
writing to hint at a curious theory of knowing. The best sense
I can make of it is "what makes sense to RC (at some sort of
intuitive level) is what is True". Just look at the use of
these words in your paragraph above: "natural", "implicit
sense", "weak". I feel those are the joists that take the
entire load of your epistemology. I have to say, I don't think
they are fit for purpose.
RESPONSE: Good point. You have me here. Yes, I do have a rather unprovable and
perhaps even dangerous sense of *conviction* about realitythat I know what
reality *isn't* in such a profound way, that in effect I tend to think I know
what reality *must be*. I don't believe I can refute the point you make here: I
am guilty of doing just this. The only thing I could say in my defence is that
I have (according to my own testimony at least) passed through the spiritual
consummation of the East (Unity Consciousness) and later passed through what it
took to dismantle and deconstruct this state of consciousnesspsychologically,
physiologically, and metaphysically.
This required help beyond myself, I can assure you. Help in the form of someone
other than myself; help in the form of intelligences opposed to the
intelligences which made me enlightened. Yes, Pal Gap (out of desperation,
Robin, perhaps?) I am saying that my present understanding of realty, of
creation, of myself, of the meta-game of life, has been the product of first
living out the truth of the East, and then getting the assistanceboth human
and supernaturalof living out the truth of the West (a kind ofas it werePost
Final Judgment kind of Catholicism, where the whole drama of the salvation of
the soul appears to have ended).
My epistemology, unfortunately, comes down to just being me. That won't do it
for you, and it shouldn't do it for you. But I can assure you that my ideas and
perceptions and arguments come out of a profoundly mystical but Western and
anti-Eastern context of experiencewhat it took to destroy my enlightenment.
Again, I can't mount a counter-argument to what you say here. You are right.
Still, where I know what I say is true (or why I feel it is true) is a very
deep place in myselfdeeper for instance, than transcending through TM; deeper
than for instance, my love for Maharishi; deeper for instance, than my
experience under LSD; deeper for instance than my extraordinary experience of
'slipping into Unity" in Arosa in Septembe f 1976, where literally the
intelligence of the cosmos itself created a context of experience and action
for mefor Ten Yearsin which my individual intention was held within an
infinite context of purposefulness and 'right action' such that I had literally
no control (in any basic sense) over my actions. I experiencedand convinced
others this was the casemy actions being computed moment-to-moment by the
intelligence behind the workings of the entirety of creation.
This was a lie. But out of that lie, I have got a hold of a great truthat
least as I subjectively experience it.
And it has made me the enemy of my erstwhile savour, Maharishi.
> I believe that if reincarnation were actually the case,
> the evidence for it would be undeniable,
You mean it would be "self-evident"? To whose intuition, yours
or mine?
RESPONSE: Pal Gap, I believe I have already addressed this above. Yes, we are
living in a universe where truth in some absolute sense cannot be established,
and every point of view has the status of being, in principle at least, as
valid as any other point of view. Only reality can ever decide or adjudicate
between us as to which intuition is closer to the way things actually are:
Robin's or Pal Gap's. And who knows? you might be God's way of interposing
himself to say: Shut up, for Christ sake, Robin: For your own good I am going
to have to take you down (again, God? Please or please, no). And I am going to
take you down through the erudite Pal Gap. Get prepared for it.
...
> I don't think just spontaneously, unthinkingly,
> naturally we live our lives as if thisreincarnationmust
> be true.
And again our intuitions differ.
RESPONSE: I have made my casewithout even the slightest notion that I have
persuaded you of anything. I have not. You remain adamantly and eloquently an
atheist when it comes to the philosophy of Masked Zebra. This is the way it
should be. Just as long as I put off being bested here such that I have to go
back to meditating and trying to get enlightened and believing Maharishi was a
perfect spiritual teacher. If I re-embrace the idea of reincarnation you will,
will you not, Pal Gap, spare me the whole Hindu re-immersion thing?
If I can get this reassurance from you, then maybe I will feel courageous
enough to rethink my attitude towards reincarnation.
Exactly why does "spontaneously, unthinkingly, naturally" play
a role here? (actually I couldn't disagree more in any case. I
find reincarnation a completely *natural* idea).
RESPONSE: Well, I think if it be natural per se as an idea; that is, an idea
which has the same status as single existence, why has it not become woven into
the fabric of our civilization and our psyches? Why hasn't psychiatry, for
instance, adopted it inside its theoretical context of understanding of the
human person? Think about it: if reincarnation really is true it should and
must revolutionize *every single enterprise of human knowledge that exists*. It
has not. It has not even begun to do this. I mean by a process of osmosis
arising out of the fact that *it is true*. It seems to me the intuitive basis
which implicitly rejectsin a functional wayreincarnationassuming
reincarnation is truehas got way more support genetically, psychologically,
historically, religiously, than what is the truth [that Pal Gap is right, and
Christ wrong: reincarnation is true].
