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The Reincarnating Soul

The Reincarnating Soul. Sri Aurobindo. The Crude Understanding. The soul is reborn in a new body. Survival is of an identical personality. This is attractive to the European mind. The major challenge to this understanding is the lack of memory.

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The Reincarnating Soul

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  1. The Reincarnating Soul Sri Aurobindo

  2. The Crude Understanding • The soul is reborn in a new body. • Survival is of an identical personality. • This is attractive to the European mind. • The major challenge to this understanding is the lack of memory. • Can personality remain the same if there is no memory?

  3. The Buddhist Understanding • This understanding does not begin with attachment to personality. • There is no real identity. • “The identical “I” is not, never was, and never will be.” (361) • The language of “I” is a language of ignorance.

  4. Sitting astride the senses is a shadowy, phantomlike figure with insatiable desires and a lust for dominance. His name? Ego, Ego the Magician, and the deadly tricks he carries up his sleeve are delusive thinking, greed, and anger. Where he came from no one knows, but he has surely been around as long as the human mind. This wily and slippery conjurer deludes us into believing that we can only enjoy the delights of the senses without pain by delivering ourselves into his hands. Of the many devices employed by Ego to keep us in his power, none is more effective than language. The English language is so structured that it demands the repeated use of the personal pronoun "I" for grammatical nicety and presumed clarity. . . . All this plays into the hands of Ego, strengthening our servitude and enlarging our sufferings, for the more we postulate this I the more we are exposed to Ego's never-ending demands.--Philip Kapleau, in Thich Nhat Hanh's Zen Keys

  5. The Buddhist Understanding • There is no soul that reincarnates. • Reincarnating is like a flowing stream or the continuous burning flame. • Karma persists and flows.

  6. The Vedantist Understanding • There is a persistent immutable reality, but this is not my personality; it is not “I.” • Katha Upanishad (4.15) • “As pure water poured into pure water becomes the very same; So does the self of a discerning sage become”

  7. The Vedantist Understanding • The Self is one everywhere. • Even what we call the individual soul is greater than the body. • “I have spat out the body” (362) • The real Self accepts the mutable personality. • Mind and ego-sense are inferior instruments

  8. The Vedantist Understanding • “To speak of ourselves as a soul reincarnating is to give altogether too simple an appearance to the miracle of our existence; it puts into too ready and too gross a formula the magic of the supreme Magician.” (363) • The need is to seek behind all of this for the Person, the unchanging entity, the Self.

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