Reincarnational dogmatism, a belief-system of this world, though ostensibly part of the proof-of-afterlife movement, effectively mutes and scuttles what’s most important for us to know concerning post-mortem survival.

As Steve Blake has so aptly observed, “In reincarnation, human consciousness is dependent on the physical body... [It] has become a surrogate for survival.”

Blake says he wrote his book as a challenge to the theory of reincarnation, which most unfortunately, has “effectively neutralized the principal finding of psychical research, namely, that we all survive bodily death and continue to exist as discarnate spirit beings” (Blake 2014, 194).

Making us dependent on a physical body (to continue our progress and work out our karma) is incompatible with the most fundamental definition of spiritualism.

Editor's last word:

The brevity of this section belies its importance.

Virtually every theory of spirituality in the world, even that preached by our old friend, Big Religion, would have us become less materialistic, less focused on this transient world, less pre-occupied with the things of the flesh-and-blood body.

And yet reincarnationalism, as it does on a number levels, takes us in the wrong direction. As Blake rightfully points out, this errant doctrine sends us to fixation on the physical body as key to the evolvement of consciousness. Few precepts could be more wrong.

But, even worse, all of the emphasis on “R,” the dreary news of coming back, the "dreadful good" of living umpteen lives on this hell-hole planet, utterly obscures the wonderful reality of our eternal continuance in a glorious world, Summerland.

Talk about trading gold for lead.