René Guénon and “Against Reincarnation”

Continuing with my series of articles about reincarnation, I would like to examine the ideas and written opinions of an occultist named René Guénon, and particularly, the article  entitled “The Case Against Reincarnation,” written by Joscelyn Godwin, which appeared in the Winter 1997 edition of the Gnosis magazine. Some occultists have lionized Guénon’s writings, and others have considered him quite a pompous, arrogant and opinionated man. I have collected several of his translated works and have found them somewhat difficult to read, which might be due to the fact that the translations are more accurate than actually readable. Mr. Godwin’s translations and analysis of Guénon’s writings, particularly on this topic, seem to better represent his thoughts in an accessible manner. You can find the entire series of Guénon’s books translated into English and republished through the imprint “Sophia Perennis.”

Also, I wanted to comment briefly on a few remarks that one or two individuals have made regarding my previous articles in this series. First of all, I am not at all making light of anyone who ardently believes in reincarnation. If anything, I am challenging the typically accepted ideas that surround a belief in reincarnation. I haven’t said that reincarnation is impossible (although Guénon does make this statement, as we shall see), but I am just questioning the logic and built in assumptions associated with the popular belief in reincarnation. As occultists, no belief system should be accepted without some critical thinking and analysis.

While I may make light of what I consider to be the more abusive aspects of a belief in reincarnation (such as someone making unjustified claims of having been someone famous), I do respect the overall assumptions and personal beliefs that someone might have who believes in reincarnation. If my words have found offence or have disturbed some of my readers, then all I can say in my defense is that I have approached this analysis with the same critical thinking skills that I have successfully used in my own occult work. All I ask is that those who read this series of articles ask themselves some questions and do a bit of self examination after reading them.

French Occultist René Guénon

René Guénon (1888 - 1951) was a French author and intellectual who continues to be influential in the study of metaphysics and occultism, having written on topics ranging from metaphysics, sacred science and traditional studies to symbolism and initiation. (See the Wikipedia article for a thorough biographical examination of René Guénon - you can find it here.)

René Guénon not only expounded on the religious systems of Hinduism, Taoism and mystical Islam in his various books, but he had actually received initiations and instruction within these traditions as well. He was one of the earliest Europeans initiated into a lineage of Shankaracharya (Indian Vendanta) and he also received a consecration in Jules Doinel’s French Gnostic church. He was fluent in a number of languages, and declared that spiritual traditions must be handed down from teacher to student in order to keep those traditions relevant and alive within the culture that gave them their meaning. He was against borrowing terms and concepts from one culture to be used in another, and believed that the West had lost its valid esoteric traditions because of materialistic science and religious intolerance. He was often at times an opponent of the Theosophical movement and an ardent critic of the popular occultism of his day. His voluminous writings were first written in French, but were later translated into over twenty languages. He died in Cairo, having become something of an adopted Egyptian and a follower of mystical Islam.

In the article “Against Reincarnation”, Joscelyn Godwin had located the original source of René Guénon's opinions and theories about reincarnation in a single a book entitled “L’Erreur Spirite” (The Spiritist Fallacy) published in 1921, which, I might add, was one of the few books at the time that had not been translated into English. Godwin took the responsibility of distilling and paraphrasing the contents of this book into the salient points used in his article, stating that a mere translation of the work would be too difficult, since Guénon had a tendency to “extreme wordiness and philosophical abstraction,” which would distract the reader from its inherent and important message. However, that book has since been translated into English, and I have found it readable, although quite wordy with long and uninterrupted paragraphs. By the way, this book was written by Guénon to counter the popular beliefs and practices of Spiritualism, which had impacted much of occultism in the late 19th century. It was the proponents of Spiritualism who brought the concept of reincarnation into the popular imagination, only to be later picked up by theosophists and western occultists.

