House Unseen

Dwija Borobia

The Problem with Reincarnation

by Dwija Borobia on March 13, 2012 · 14 comments

So if you can’t know yourself in this life, or in your previous lives, or in your future lives, what is there to love?  Certainly not this temporary material body that is nothing but a vessel for carting your soul around in.  That would just be gross, honestly.  Because bodies are so…like…disgusting and stuff.

Are you with me so far?

Good, because now we need to move on to other people.

So there you are, doing your best not to think of yourself as YOU and trying not to love anything material, and you meet a guy who you think is pretty much a jerk.  Reincarnation lets you say “Man, it’s a good thing his soul is full of eternal bliss and knowledge, because I really can’t stand the body that he’s in.”  Pretty sweet, right?  You don’t have to love and care for the jerk.  The jerk guy is just a temporary prison that his soul (which is his real self) is trapped in.  If you can get him to change and start doing things you like, things that make you not think he’s a jerk anymore, that would be pretty sweet.  Because then he can have a chance at a better body in his next life OR maybe you could even get his soul to heaven.  That would totally get you extra good karma points!  But, BUT, you don’t have to actually love the jerk.  Sweet.

So here we are not loving ourselves and not loving others, because our bodies are just vehicles and others’ bodies are just vehicles and this whole material world thing is an illusion.  Instead we are supposed to be loving souls that we can’t know, because the souls are what were created by God and that’s who, or what, gets to go to heaven.

Where does that leave us?

Sad.  Lonely.  Confused.  That’s where it left me, at least.

Until I was able to let go of this ingrained habit of distancing myself from my self, I had no peace.  And let me assure you, it still rears its ugly head sometimes.  It was, and is, a constant struggle.  To be not at all dramatic, it was an exercise in self-sabotage.  Because “UGH, this body is just a hindrance!  It won’t be my body in another hundred years, so who cares about it?  I might think I love Family Member X, but I can’t forget it’s all an illusion.  In a hundred years, they won’t be them either!  So why waste my time?”.

Why waste your time cultivating deep, meaningful, personal, loving relationships with other lumps of flesh?  Why waste your time identifying your own personal, unique strengths and weaknesses when those strengths and weaknesses aren’t even yours?  They just belong to this wretched body which “soon will have to go” (the rest of the lyric from that song), ya know.  They don’t matter.

You don’t matter.

Reincarnation says that this you, the only you that you can know, doesn’t matter.  What you do kinda matters in terms of karma, but you don’t have any inherent value outside of the things you make happen.

And my girls understood all of this.  In the time it took me to merely define the basic principles of such a belief system, they grasped the striking sadness of not being able to know or love your family and friends.  To not know what my grandma would be like in heaven.  For my grandma and grandpa’s earthly relationship, the faith-filled marriage that produced 14 children, to have no eternal meaning.  To imagine that I would not actually be their mother and that would not actually be their baby sister was, in a word, heartbreaking.

Reincarnation takes away the permanence of our selves.  Reincarnation takes away the importance and urgency of love, kindness, and relationships.  Reincarnation destroys the very foundation of self-awareness.

The problem with reincarnation is that it tells us we don’t matter.

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Dwija Borobia lives with her husband and their five kids in rural southwest Michigan in a fixer-upper they bought sight-unseen off the internet. Between homeschooling and corralling chickens, she pretends her time on the internet doesn’t count because she uses the computer standing up. You can read more on her blog house unseen. life unscripted.

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  • http://lesliesholly.wordpress.com/ Leslie

    Love, love, love.  One of the (many) things I love about our faith is the incarnational emphasis–that we aren’t just souls or bodies but embodied souls.  This disdain for the physical seems to be present even in many Christian religions today.  And don’t you love it when your kids can see straight to the heart of issues that confuse adults?

  • Elise Hilton

    Another problem with reincarnation comes from Woody Allen:  “That means I’d have to sit through the Ice Capades again….”

  • http://twitter.com/HouseUnseen Dwija Borobia

    Exactly.  When my husband, who was then my boyfriend, first told me about me, as Dwija, not  just as soul, being important, I literally couldn’t understand it for a while.  And there my kids, 9 and 10 years old: instant recognition.  Pretty incredible.

  • http://twitter.com/HouseUnseen Dwija Borobia

    Ah, reincarnating as oneself might even be worse than doing the blade of grass thing.  Seriously.