Why the support for the terrible lie that reincarnation is false? Did your
grandmother believe in the "naturalness" of reincarnation? Does she now? Do you
believe your great grandparents are somehow on the earth right now? Perhaps you
are one of them. All this amounts in my opinion, Pal Gap, to mere abstract
thinking. Reincarnation has never incarnated in anyone's life or in the record
of history such as to make it a bona fide beliefthat is, a belief which goes a
long ways towards explaining why human history collectively and individually
has been what it has been.
....
> Aquinas teaches that the soul is the form of the body.
> If this is true (and it comes from revelation), it would
> make reincarnation impossible, because the only body we
> could ever have would be one that in a definitive sense has
> determined the very quality and nature of our soul.
I can't say I'm impressed with this.
That the "soul is the form of the body" comes from Aristotle
rather than revelation I'd suggest.
RESPONSE: absolutely right. I was wrong. Thanks.
You (Aquinas) appear to be saying: The body determines the
soul, therefore a different body would be a different soul. So
reincarnation *in a different body* is impossible (as *you*
would be a different individual).
Well the obvious question is: sez who?
RESPONSE: says Robin, says Aquinas, says Christ, says Augustine, says Newman,
says Hilaire Belloc, says Elizabeth Anscombe, says St Francis of Assisi, says
St Ignatius of Loyola, says St Francis Xavierin my opinion ("The Holy Spirit
has freed me from a multitude of opinions"Thomas A Kempis) these guys and gals
got it right. And they are ever so glad right now about this.
But No, there is no way of making authority the basis for beliefas Aquinas
argued. You are right, Pal Gap. Everything is up for grabs, and he or she who
does not recognize this, is in for a bad time at FFL.
But are you not aware that even during your present lifetime
not one part of your body stays the same? The body of RC at
age 3 is not the same body as the body of RC many decades
later (or so we are told)? Do you deny your *reincarnation*
from little RC to big RC? If matter determines individuality,
how many RCs have there been in this one *incarnation* to date?
RESPONSE: Yes, but the person that I am, the sense of "I", that has remained
identical. And this brings me to a modern philosopher [I have referred to this
elsewhere at FFL] who has come up with an original concept:God's
omnisubjectivity": "the property of consciously grasping with perfect accuracy
and completeness the first-peson perspective of every conscious being". The
subjective world of Pal Gap, this is not just some accidental effect of
evolutionor reincarnation. Your subjectivity is itself as much of a deliberate
creation by God as your body is. And I believe this is quite definitive in
pointing towards the idea that single existence wins over reincarnation.
How so? Because God created us in his own image: This is what is means to have
a subjective sense of who we are, to experience life in a way that no one else
have ever done, and to know that what it is like to be me, and *to exercise our
free will*, is not the experience nor has it ever been the experience of any
other human being. All this points towards the holiness of personal experience,
and the importance and primacy of the individual person pace reincarnation, in
which any given individual experience of subjective sense of self is transitory
and against the backdrop of eternity ephemeraland ultimately *meaningless*.
I feel I am the very same person that I was when I was a newborn child. And I
feel I will be the same person when I come to go through death. And I feel that
Maharishi, the real man, the person, the human being, he is the same right
nowand *he has not incarnated*, nor could he ever incarnate as a foetus in
some unknown woman's womb, and thus begin his life all over again. It is an
absurd idea when you really work out the detailsnot withstanding the very
credible process by which Tibetan priests determine the reincarnation of the
next Dalai Lama. That is exquisite esoteric stuff, that. Very convincing.
I wonder if you saw the post by Yifu on the "Ship of Theseus"?
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/message/282718
REPONSE: Yes, I have read this.
Or maybe I have misunderstood your point.
RESPONSE: No, at no place do I feel misunderstood, Pal Gap. You are fair and
discerning and believable.
Incidentally, I see Aquinas says: "In the resurrection,
however, both the numerically same soul will come back again,
since it is incorruptible, and this numerically same body
restored by divine power from the same dust into which it had
disintegrated; and thus will the numerically same man rise
again".
Now if God can take the "same dust" and resurrect you, why
couldn't he "take the same dust" and reincarnate you?
RESPONSE: Granted. He *could* do this very thing you suggest. But he decided
based on his own desire and will *not* to do this. And he made sure Thomas
would make this clearas he did when he became a tiny child in a manger (like
that sentimental touch there, reader? Well, there's more from where that came
from.). The Crucifixion just taken in some literary or metaphorical sense
annihilates the truth of reincarnation. Sure, Pal Gap, God could have done
what you say, but he had the good sense not to. He chose to do something very
differentbut he permitted (only he knows why) you to believe sincerely
forcibly in reincarnationeven though objectively that intuition and belief is
false.
Do I win the argument, Pal Gap? That's all, by the way, I am interested in.
Which should be clear to all FFL readers by now.
*This guy is a reverse fanatic".
But I respect your intelligence, your obvious learning, and your arguments
here, Pal Gap. Thanks.
