Past Life (Reincarnation)?

Reincarnation (Punarjanma) is a significant aspect of Indian religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Paganism. However, Hindu and Pagan groups do not believe in Reincarnation but instead believe in an afterlife. It comes across as an esoteric belief in many branches of Judaism in different aspects, in some thoughts of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and some Indigenous Australians (though most believe in an afterlife or spirit world).

A view of rebirth/metempsychosis was held by Greek historical figures, such as Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, and various modern religions.

What Does The Term Past Life Refer To?

The concept of past lives refers to the idea of Reincarnation. Reincarnation, also understood as rebirth or transmigration, is the philosophical or spiritual vision that the non-physical essence of a living being forms a new life in a separate physical form or body after biological demise. Resurrection is a similar process hypothesized by certain religions, in which a soul comes back to life in the same body.

In most belief systems concerning the idea of past lives, the soul is noticed as eternal, and the last thing that becomes perishable is the material body. The soul becomes transmigrated into a new baby (or creature) to live again upon demise. The phrase transmigration signifies the passing of the soul from one body to another after extinction.

Although most denominations within Christianity and Islam do not acknowledge that people reincarnate, certain sects within these religions do point to Reincarnation. These sects comprise the widespread historical and contemporary believers of Cathars, Alawites, the Druze, and the Rosicrucians. The historical links between these sections and the values about Reincarnation were characteristic of Neoplatonism, Orphism, Hermeticism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism of the Roman era, and the Indian religions have been the subject matter of recent scholarly study. In recent decades, various Europeans and North Americans have experienced a grown interest in Reincarnation, and several modern works cite it.

History Of Past Life And Reincarnation

The roots of the idea of Past Life reincarnation are discreet. Dialogue of the subject occurs in the philosophical practices of India. The Greek Pre-Socratics examined reincarnation, and the Celtic druids are also conveyed to have introduced a philosophy of reincarnation.

An alternative word is transmigration, suggesting migration from one life (body) to another. The phrase has been employed by contemporary philosophers like Kurt Gödel and has entered the English vocabulary.

The Greek counterpart to reincarnation, metempsychosis, emanates from meta (‘change’) and empsykhoun (‘to place a soul into’), a phrase attributed to Pythagoras. Another Greek phrase occasionally utilized synonymously is palingenesis, ‘being born again.’

Rebirth is a fundamental idea seen in prominent Indian religions and examined utilizing diverse words. Reincarnation, or Punarjanman, is discussed in the archaic Sanskrit books of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, with multiple alternate phrases like punaravrtti, punarajati, punarjivatu, punarbhava, agati-gati (typical in Buddhist Pali book), nibbattin, upapatti, and uppajjana.

The Concept Of Past Life In Religion

Early Jainism, Buddhism, and Hinduism

The notions of the process of birth and death, Sansāra, and release partially emanate from ascetic practices that originated in India around the center of the first millennium BCE. The foremost textual connections to the concept of reincarnation occur in the Upanishads of the last Vedic era (c. 1100 – c. 500 BCE), predating the Buddha and the Mahavira. Though no immediate proof of this has been discovered, the tribes of the Ganges valley or the Dravidian practices of South India have been suggested as another early basis for ideas of past lives.

The concept of Past Life, Sansāra, did not exist in the former Vedic beliefs. The early Vedas do not cite the principles of Karma and rebirth but note the faith in an afterlife. These concepts are created and mainly defined in the early Upanishads, pre-Buddha, and pre-Mahavira. Precise definitions first emerged roughly around the mid-1st millennium BCE in numerous conventions, including Buddhism, Jainism, and diverse schools of Hindu doctrine, each of which gave individual manifestation to the prevailing dogma.

Judaism

The faith in past lives grew among Jewish mystics in the Medieval World, among whom differing descriptions were given of the afterlife, although with a versatile view of an eternal soul. Today, the existence of past lives is an esoteric view within multiple branches of contemporary Judaism. Kabbalah instructs belief in gilgul, transmigration of spirits. Therefore, the faith in past lives is universal in Hasidic Judaism, which obeys the Kabbalah as holy and sacrosanct, and is also maintained as a supernatural faith within Modern Orthodox Judaism. The Zohar, first issued in the 13th century in Judaism, examines reincarnation, particularly in the Torah share “Balak.”

Christianity

In the Greco-Roman view, the concept of transmigration vanished with the advancement of Early Christianity, the idea of past lives being inconsistent with the Christian core philosophy of salvation of the devoted after demise. It has been indicated that some of the early Church Fathers, specifically Origen, even considered faith in the prospect of reincarnation. Still, the proof is tenuous, and the reports of Origen as they have arrived down to us articulate explicitly against it.

Islam

Prominent Islamic schools of study abandon any concept of past lives of living beings. It introduces a linear idea of life, wherein a human being has only one life. Upon demise, they are evaluated by God, then awarded in heaven or penalized in hell. Islam conducts definitive resurrection and Judgement Day, but there is no chance for the reincarnation of a human being into a separate material body or being.

Sikhism

Established in the 15th century, Sikhism’s creator Guru Nanak had to pick between the cyclical reincarnation idea of archaic Indian religions and the linear image of Islam; he selected the cyclical notion of time. Sikhism instructs a reincarnation theory equivalent to those in Hinduism, but with some distinctions from conventional principles. Sikh rebirth ideas about the nature of reality are identical to concepts formed during the religious Bhakti movement, especially within some Vaishnava practices, which represent liberation as a form of association with God achieved through the elegance of God.

Skepticism Towards The Concept Of Past Life

Skeptic Carl Sagan questioned the Dalai Lama about what he would do if an essential principle of his religion (reincarnation) were definitively debunked by science. The Dalai Lama replied, “If science can debunk reincarnation, Tibetan Buddhism would renounce reincarnation…but it will be mighty challenging to debunk reincarnation.”