Speaking in a general manner it may be said that almost every point of view favours the idea of reincarnation - or transmigration as it is less inadequately termed - except one.
It is explicitly accepted by almost the whole of the Eastern and wiser half of the world, and none of the Masters has ever denied it: it is taken for granted by wise and simple, and the Sages frequently refer to it as a fact. But against it there is one apparently insuperable objection. The central or pivotal element in the doctrine of the Buddha, and the fundamental belief of everyone who has ever fully understood that doctrine, results from the realisation that no entity has ever existed, exists, or ever could exist, and that therefore there is nothing, could not be anything, that could incarnate, reincarnate, or transmigrate in any circumstances whatsoever!
We all understand this, I hope. Anyone who has read this book must be familiar with the details of this apparently formidable contradiction. But let us consider this matter once more, and in the simplest possible manner.
What can we imagine 'reincarnating' anyhow? Anything might reincarnate if there is anything to reincarnate, but unless it were potentially identifiable as having incarnated already it could never be known as having done so, and the very idea would be meaningless. Nothing, however, can fulfil this essential condition but that which has the notion of self. In other words - if anything can 'reincarnate', that thing must be, or must be accompanied by, the I-notion.
But - and who knows it better than we do by now? - what is the I-notion? It is a concept. And a concept is not an entity. Do we know what becomes of a concept? When an I-concept finds the body decaying that it supposed was itself, what does it do, what becomes of it?
I do not, of course, know; nor, I presume, do you; but being subject to Time, why should it not attach itself to another nascent body, if it can find one? And might it not be attracted to one with inherent, or genetical, similarities to the one that has left it high-and-dry by dissolution? Whatever it be in metaphysics - a minute electronic force-field in flux, a fluctuating vibrational complex, might it not be associated with residual experience which it could bring over and deposit in the psyche-soma in which it has found a new home? If that reads like a description of an entity, the fault is mine: it is not an entity in the sense of the Buddha, any more than is a cloud or a smell or an electric storm.
What may have occurred is like any other occurrence in the 'waking' dream of manifestation. The concept-complex had a discrete existence in illusory time, as an object of a dream-subject, and, after an instantaneous experience of timelessness on the dissolution of its past, associated body-object, it became attached to another nascent body-object and re-entered the sequential or time-illusion.
Note A: Let us remember that all our lives are timeless as well as in time. Time is only an interpretation, in apparent sequence, of the intemporal.
Note B: The alternative notion that each nascent body-object develops its own I-notion literally ab ovo is quite gratuitous, and is contradicted by many recorded actions of the very young.
Note C: We know from all the Masters that liberation from 'birth-and-death', that is, from rebirth, is consequent on liberation from the ego or I-notion, which implies that the I-notion is itself the essential factor in that process.
Note D: Let us be careful not to confuse the I-notion, an object in consciousness, with any degree of I-subject, which is real in whatever degree of apparent limitation. The I-notion is just a notion of 'selfness', as an object it can do nothing but be an apparent I - as a jug can only be an apparent jug.
Its transference, or transmigration, from soma to soma, or body-object to body-object, would be just that and nothing more. Transmigration does not mean that you or I transmigrate in reality - which would be impossible nonsense - but just that the absurd notion with which we identify ourselves does that! There could only be 'reincarnation' of that - but never of anything that is real.
Note E: The only importance of this process would seem to be that as long as the identification goes on in time we appear to go on in time, and on and on and on; the fantoche lives and re-lives 'for ever', that is, until it rids itself of the notion that it is I. At that moment only the appearance remains - for then we are real and know it, that is, we know our timeless reality and the fantoche for what it is. Perhaps it may be found that it is only in explanation of this, or in a context that implies it, that the Masters refer to 'reincarnation' or 'transmigration'?
So understood - have we perhaps begun to understand this apparent contradiction despite which 'the dream goes on'?
