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Reincarnation On Trial

Kant and Berkeley: does experience shape
the mind or does the mind shape experience?
The work of these great philosophers destroys
the foundational premise of reincarnation.

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In the 1700s, Dr. John Locke proposed a theory of mind - concerning the formation of ideas as derived from raw sensory data - which drew strength from the then-recently propounded Newtonian theory of gravity.

Locke's theories of mind would be superseded by subsequent thinkers, most notably, Professor Kant.

The "Clear Thinking" article addresses in some detail the overthrowing of Lockean concepts. I would encourage you to review some of the "Clear Thinking" sub-articles, the information from which will also serve as basis for this writing on reincarnation. Please review four titles beginning with "Bruce Lee" and moving down the list toward "Kant," the "half-empty glass," and "most important" concepts.

a summary of the issue

Essentially, the doctrine of reincarnation rests upon Lockean notions of how the mind works, but these theories of Locke were overthrown, a long time ago, by the work of Immanuel Kant and others.

Locke and the British Empiricists taught that experience, the incoming raw sensory data, shapes the mind. This proposition is largely untrue. Kant, as a forerunner of Einstein (in a particular area), was the first to understand that the mind itself imposes conceptual structure on experiential data.

Despite this more-accurate view, reincarnation continues to teach a discredited Lockean view of "if we just had enough experience, if only we had a surfeit of raw sensory data in the form of untold number of lives, we could advance ourselves mentally and spiritually."

This is absolutely not true. Kant was right. Locke was wrong - and reincarnation is wrong with Locke.

Experience is always good to have, and, in the coming ages of our eternal lives, we will thrill to all sorts of studies, adventures, and explorations of the universe. But this experience, of and by itself, cannot deliver the kind of evolutionary progress that we seek. Only an elevated consciousness can do that.

And it is this expanded awareness - which, in fact, makes what we call experience possible - that leads us forward. Greater consciousness has nothing to do with time as such; it requires no endless number of lives but only one timeless moment of cosmic clarity.

without apperception, experience avails nothing

Consider this comment by Dr. Daniel Robinson of Oxford on the work of Bishop Berkeley (paraphrased, from a lecture):

Without apperception, experience [Editor's note: or the experience of a thousand lives] avails nothing; the Self is different from the idea; content different from the knower. Apperception is paramount to the process: to be experienced at all, the successive experiential data must be combined or held together in a unity of consciousness, which implies a unity of self, and this inner integration is as much an object of experience as anything is. Therefore experience, both of the self and its objects, rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the [pre]conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.

Editor's note: "Apperception" is not a common word. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) coined the term (from the German apperzeption). He did so within the context of his “monads,” which he said are building blocks of reality, a “self-sufficient indivisible simple substance.” There are four different kinds of monads, Leibniz postulated, with God as the supreme monad, followed by humans, animals, and other items of the world. All these have a degree of perception, but God (and humans) enjoy a higher grade, an “apperception,” which is self-consciousness (that is, the One who describes himself as the great “I Am”); further, he asserted, God demonstrates absolute apperception and appetition (this latter becomes a desire directed towards a specific purpose. See the youtube lectures of physicist Dr. Frederico Faggin, inventor of the first computer microchip in 1971, who sees Leibniz’s “monads” as a starting point to explain that Consciousness, not matter, forms the elemental essence of all reality. The appetition of Universal Consciousness is to know itself which, as Dr. Faggin puts forward, is the driving force of evolution in the cosmos).

Dr. Robinson, I feel, is incredibly insightful in his assertion: "this inner integration is as much an object of experience as anything is."

an elevated level of self-consciousness

How profound. The "inner integration" is one's perception of self, which is an elevated level of self-consciousness - without which all the experience in the world will benefit nothing.

Reincarnation, based upon outdated and discredited notions of how the mind works, states that experience of the world is what we need most; that, uncounted numbers of lives, with mammoth injections of experience, will yet make us perfect. This is gross error.

there can be no perception without apperception

Reincarnation fails to acknowledge that the inner world of integrated Self, of elevated consciousness, is far more important and dispositive to the process of personal evolution than raw experience, mere infusion of sensory data, and without this advanced apperception there will be no better perception, but, at best, like a worm hardly perceiving light, only vague awareness of stimuli.