Reincarnation, or the idea of rebirth after death, is an unsettling subject for some of us, particularly in the West. But this might be starting to change, given that studies suggest 20% to 30% of us believe in it. Reincarnation has certainly always been intriguing for me, as it has for human beings since the dawn of time.

Of course, in less survival orientated cultures than ours, such as those in South and East Asia and Tibet, through the religions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, and in parts of Africa, and generally in indigenous cosmology, rebirth isn’t the esoteric or pseudo new-age idea that it often is for us. It is part of an embedded cosmology, a way of understanding existence that doesn’t artificially separate spirit from matter, life from death, or the self from a broader web of relationality. Reincarnation is seen as the natural expression of life’s seamless continuity.

For some reason, rebirth has always seemed self-evident to me, (Cambridge dictionary, ‘self-evident’ – “so clear or obvious that no proof or explanation is needed”), even if there is no acceptable scientific proof of it. But that is unlikely of course, since science and rebirth exist in different categories of knowledge, in modernity only one of which is acceptable as truth.

I have always found it impossible to accept the idea that life comes to an end after death. In modernity, in a materialistically defined universe, it’s true we live in a world of beginnings and endings. But in nature itself, there are no beginnings and endings, only transitions and reconfigurations.

The purpose of this article is not to convince anyone of the truth of rebirth, but rather to open it up as an intriguing possibility, and how it might transform the way we understand existence and why we are here, if we were to seriously consider it.

Research and Historical Theories

There are a number of significant pioneers in the field of reincarnation research in the West, particularly in the US. Dr. Jim Tucker, Dr. Ian Stevenson and the Monroe Institute between them, have documented hundreds of cases of children remembering their past lives, of NDE’s (near-death experiences) and of out-of-body experiences, or OBE’s. The empirical data on reincarnation and life after death is certainly out there.

One can only respect the dedication and courage of these pioneers for firmly standing by the results of their research, in a political climate these days where far less radical ideas are being targeted and rejected as leftist woo woo. At the same time, trying to convince science of the truth of reincarnation on its own terms, seems destined to fail as long as the scientific orthodoxy remains unwilling to accept that consciousness can exist independently from the brain. It is not lost on mainstream scientists that the implications of accepting rebirth as real, would challenge the very foundations of Western epistemology.

In the premodern era in the West, before Christianity considered it a heresy, rebirth was not such a contentious idea. For example, reincarnation is one of the pillars of Plato’s philosophy. In Phaedrus and the Republic, Plato describes the soul as immortal, tying reincarnation to moral development and the idea of learning through multiple lives.

Yet, ironically, although ancient Greece is considered to be the cradle of Western civilisation, and even the great English philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead is famous for saying, “All Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato”, this particular pillar of Plato’s philosophy as it lies now in science’s prodigious shadow, has never seen the attention it deserves.

Socrates, Pythagoras and Plotinus also believed in reincarnation and Pythagoras even claimed to remember four of his past lives. Rebirth or belief in the immortality of the soul, is also central to Kabbalistic thought and appears in Gnosticism, Norse Mythology and across pre-Christian Europe. There are of course certain aspects of pre-modern theories of reincarnation that seem absurdly anachronistic at this point. But let’s slow down on throwing the baby out with the bathwater, for times are changing.

Moving aside from reincarnation’s long and complex history, it might be more interesting to come at this from a different direction, one that reflects, despite the current state of the world, or more likely because of it, the ways in which our understanding of who we are and what our place in the world is, our ontology itself, is starting to open up.

Is Consciousness Fundamental?

How might, for example, our understanding of reality shift if we realised that consciousness was not in us, but we were in it?

Western science, at least broadly, is already shifting from the fearful days of the European Enlightenment and the Age of Reason, where anything smacking of superstition was akin to confronting a vampire, (to some extent with good reason at the time), to the advent of quantum physics, panpsychism, process philosophy and systems thinking, which all see consciousness as fundamental to some extent, challenging the idea that consciousness begins and ends with a brain.

Obviously, understanding consciousness as fundamental and not just an epiphenomenon of the brain, is not synonymous with reincarnation, but it’s a big step in that direction. And, perhaps, as we begin to absorb more deeply that we are an interdependent and entangled part of nature, rather than separate from it, which is happening at great speed in the Western progressive world, the idea of rebirth as a natural cyclical process might begin to have some traction.