Ostensibly, the proponents of reincarnation believe that the same being can be born more than once in a human body while Guénon holds that it cannot occur. This is because he emphatically states that a human existence is only one of a myriad of possible manifestations through which the totally of being, which he calls the Universal Being, can manifest. The individual “beingness” of a human being is only the outer manifestation of this Universal Being, and only that greater entity re-manifests itself after the life of the individual human being perishes. If we value the individual human manifestation of life too greatly, then we misconstrue the nature of that Universal Being, which through its greater perspective cannot have such a bias. We also function as beings trapped in the web of space and time, and perceive events in our lifetime, as well as all lives in general, as sequential occurrences; but this would be considered an illusion from the point of view or perspective  of the Universal Being.

If we recall that Guénon had been trained and initiated into a sect of the Vendanta tradition in India, and that followers of Vendanta (especially the Advaita sect of Shankara) believe that the individual spirit called Atman is undifferentiated from the absolute Godhead called Brahma, then we can easily understand where he is coming from. Guénon believed that the indestructible element of an individual human being was essentially the same as the absolute Godhead, therefore it must exist in a state that profoundly transcends the individual self and its associated ego-body structure. This individual and internal Atman would not be limited by space, time or any aspects of the material world. Guénon believed that this absolute attribute of the individual was the only thing that could survive death, and in fact, he believed that it was completely untouched by the occurrence of death and mortality. If this is true, then it would explain his apparent hostility towards reincarnation and spiritualism. So this is what Guénon was referring to when he discussed the concept of the Universal Being; he was referring to the transcendental Atman.

In the book “The Spiritist Fallacy,” Guénon shapes his arguments against the possibility of reincarnation, stating unequivocally that it defies the concept of a trans-temporal, trans-personal inner Godhead which has no limitations. If we can agree that the universe has an infinite number of worlds, and that the material world is just one of an infinite number, and that life is not limited to this single planet but extends throughout the multiverse, then it does seem absurd that the individual Godhead incarnating as a human being would limit itself to just a series of sequential human lives instead of engaging with a multiverse of possibilities. As Guénon so succinctly puts it in his book, The Spiritist Fallacy, with the following quotations: 

“[U]niveral and total Possibility is necessarily infinite and cannot be conceived otherwise because, including all and leaving nothing outside itself, it cannot be limited by anything whatsoever.”

“Only within a finite set can one return twice to the same element, and even then that element would not be rigorously the same except on condition that the set in question is a closed system, a condition that is never effectively realized.”

“[I]n universal existence, a return to the same state is an impossibility. In total Possibility the particular possibilities, which constitute the conditioned states of existence are necessarily defined indefinitely multiple; to deny this is also to limit Possibility. This must be admitted on pain of contradiction, and suffices to establish that no creature can pass twice through the same state.” (See “The Spiritist Fallacy,” p. 180, translated by Alvin Moore, Jr. and Rams. P. Coomaraswamy Sophia Perennis 2003)

Godwin follows up with his own estimation of this perspective, which implies that a human incarnation is likely to occur only once for any individual spirit.

“In an infinite series, such as that of integers, each term appears but once. Likewise, in the infinite variety of the universe, experienced in its totality by every being, no single state need or can be repeated. The being contains (or to use the bead metaphor, passes through) them all, without singling out any particular state for special treatment through repetition.” (See “Against Reincarnation,” p. 30, para. 2)

What Guénon and Godwin have both said is that a single lifetime is unique and unrepeatable, which agrees with what I had often thought about the uniqueness of the genetic and temporal footprint of a living being. However, Guénon goes further to state that the essential nature of that being also cannot be repeated. This claim, if true, would go against almost all theories of reincarnation, and most particularly, the popular notion of reincarnation that he encountered in France in the 1920's, proposed by contemporary occultists and theosophists. As we discussed earlier, the issue of reincarnation is principally a question of what actually gets reincarnated, and according to Guénon, only the totality of being can and does re-manifest itself, but never in the same manner or through the same individual being. Godwin explains this logical pronouncement with the greatest of ease and efficiency.

