Religion

RELIGION

T

he question of whether we survive death is surely the most important one that can occur to us. Yet almost nobody is concerned with it. With the decline of Christianity, Western civilisation now ignores it completely. As a result, people go blindly into death and are reborn at hazard.

            J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Brahms came to my bedside one night in a dream and told me they were all the same entity. The next day I looked up their birth and death dates in Groves Dictionary and found that this could be possible. Consider these dates: Bach (1685-1750); Mozart (1756-1791); Schubert (1797-1828); Brahms (1833-1897). The entity waits six years and is reborn as Mozart; waits six years and is reborn as Schubert; waits five years and is reborn as Brahms. These figures broadly agree with Dr. Ian Stevenson’s researches into reincarnation, which show that the average interval between death and rebirth is quite short, though it varies somewhat from country to country. Note too the continuity between their music. In particular, Brahms, surrounded by full-fledged Romantic composers, is severely classical. Now what happened to Brahms? Did the entity continue as a musician or did it decide to try another field? If so, which? I would suggest mathematics or chess, for both are related to music.

            One of the most interesting aspects of W.B. Yeats is his firm belief in reincarnation. He was determined to be reborn, even if it meant being “pitched into the frogspawn of a blind man’s ditch / A blind man battering blind men…” He had failed to understand the message of the Upanishads – which he helped translate – that one should strive not to be reborn. Was he reborn as a poet? If so, as who? I feel that he became another Irish Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney, b.1939 in County Derry. Yeats could not resist life, poetry, or official honours. Of course, this is no more than a wild guess. (I did not know when Seamus Heaney was born, looked it up after writing this and was delighted to find it was after Yeats died. At least my guess was not absurd).

            When a child is born, the Balinese immediately put to it the question “Who eats the rice?” meaning, “Who were you in your previous life?” No child has ever been known to answer, yet the question is still asked. Why? Because the Balinese believe that a newborn infant can often understand Balinese, since it is likely to have been a Balinese in its previous life. They therefore ask the question to remind the child not to forget the lessons learnt during its previous life, which would otherwise have been led in vain. No anthropologist has yet explained this, though most of them have remarked on the absurdity of the practice.

            All of us underestimate the importance of the vasanas, the scars and blemishes left upon us by our past lives. Sometimes these are bodily, sometimes mental. The worst scar or blemish is on the soul itself.

            These days I find myself increasingly preoccupied with my next incarnation. It feels like the way I used to map out my career when young.

            Choosing one’s next mother is a very serious matter, requiring years of preparation. Unfortunately, one cannot choose one’s father. One can only hope that if one’s choice of a mother is sound, she will have the sense to choose a decent husband.

            Ian Stevenson has shown that those who die violent deaths not only tend to remember their previous lives but suffer from phobias and somatic scarring, often of a disfiguring nature, because of the deaths they have undergone. Either this is part of their karmic punishment or the universe is even nastier than we imagine. To adapt J.B.S. Haldane’s famous remark: “The universe is not only nastier than we imagine; it is nastier than we can imagine”. This was the Buddha’s insight. No wonder he compared existence to a burning house.
            Compassionate people are often unhappy, for the cruelty, suffering and injustice of the world horrifies them. If they became enlightened, they would no longer be unhappy, for they would understand that only such a world can produce enlightenment.

            “A belief in reincarnation changes one’s attitude to literature. For one thing, tragedies are no longer seen as purely tragic. Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Romeo and the others should have all learned lessons which will enable them to cope better next time they are reborn. Lear, for example, should have learnt not to judge people on their words alone and to pay more attention to a daughter who cannot have her heart into her mouth”. So my Buddhist friends argue, sounding like Victorian moralists. I am thankful, however, that I can forget my own belief in reincarnation when I am watching Shakespeare.

            If I keep reincarnating, where will I be a billion years from now? For that matter, where was I a billion years ago? Living and suffering pointlessly in another universe or another galaxy? Immortality is no joke. And neither is death after death.

            Watching The Blue Planet, a TV series about life in the oceans, I was once again struck by the thought that everything on this planet is designed to eat and be eaten. Watching the endless eat-or-be-eaten existence of the denizens of the sea, I was dismayed by the hideous pointlessness of it all. Is this a penal planet? Or a purgatorial one? Or simply – a terrifying thought – like most of the other planets in the Multiverse? As the Buddhist verses run:

These slowly drifting clouds are pitiful.

What sleepwalkers we are!

Awakened, the one great truth –

Black rain on the temple roof.

This poem never fails to move me. The last line, in particular, has a power that has seldom been equalled in literature.

            “God sees the truth, but waits”, runs a Jewish proverb. The truth is, He often appears to procrastinate. Perhaps He is too busy running the Multiverse?

            Alfred North Whitehead once defined religion as “What a man does with his leisure time”. (Collecting stamps, perhaps?) This asinine remark, coming from a man of Whitehead’s towering intellectual stature, reminds us that even geniuses can be fools at times. It brings to mind Newton’s making two-cat doors in his house, a large one for his cat and a small one for her kittens.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM