an existentio-perennial interpretation of the resurrection

Even science agrees that the earth is doomed for destruction. The sun is going to explode a shock wave sometime in the next 5 billion years which will incinerate the earth--according to science our solar system is about half-way through its life cycle.

The perennial philosophy is a philosophy that takes as its dogma the idea that all religions inevitably lead to the same God. If this is so, I maintain that we should be able to derive a coherent understanding of the connections between religions that reveals the purpose and destiny of our lives. If we maintain that science is a religion then it is incumbent upon us to include science in such an understanding.

One of the challenges the perennial philosophy is currently facing is how to reconcile the Islamo-Christian teachings of the resurrection with the Asian philosophies of reincarnation. Using science, this thesis attempts such a reconciliation.

There have been any number of attempts to present the Christian teachings of the resurrection as teachings of reincarnation. It is well established among the traditional Christian community, however, that the teachings of the resurrection are not reincarnation teachings--they are teachings of the resurrection of the dead for final judgment.

I propose that both sides are correct. There is a way to understand many of the teachings of Jesus as reincarnation teachings. In another paper, I present the idea that the majority of the teachings of Jesus as pertains to "resurrection" can be understood in terms of a very general act of resurrection--terms which include in their logic both reincarnation (in the Asian sense) and resurrection (in the Islamo-Christian sense), as well as any sort of a transformation experience (baptism). It was primarily through the work of the Apostle Paul that the notion of the resurrection of the dead for final judgment became the dominant Christian discourse.

What is more important is to formalize a paradigm whereby we can conceive of the possibility that both the reincarnation scenario and the resurrection scenario can hold validity.

The Islamo-Christian tradition maintains that souls live one life and that at some point after that life is ended there is judgment. There are two problems with this approach. First of all, there is no logical reason to accept this conclusion unless we take the Bible or the Quran as the sole infallible sources of divine revelation and the final authorities for living the life of humans. The perennial philosophy necessarily takes this assumption to be false, and accepts no one source as infallible. Rather the perennialist maintains that all literature of the world's wisdom traditions hold some light inside of them which is shed on the divine, but not the sole light. The problem with accepting the Bible or the Quran as the final authority for life on earth is that it is impossible to come to one conclusion concerning how to interpret such complicated texts, and devotees of these traditions find themselves forced through emotional, cultural, and political developments to attempt the other's destruction. Accepting that war and the warrior are part of the human condition does not justify accepting an interpretive stance which cultivates aggression.

The second problem with the Islamo-Christian teaching of one life for one soul is that it leaves no opportunity either for the growth of the soul or the principles of the preservation of energy which rule physical matter. The Asian traditions understand the soul as an animating spark which transmigrates between various physical forms until it can escape the cycle of birth and death. This notion accepts an understanding of the principle of life, growth, and death (in short, the principle of transformation)--which is the most dominant principle on earth (and the universe). There is no reason to dismiss the notion of reincarnation unless we focus exclusively on the Islamo-Christian texts in which we arrive at the difficulty of how to conceive of the soul at all.

The problem is that the Islamic and Christian texts are very clear about a belief in the resurrection of the body toward final judgment. I accept this notion as valid since the energy mass of the physical body represents an imprint on the universe from the soul that does not just disappear with the erosion of the body. The body is remembered in the genetic and memetic codes of offspring, if nowhere else. Such a memory must necessarily form a connection between the soul and the body which persists after death. The soul is responsible for the body, and thus has a responsibility for the bodies in which it has transmigrated and the imprints which these bodies have made on physical and linguistic reality. If the soul attains Nirvana that is very well- the responsibility is cast aside and these connections are dissolved. But the majority of souls do not attain Nirvana.

Here is where the scientific understanding of the end of the earth proves to be most helpful. The Islamo-Christian traditions are concerned with the end of times, at which it is said the resurrection to judgment will occur. If we accept that such an end of time will come for earth at some point in the evolution of the sun from a main sequence star to a white dwarf sometime in the next 5 billion years then it is possible to make the Islamo-Christian texts commiserate with Asian religious philosophy. Because only those souls which attain Nirvana or some other form of escape from the reincarnation cycle are exempt from the rules of resurrection which govern life on earth and are described in religious texts of all flavors, the souls which do not attain such spiritual zeniths must necessarily be reincarnated in one form or another. Furthermore, due to the laws of the preservation of energy these souls will also at some time or another need to be faced with the realities of their connections to the physical bodies they have inhabited. The Earth is capable of storing the most significant imprints of such histories primarily through the transformation of mass from one energy form to another and the linguistic imprints which all life makes upon it's surroundings and fellow beings and leave as a heritage to its descendents. If the earth were to be incinerated, or damaged to the point that it could no longer sustain living mass or earthly language, it would be necessary for this mass to return to the jurisdiction of the individual soul and to inhabit some other physical space.

That the Islamo-Christian traditions always preface the final judgment with a fiery destruction of the Earth, it is not hard to accept that it is such a time as science prophecies which most readily describes such a future moment. But it is not just the one physical body which returns to the soul at this time, but rather some admixture of all of the physical bodies which that soul has inhabited. Thus Jesus says "At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven (Matt. 22:30)." I don't know what the angels in heaven are like, but if we think of heaven as space the angels could very well be stars, the people at the final judgment holding all of their bodies in themselves sounds like the type of huge mass formations that are the physical makeup of stars.

There are a number of positive consequences in approaching a commiseration of reincarnation and resurrection teachings. Foremost is a broadening of our understanding of life on earth and it's relationship to the universe. The notion is that the souls which are destined to go through final judgment at the end of time on Earth are not going to be either lost or rewarded in some ethereal and eternal heaven or hell. It makes more sense that the souls will be moved to other life-platforms, to continue their quest for enlightenment and reunification with the source. The idea of hell is therefore most sufficiently explained with the notion that those souls which have not maintained their responsibilities on earth in a coherent manner will be scattered and forced to live their lives once again--ie, "lost". But not eternally--only as a transmigrated life form moved to other platforms of existence. Heaven, or the "saved", is some new type of existence for the souls of those who are able to maintain their form in the resurrected space--perhaps these are now stars.

In order to conceptualize what I am saying it is important to move beyond the ethereal and ill-formed conceptions of heaven which stifle Christian doctrines. "The Kingdom of Heaven" is the universe--the huge collection of galaxies and stars and planets and life-platforms that exists outside of the atmosphere of Earth. Thus when Jesus says "The Kingdom of God is within you (Luke 17:21)," he means that feeling of the universe which we all have as part of the makeup of life in a system. The system is the universe, with it's gravities and lights and magnetisms. These stars and planets and galaxies are to be understood as living things--hugely powerful and of a different nature from ourselves, but restrained under the same principles of the resurrection (ie, both resurrection to judgment and reincarnation) as is life on earth. For these are the principles of life, and no life exists without these principles governing them.