“Guénon’s language and dry logic may obscure the grandeur of his view. Human life, he seems to be saying is not such a special and unique thing that beings are clamoring to experience it again and again. Beings including you and me are tremendous things, with unlimited vistas of lives in modes we cannot begin to imagine.” (See “Against Reincarnation,” p. 30, para. 3)

Thus from this viewpoint we can deduce that Guénon believes that corporeal life is but one of a myriad possibilities, and that to insist that a being should always be manifest in a material and human guise is so limiting as to be astonishing. As Godwin states: “With ‘indefinite possibility’ before it, it is absurd to imagine a being forever imprisoned in the closet of the physical universe, as the materialists do; or ever returning there, as the reincarnationists do.” As for the beliefs in reincarnation held by the Hindu religion and by Buddhism, Guénon states that they are misinterpretations of two completely different processes, which are metempsychosis and transmigration.

As Godwin points out in his article: “From the point of view of the essential being, so-called ‘death’ is nothing but a change of state, which might just as well be called ’birth into a new state’ inevitably a non-material one, if one follows Guénon’s principles. This manifestation of a being from state to state is called ‘transmigration’, although in fact the being has nowhere to migrate to. It is more a case of innumerable lives manifesting [due] to the being’s mere existence.”  (See “Against Reincarnation,” p. 31, para. 8)

Godwin goes on to point out that the serial manifestation of lives, seemingly sequential and having causal links to each other, and comprising of an evolutionary chain is illusory. Godwin also states that Guénon’s constant assault on reincarnation is because he feels that it obscures the real fact that “this unchanging self which sustains all the myriad states and who conscious attainment is the summum bonum.” The realm of the ego, which acts as the center of a human life is transitory, illusory and ephemeral. It is a grave mistake to elevate this transitory shadow of the true self and then to project it into the past and future as the self that is reborn in other bodies. As Godwin puts it so eloquently: “As soon as we die, we leave the human species behind forever.”

Guénon attributes the first appearance of the popular Western notion of reincarnation not with the advent of Theosophy or even Spiritualism, but to the French Socialists of the early 19th century, such as Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux, who found it a tidy explanation for human inequality. While I am not able to thoroughly examine this claim, I was able to look up these two individuals in Wikipedia. Charles Fourier was an important French utopian socialist and philosopher of the early 19th century, and Pierre Leroux was a French philosopher and political economist from around the same period. Of these two individuals, only Leroux was reputed as believing in metempsychosis, who made it a part of his social theories (which were more in line with propaganda than scholarship),so I can at least verify the credibility of Guénon’s claim.

If metempsychosis was a popular notion amongst European intellectuals in the early 19th century, then it could have had a powerful impact on how reincarnation was defined by later organizations such as the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, who both lionized and developed this belief into a complex system. From those organizations this doctrine passed into the sentiments and beliefs of the common populous.  However, as we examine reincarnation from its historical sources, we will see more clearly where the origins of the theosophical theory of reincarnation came from as well as the digression of the popularly held belief.

Guénon's book also contained some theories that explain the occurrence of anecdotal evidence of reincarnation, as well the occurrence of ghosts and other paranormal phenomena. These phenomena are caused by what Guénon calls “psychic residue,” which are the energies or subtle parts of one's organic being. These energies are then separated or jettisoned from the body when a person dies, and while they slowly disperse and decompose, they can seemingly take on a life of their own. These residues can take the form of the body that they once inhabited, thus forming apparitions or ghosts, and they can also be picked up by individuals, sensed in dreams, manifesting as visions or even cause individuals to be possessed. Guénon also discusses in his book that some of these psychic residues are also passed down from parents to children in a kind of psychic heredity.

