Accident of birth – Lent 2025: Day 42

 "O, to be in that space whence flow the great revelations!" What's missing? Inspiration. Knocked out by my medication? (eight pills a day) Or is it just a need to sit down and Get On With It?

For me, a powerful argument for the existence of the conscious soul is the conundrum as to whether I'd be here had my parents never met. Well, the biological 'I' would not be here. But that itinerant soul most certainly would be. In a different body, with a different ego, but still with the same awareness. Where do you locate a soul – by what logic? Hindu and Buddhist theology would both ascribe karma to the process. Lessons needing to be learnt from past lives.

What brought the conscious 'I' to West London in 1957, as the son of Polish refugees displaced by war? What biological container housed the conscious 'I' prior to that? 

I have strong feelings that the previous life was lived in America from the 1920s into the 1950s, This is based on lifelong familiarity and preference, along with anomalous qualia-memory flashbacks (xenomnesia, or exomnesia) and dreams. Walking home up the hill from Chynów station, the sight of the two houses on the left on a cloudless day is guarantee of those flashbacks; but they flash back neither here, nor now.

Left: this was me, aged four, Christmas 1961, at the Polish Saturday school Święty Mikołaj party. In the box – a toy train, an American diesel locomotive that would spark an instant and strong flashback, so familiar and so pleasant.

What's the reason for where a consciousness reappears on its eternal journey from Zero to One? 

Here I need to dive into reincarnation as defined by the two main religions that hold it to be true. The concepts of reincarnation in Hinduism and Buddhism share some similarities, but they also have key theological differences. 

Hinduism believes in the existence of an eternal, unchanging soul, the atman, which transmigrates from one body to another. The goal is to achieve liberation from the cycle of samsara (birth, death, and rebirth), and ultimate union with Brahman, the Oneness. Karma plays a crucial role in this cycle, with actions in one life determining the conditions of the next. Good actions lead to favourable rebirths, while bad actions lead to unfavourable ones; the karmic cycle driving the process of reincarnation.

The Buddhist doctrine of anatta denies the existence of a permanent, unchanging soul; instead, Buddhism teaches that what transmigrates is a continuity of consciousness and a stream of mental impressions. Having said that, Buddhism also emphasises the importance of karma. Actions have consequences that influence future rebirths, though how karma affects future rebirth differs, due to the concept of anatta. Buddhism also views samsara as a cycle of suffering. The goal is also to achieve liberation from this cycle.   

So both Hinduism and Buddhism see rebirth as a process of dependent origination, but Buddhism sees this as a flame being passed from candle to candle, while Hinduism is more literal, seeing a soul moving from body to body. Another way of seeing the difference is to use Bernard Carr's 'Big-C', 'small-c' consciousness metaphor. Hindus would see our small-c consciousness growing over a succession of incarnations until finally it merges into Big-C Consciousness. Buddhists would see the small-c consciousness returning to the Big-C Consciousness at the end of each biological life, with new biological life being filled with a fragment of small-c consciousness from the Big-C whole.

I must say I'm on the fence on this one. On the one hand, my lifelong subjective experience does indeed suggest a soul moving from body to body, and while that sensation isn't particularly strong; it's strong enough to for me to recognise it tas such. However, it is perhaps more separate from the ego; a pure expression of consciousness.

Maybe had I been born into a Hindu or Buddhist family, I might have been more curious about those past-life flashbacks I'd noticed in childhood. I might have been less dismissive of this phenomenon that has fascinated me since the age of three or four. Christianity and scientific materialism both roundly reject the notion of an eternal consciousness passing through myriad life forms on the way to an ultimate unification with the Everything.

But I was born into a Polish, Roman Catholic family, in West London, at a time and a place when religion was becoming marginalised, and where its practice in our edition was more to do with nationhood (Matko Boska królowa korony polskiej) than with theology. The concept that my conscious soul may have lived before was not something to discuss in such a milieu. 

More to the point: some time in the second half of this century, a small boy – who knows where? (but a boy, I'm certain) will have incongruous memories of qualia pertaining to London in the second half of the 20th century and Warsaw in the first half of the 21st century. 

Lent 2024, Day 41
More Questions than Answers (Pt II)

Lent 2023, Day 41
The End of Times

Lent 2022: Day 41
A Better Future

Lent 2021: Day 41
The Holiest of Holies

Lent 2020: Day 40
God and Nation don't go together