In fact, these stirrings could even herald the promise of a new cosmology, in which rebirth itself finally finds its place again in the order of the universe. It is worth considering just how our sense of meaning and purpose for being alive might change, if we were able to accept the continuity of existence, which the recognition of rebirth could provide.

So, with that encouragement, lets lean a bit more into the unknown of what reincarnation involves and how it might actually work.

What is it that is Reincarnating?

The most common conception for what it is that reincarnates, is the soul. A word both my and probably our secular instincts naturally shy away from, because we associate it immediately with religion. We could choose other words. For Plato it was ‘the psyche’, for the Hindus, ‘the atman’, or ‘true self’.

Staying with the soul for the moment, it is understood slightly differently in different traditions. Some say it’s eternal, others disagree. But in essence, we could say that it’s the deepest sense of who ‘we are’, that stream of consciousness that develops from life to life. In a sense an individual stream, but one that is at the same time, inseparable from however we might understand the source of all existence.

The Indian mystic Sri Aurobindo called the soul, the ‘Psychic Being’. That which develops from birth to birth as a process of evolution toward the transformation of humanity, and “divine life on earth.”

As he wrote, “The soul gathers the essential elements of its experience in life and makes that its basis of growth in the evolution; when it returns to birth it takes up so much of its karma as is useful to it in the new life for further experience…The soul grows by experience. It is the central being that incarnates, not the outer personality.”

Rebirth and Evolution

This brings us to the question of the relationship between rebirth and evolution. What if we looked at rebirth as not in any way random, but as part of the whole process of evolution?

There is no doubt that the evolutionary theory has been instrumentalised, and filtered through capitalist, colonial, and anthropocentric lenses. It’s been used to justify everything from racism, eugenics, ecological destruction, and more besides.

But what if we looked at evolution, not as a linear and anthropocentrically self-serving mechanism, but as the being and becoming of the whole cosmos. As the feminist quantum physicist Karan Barad has pointed out, “matter and meaning are not separate elements, they are inextricably fused together.” Why would they not evolve together?

As Carter Phipps wrote in his excellent research essay, Death, Rebirth & Everything in Between, published in What is Enlightenment? magazine:

“We have not yet extended the evolution revolution to apply to the nonphysical dimensions of existence. But why shouldn’t we? What if souls, for lack of a better word, didn’t just emerge out of creation fully formed but were actually created through the process of evolution in the same way that brains were?

That would mean that the soul is not a permanent, ever-existing entity any more than a cell is a permanent, ever-existing entity. It has, instead, evolved over time and will continue to evolve in the future. While many of the people I spoke with talked about the “evolution of the soul,” what they were referring to is individual development from lifetime to lifetime. I began to realize that very few were really looking at the soul as being part of the larger stream of ongoing cosmic evolution.”

Responsibility Built In

So how would we relate to the idea of karma or causality for example, if we understood consciousness to be less of a personal possession, “not an individual affair”, as Barad has put it, “but more of a relational field,” that is interdependent, emergent, and co-creative?

Karma then becomes less about my karma, and my own soul’s development, and more about my response-ability and how the ripples and reverberations of this change the conditions of becoming for all involved, both human and non-human, seen and unseen.

Responsibility then isn’t just moral in the sense of individualist ideas of right and wrong—but ontological: it’s built into the way things are.

What if we look at rebirth, not merely through the lens of individualisation, but as how the inter-relational field re-patterns itself through both form and consciousness, as it searches for more harmonic, responsive, and relational ways of being and becoming.

Mystery abounds at the heart of this process and death itself is only a part of that, whether we accept reincarnation or not. Rebirth doesn’t take away from the absoluteness of death, it just puts death in the context of something much greater, of which death is a passage and a reconstitution. There will always be great forces at work here, as well as subtle worlds and dimensions that exist beyond what we can necessarily see or understand.

What seems core though is that it is through our own conscious recognition of, engagement with, and responsibility for the inter-relationality of the world’s becoming of which we are an integral part, that we can sense we are aligned with the entire universe itself moving forward.