Since these energies are not unified through a physical body, they generally appear in a fragmentary manner, like the broken shards of a personality that once lived in another body in another time. However, without the constant renewal supplied by the physical body, these energies slowly dissipate; but they can and do continue to exist for long periods of time. Yet such a partial or fragmented entity, even though it is sensed and perceived in dreams and visions, and seems real and meaningful to the observer, it does not originate from one's own self. The apparition, however seemingly real, is only the fragmentary residual energy of a completely different person who happened to live in another time and place. Ghostly phenomena are the effects of mindless and soulless entities, since the true self or being that acted as the core of such an entity was retracted back into the Universal Being upon the death of the physical body.

Guénon defined this process of residual association that seems to influence individuals and cause them to believe in reincarnation as a form of metempsychosis. This definition is somewhat different than the classical definition of metempsychosis, which has its origins in ancient Greece (we will fully examine this topic below). However, Guénon wanted to differentiate the illusions of past lives and ghostly apparitions from the transmigration of the true self.

According to Guénon, metempsychosis occurs when the psychic residues associated with past incarnations appear in association with another being, human or animal. “Sometimes this gives the impression of reincarnation, as when a being contains identifiable psychic residues from the past. In such a case, one may remember past lives, but in the deepest sense they are not one’s own. They are an inheritance from other beings who will never reappear on the earthly scene.” This explanation would account for all of the anecdotal accounts and proofs for reincarnation, and it would further explain why the child who would become the current Dalai Lama was able to remember some things associated with the previous Dalai Lama, but could not gather together all of the memories and abilities that the previous mature individual possessed into the body and mind of the young boy.

We have covered all of Guénon’s views about and against reincarnation and its associated phenomena, and we can now make the following points about these views, assisting us in building an alternate theory to that which is defined by the Theosophical Society or held in the popular imagination.

• The true self, representing the indelible and immutable part of an individual being, is actually a vestige of the Universal Being, temporarily incarnating as a human being. The Universal Being is unlimited and ‘indefinite’, or infinite, while individual human beings are limited and definite, both in their characteristics and in their physical manifestation in the space time continuum.

• In the infinite variety of the Universal Being, no single state is ever repeated, which is to say that the true self that emanates from that universal state will incarnate as a human being only once, and then never revisit that state ever again, since it has an infinite variety of states in which to manifest itself.

• Death is but a rebirth into another state, and that the true self engages in a form of transmigration from state to state, never repeating the same state twice, although this is illusory, since from the standpoint of the Universal Being, all states are co-existent or ‘co-present’, meaning that they do not occur in a sequential or serial manner. There is no time and space from the perspective of the totality of being, there is only the eternal now.

• Reincarnation asserts that the true self is continually manifested in a corporeal body, but this would actually be against the odds, since corporeality is only one of an infinite series of possibilities for manifestation. Reincarnation also assumes the primacy of incarnating into a human body, which Guénon has shown is an absurd bias for human centric thinking that must be rejected.

• Anecdotal evidence for reincarnation can be explained as a process of ‘psychic residue’ left over from previous incarnations, and that dreams and impressions of previous past lives can be explained as a function of metempsychosis. The action of ‘psychic residue’ also explains the occurrence of ghosts, apparitions, and a sense of familiarity that one might find with places and events in the near or distant past.

• The belief in reincarnation in the Hindu and Buddhist religions is vastly different than the way they are held in the West. The popular belief in reincarnation as proposed by occultists and New Age adherents is the product of sentiments and ideas that have their origin in 19th century Utopian Socialism, progressive theories of social equality, and modern concepts on spiritual evolution rather than Eastern religious philosophies or Greek Philosophy. (We will prove this point in the paragraphs below.)

What remains is for us to examine the historical precedents for reincarnation, and also examine this belief as it is held in the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism to make our point that the current belief as held in the West is neither ancient nor concurrent with Eastern beliefs. It is, in fact, a very recent and modern creation, fashioned to give comfort to occult intellectuals who fear the oblivion of death; but it has also been responsible for propagating misinformation about the nature of the true self. This sentiment has also fostered a kind of false sense of personal immortality, in some cases allowing individuals to complacently delay their search for pathways to individual enlightenment. This is because they have subscribed to the belief that enlightenment takes many lifetimes, instead of it being available to everyone in this lifetime.

