It seems clear that the Eastern world needs reincarnation for one simple and compelling reason: to validate personal suffering, so that it will not be in vain, but will be part of a path leading to the eventual cessation of our misery. We don't want to believe that our suffering is meaningless. We don't want to believe that the path to its complete cessation is never attained, or only rarely by very special people. It must be their human heartedness that takes them to this position, not their philosophical rigor. Looked at as just another effort of human beings to come to terms with their mortality, you'd have to say that the Buddhists need rebirth, they need consolation that flies in the face of common sense, they need the comforting illusion that it doesn't all end here in this frightening onceness of experience, but that something goes on and on until it achieves completion. It's the infantile part of ourselves that cannot countenance its own end. To comfort it we run from oblivion.
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)