  • http://www.martinfamilymoments.blogspot.com/ Colleen Martin

    I love reading things like this because it makes me realize how lucky I was to be raised by such wonderful Catholic parents.  I didn’t need to “learn” or “think” about any of these things.  They just *were*.  Of course we are created in the Image and Likeness of God, and He looked at His creations and said we were good.  To me, that’s like…duh!  It’s nice to see how other people come to understand the beauty of the faith when sometimes I take it for granted.

  • http://twitter.com/HouseUnseen Dwija Borobia

    I hope my kids feel the same way you do, Colleen.  Thank you!

  • http://www.clan-donaldson.com/ Cari@Clan-Donaldson

    The biggest problem I had with reincarnation during my travels, was the notion that it turned God into a dupe.  After all, if (as I understood it), people with more materially comfortable lives had gotten there as a result of playing by the rules in previous lives, what did that mean when they ended up obviously NOT playing by the rules in their cushy lives?  God couldn’t see that one coming?  And what about this version of God that obviously valued material comfort enough to provide it as a reward?  How did that jive with the material world being an illusion?  This meant that this god either gave crappy gifts that he knew were fake, or, as previously stated, he was a dupe.

    Thanks for writing this.  

  • http://www.clan-donaldson.com/ Cari@Clan-Donaldson

    The biggest problem I had with reincarnation during my travels, was the notion that it turned God into a dupe.  After all, if (as I understood it), people with more materially comfortable lives had gotten there as a result of playing by the rules in previous lives, what did that mean when they ended up obviously NOT playing by the rules in their cushy lives?  God couldn’t see that one coming?  And what about this version of God that obviously valued material comfort enough to provide it as a reward?  How did that jive with the material world being an illusion?  This meant that this god either gave crappy gifts that he knew were fake, or, as previously stated, he was a dupe.

    Thanks for writing this.  

  • http://twitter.com/HouseUnseen Dwija Borobia

    Or, He doesn’t actually care.  ”Here’s the game.  Play it.  If I see ya back someday, that’ll be cool.  If not….sucks for you!”

  • C W

    Dwija! You rock! But you are not a rock. Thank you for taking the time to explain this. I love your perspective and your insights into a culture I know absolutely nothing about. I’m letting my teenagers read this!

  • C W

    I didn’t mean to log in with my Google account. This is Charlotte (Waltzing Matilda) by the way.

  • Gail Finke

    Dweej that was beautiful and heartbreaking.

  • http://truedaughterofmary.blogspot.com/ Meganj@truedaughter

    This was interesting. As a cradle Catholic, I have never given the concept much thought. I just thought it was another nutty idea. I have looked at other belief systems, and for me, it always, always brings me back to the Catholic faith – it is where the Truth is…as I like to say to my non-Christian friends….if they are right, I have done no harm to myself or humanity as a Christian. If they are wrong, well, I’d not want to be them on judgement day!

  • http://people-as-guate.blogspot.com/ Steph

    This is an interesting topic, thanks for sharing!  I had never thought about this before but I think you hit the nail on the head with the idea that reincarnation is problematic, since it would tell us that we as individuals don’t matter.

    There is a really fascinating book out there called “My Stroke of Insight” in which a neuroscientist relates her experience of having a stroke localized in her left brain. At some point, she lost brain cells in enough parts of the left brain to the extent where she could no longer perceive the limits of her body (turns out there is a brain center in the left brain responsible for this) and was consumed by a sense of peace that almost prevented her from calling to receive help. (Some part of her left brain reminded her that she had an individual identity!) It took her months to recover the perception that her body was separate from her surroundings and even after her recovery, she can slip back into that “right-brain” state of mind. Her story is a fascinating testimony to the power of balancing the left and right brains. After her stroke she says she is way more relaxed, kinder, and mellow because the self-critical part of her left brain has been quieted down a bit.

    After reading her book, I wondered (as does she) if many of the traditions that believe in reincarnation/strive for nirvana are tapping in to those areas of the brain when they talk about being able to cut off the self-ego? 

    Her book is nothing if not  a testimony to the power of how we train our brains… on that note I don’t
    find it surprising that kids in the US would intuitively take issue with the idea of
    reincarnation. Our left brains are heavily trained from a very young
    age that each of us is special and important!

    Although human existence wouldn’t be possible without that synergy between left-brain ego and right brain super-ego, let alone some of human existence’s most beautiful attributes such as love and kindness…  Analyzing just on a purely physiological standpoint it would seem evident that our greatest capacity for those things is based on an intricate balance between right and left brains.

    that is a mystery to puzzle out and one that I think has always
    remained for those faiths espousing detachment as the path to salvation.
    But I think simultaneously keeping our smallness in mind is not a bad thing, either, though, especially when our left brain calls us to cruelty or pettiness.