(To be continued..)

Frater Barrabbas

Nature of the Reincarnation Conundrum - Part 1

In modern occultism, whether it's New Age, Neopagan, Wiccan or Theosophic groups and organizations, there is a wide-spread belief and support for the tenets of reincarnation. This belief is so prevalent in these groups that it seems to be an accepted fact, and one is judged either a fool or an unbeliever if he or she does not accept this doctrine as truth.

New Age adherents attend workshops to assist themselves in determining and remembering their past lives, and Wiccan followers speak platitudes about being reborn again with friends and family. Wiccans even reserve a special kind of hell for oath breakers and others deemed cursed by the Goddess, since they are denied this benefit of rebirth with friends and lovers, and are forced instead to be reborn and wander the earth with strangers.

Theosophists have established a doctrine of reincarnation that proposes a kind of long term cycle of spiritual evolution. This cycle is where individuals engage in a long series or chain of lifetimes in order to ultimately evolve into ascended spiritual masters. Once having achieved that goal they then exit the reincarnation cycle and continue to aid and assist humanity with its collective spiritual evolution. If it were not for the thorny problem of verifying and proving that reincarnation is indeed a fact, perhaps the Theosophical model of reincarnation would make the most sense since it's so well thought out and documented.

For those who are believers, the popular consensus of reincarnation is that we as individuals experience multiple lives, and that we are influenced today by what we have done in those past lives. We are ruled by a balance of virtues and flaws that have been a part of us since our nebulous origins, and that these positive and negative effects continue to follow and haunt us from one lifetime to the next.

These powerful influences are given the label of Karma, and they are an inescapable component of the influences of reincarnation. What happens to us in this life is not so much determined by our actions and intentions, but by actions and intentions that were part of our past lives. We might be so greatly influenced by past lives that free will and self-determination would be illusions, since all is predestined by events and actions that happened long ago. Thus a person murdered in this life could have been a murderer in a past life, because his karma would have required the previous murder to be balanced out by being a victim in this life. Diseases, accidents and other maladies that afflict us could be considered the result of wrongs perpetrated in past lives and not adduced so much to our current life style and choices.

With so much of our actions, intentions and even our goals pre-determined by our past lives, it's a wonder that there is anything newly emerging in the typical person for their present life. Perhaps there's a mix of the past lives and personalities with our current inner self influencing us today, with the past having less of an impact than the present. We could grade things as being less influential if they happened further in the past, and more influential if they happened in a recent life, thereby judging past life events as being more or less relevant to the present.Of course, there could always be exceptions.

In whatever manner we seek to organize and understand these influences, reincarnation creates a very complex model of human volition; where individuals have to carefully sift through their motives, intentions, actions and even the accidents that have occurred to them in order to determine what is being influenced unduly by past lives.

If reincarnation is considered a fact, then all of these speculations, and indeed even the required examination of past lives through regression hypnosis and trance, become very important tools to understand the totality of the self. However, if it's not a fact, then these activities could be considered extraneous and even counterproductive to self realization.

My experiences with the social fad of reincarnation and karma have not made them more plausible or acceptable to me, and in fact many of the problems with these powerful concepts are amplified by how people thoughtlessly and carelessly use them. The fault is not theirs, though, since there is no real authority to guide them in these beliefs and judge their pronouncements as accurate and believable or erroneous, and so mitigate what is implausible and even ridiculous.

There are many individuals who claim to have had past lives, and some even seem to have vivid memories of these past life experiences, which is all very well and good. However, many also seem to hold the romantic notion that they are the reincarnation of famous individuals in the past, such as Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Washington, Queen Elizabeth I, Hannibal, Catherine the Great, or numerous other luminaries. Seldom have I ever heard anyone talking about having been an anonymous Chinese, Middle Eastern or European peasant, or some common cutthroat or nameless criminal, which would be much more likely if one considers the odds.

