Choosing to believe
One of the things I’ve learned in recent years, as I’ve become more interested in religion, is faith takes work. It’s an active choice to interpret the world in a more optimistic way. People make this decision for a variety of reasons, but it’s a choice. And, so, while I have no evidence for this, I’m choosing to believe in an afterlife, specifically the concept of reincarnation.
It makes more sense to me than Christian understandings of the same. Transmigration of the soul offers a simpler, more elegant solution to the problem of not finishing one’s spiritual journey in a single lifetime than purgatory does. In my view, both are more in keeping with the idea of a compassionate God than eternal damnation is.
God employs experiential learning where necessary. “If you haven’t been very kind to your parents in this life, you have to be born into a home where you will have rebellious children,” my spiritual teacher Eknath Easwaran writes. “If you haven’t been very considerate to your wife, you will have to be born into a context where you will have an irate husband.”
Perhaps the most persistent objection I had to the concept of reincarnation is it just sounded exhausting. Were you really telling me I had to travel across countless lives in a slow journey to God? Surely, one life was enough and God would accept my progress, however limited. But maybe not.
I was heartened, reading Easwaran’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, because it talks about a place where good people stay in between lives, until their “merit is exhausted.” Might this be like having a vacation rental in heaven, before you’ve earned enough money to buy your own house? That didn’t seem so bad.
However, I was discouraged by Easwaran’s commentary on the text, in which he compares this place to a “cosmic waiting room” or a “bus depot,” neither of which sounded very appealing. As I look more closely at Easwaran’s work, though, I believe I better understand the metaphor.
I don’t think he means to emphasize the unpleasantness of this place. I think he is trying to emphasize its transient nature. After all, in his own translation of the Bhagavad Gita, it’s described as “heaven,” where those who progress on the spiritual path can “enjoy celestial pleasures.”
In his commentary on the text, Easwaran says this place offers “a long period of rest and recuperation.” Elsewhere, he says it might take hundreds of years for God to find the right context to put us in next. Now I’m going to return to his metaphor of the bus depot, a location he describes as “crowded.”
This would suggest there are other people there. So far as I know, Easwaran doesn’t talk about seeing your loved ones in the afterlife. I’m not sure if this is so obvious he doesn’t mention it or his conception of the in-between place is so abstract it isn’t applicable. But I find the idea of such a reunion to be reassuring.
I don’t see why it couldn’t be compatible with reincarnation. Indeed, in Easwaran’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, God is remarkably open-minded as far as the afterlife is concerned: “Those who worship the devas will go to the realm of the devas; those who worship their ancestors will be united with them after death.”
Ultimately, Easwaran and the authors of the Bhagavad Gita are just speculating about what happens in the afterlife. Nobody knows the truth. My spiritual teacher seems to acknowledge as much, when he refers to the “theory of reincarnation.” It’s certainly the view he prefers, but it’s a theory.
Given this fact, I think it’s reasonable to provide everyone a wide berth in envisioning the afterlife for themselves. Reincarnation seems like the most straightforward and compassionate theory to me now, but I reserve the right to change my mind.