Reincarnation has been made romantic and glamorous in its common usage, and seems to be increasingly used to add prestige and a depth to people who would otherwise have shallow and uninspiring lives. Perhaps the most absurd element of popular reincarnation is that there is probably more than one individual claiming to be the reincarnation of the same famous person. To straighten out this conflict there would have to be some kind of mechanism to explain this phenomenon, either by verifying one claim over the other (or denying both claims) or by proposing that both are correct, with some kind of bifurcation of the reincarnation lineage occurring. Who is to say what that mechanism would be, or if there could be any criteria for judging such claims?

There is also another problem to consider, and that is what does it all signify? If some man or woman claims to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra, then what does that tell us about who they are in their present life? In my opinion, it really tells us nothing about the person living in the present time, since the life of Cleopatra was lived so long ago and all of the factors and the historical context of that life are long gone.

Promoting a famous past-life personality seems to be nothing more than a cloak or mask to hide the real truth of a person's sense of inadequacy and unimportance. Certainly, the claim of being the reincarnation of a famous person could not be taken seriously in a court of law, where someone would try to lay claim to the legacy of a famous person. So we are left with more puzzling questions and insolvable conundrums by accepting reincarnation rather than carefully judging it or considering that it might be fatuous as it is popularly defined.

The most difficult argument for reincarnation is attempting to define exactly what aspect of the “self” gets reborn if it does in fact occur. There is also the difficulty in defining an eternal and immutable aspect of the self, since by dint of its definition, such a thing would be inexplicable and incapable of being defined or discussed. If we consider that each individual is a unique product of genetics, culture, time, circumstance and life experience, and that this uniqueness affects all that is a determinant for an individual life, then such a life is impossible to be repeated at a later time.

If we also consider that life as we understand it is centered in the body, where reside the emotions, mind, ego and perhaps even the individual soul, then when that body perishes in death, so too must perish all of the other unique qualities of that individual as well. An individual life is precious, since once it is gone, the loss is permanent and irreparable.

There may be something that is permanent, immortal and eternal in regards to a human being, but it could not be related in any direct or conscious manner to what is based on the self as defined by the mind or by the living body, since these elements are verifiably perishable. The typical adherent to popular reincarnation seems to assume that their ego-based mind somehow manages to survive death, but there is no concrete evidence for that survival.

The lack of empirical evidence for an immortal soul would force theologians and occultists to define it as something ineffable and essential to the self; but not a part of that self which is perishable. The fact that they have defined the human spirit in just such a manner should be no surprise. Yet this would make temporal memories (life experience) and emotional or mental sensibilities incapable of being transmitted from one life to another, since they would not be a part of that immortal self.

So we are left again with the problem of defining what exactly gets reborn, and if it's so abstract and distant from the nominal self, what relevance does it have to the living and perishable part of a human being? Other questions that would need answering are how does reincarnation function, how long is the duration between death and rebirth, how is the new life chosen, or is it just randomly assigned, and who or what guides the spirit as it makes these transitions and implements these decisions?

One element that can be pointed to is that even with the large population of people currently inhabiting the planet, there is still 15 dead people for every one living. That number has been reduced in half since the 1960's, and might drop even further in the future. While one could conceive that there is a possibility of each person on the planet having multiple previous lives, there is also the possibility of a growing number of individuals who might be living their first life in the chain of reincarnated lives. 

Eventually, if the population continues to grow as it has, the number of living people may outnumber the dead, and then it would be likely that the majority of people would be “new souls” who have never experienced reincarnation. Other souls would have to be very archaic as well, since we would assume that all available “souls” would be used up before “new souls” would be fashioned. (There is also the question - how are new souls made, and who or what makes them?)

To be continued...

Frater Barrabbas