Reincarnation
and the Meaning of Life
(A talk given to the Open End, Birmingham, December 2002)
also
available in Adobe PDF format
with footnotes
In The Gay Science and Thus
Spake Zarathustra, and the posthumous The Will to Power,
Nietzsche puts forward the idea of eternal recurrence, the endless
repetition in every detail of the entire history of the universe,
including our own lives, and including this present moment.
This life [he says] as you now live it and have lived
it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again;
and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every
joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small
or great in your life must return to you even this spider
and this moonlight between the trees . . .' I am not concerned
here to enter the busy industry of Nietzschian exegesis and
the question whether eternal recurrence was intended by him
as a serious scientific theory or more likely, as I think, a
metaphorical or poetic way of presenting a profound personal
challenge. He does at one point offer an argument for it as
scientific cosmology, based on the principle of the conservation
of energy. The universe, he says, consists of a finite number
of quanta of energy which, churning about randomly, must sooner
or later, in infinite time, fall into the pattern which constitutes
our universe, and must sooner or later repeat that pattern again
and again an infinite number of times. However this does not
occur in anything that he published himself but only in the
collection of notes which his sister later put together and
published after Nietzsche's death under the title The Will to
Power. In his own books the idea comes as the most penetrating
possible question about the value of each individual's life
and of human life generally. Has your life thus far been such
that you would want to live it again and again endlessly, exactly
the same in every minutest detail? And would you want human
history as a whole to be repeated endlessly, just as it has
been? To say Yes is, for Nietzsche, the ultimate affirmation
of life by his ideal type, the Over- or Higher- or Superman,
who however does not yet exist except in his imagined Zarathustra.
He sees the challenge to accept life as it is in this full sense
as a burden which present day humans cannot bear. But to affirm
life unreservedly in all its mixture of good and evil, happiness
and pain, beauty and ugliness, pleasure and horror, triumph
and tragedy, would not to be judge it good, or more good than
bad, but would be to go beyond good and evil to a sheer act
of self- and life-affirmation.
Now there are writers by whom one can be deeply moved and influenced
whilst actually believing very little that they say, and for
me Nietzsche is one such. I appreciate his extremely penetrating
psychological and social insights. But his training was in philology,
not philosophy, and we can best reap the rewards of reading
him by overlooking the fact that both the challenging question
and the Higher Man's response to it are logically null and void.
For if there is eternal recurrence, everything, including our
affirmation or non-affirmation of it, is happening exactly as
it has happened an infinite number of times before, and we do
not have the freedom this time round to vary it. We can have
only what is misleadingly called compatibilist freedom, that
is a subjective freedom which is compatible with being objectively
determined which is the unfree delusion of freedom. So
in presenting the challenge to affirm eternal recurrence as
though we could now determine our own response to it, Nietzsche
is guilty of the error made by all who affirm or imply a total
determinism, namely tacitly exempting themselves from their
own account of how things are. That is, they assume that in
affirming total determinism they are making an intellectually
free judgement. But clearly, if they are right, the judgements
of those who affirm and those who deny freewill are alike causally
determined events, and there is no non-determined standpoint
from which they can be adjudicated.
But having noted this, as in duty bound, let us forgive and
forget it. Let us turn to David Hume who asks the same challenging
question but, as the cool and lucid thinker that he was, without
the poetic extravagance of eternal recurrence. He has one of
the characters in his Dialogues, Demea, say Ask yourself,
ask any of your acquaintance, whether they would live over again
the last ten or twenty years of their life. No! but the next
twenty, they say, will be better'. For however satisfying our
life as a whole may have been during the last ten or twenty
years, we can all think of innumerable points at which it could
have been better, so that, if we are comparing the way it has
been with the way it might have been with these improvements,
we would say No to the actual in comparison with the improved
version. But we must eliminate this comparison in our thought
experiment. I have to try to look back on my life as a whole
during the last ten or twenty years and ask whether I would
wish to live it again just as it has been, not changed or improved
in any way, and without knowing that it had all happened before.
It would be exactly as though one was living it for the first
time, the alternative being not having existed at all.
Setting the question up in this way I think that Hume (though
not the Demea in his dialogues), and also Nietzsche, and indeed
all of us would opt to live it again. Only very few very unhappy
people living in deep depression or in utterly unbearable circumstances
of some kind would, I think, wish not to have existed. I suspect
that even the millions in our world now living in dire poverty,
anxiety and danger hope, with Demea, that the next years will
be better and will thus make the past span of life worthwhile,
not in itself but because it will have led on to that better
future.
But on the other hand, still focussing on those millions who
have lived in hope that life would in the future become better
for them, or perhaps for their children, when we look back over
human history we see that in a very large proportion of cases
that hope was not in fact fulfilled. And so we have to ask whether
we would want that entire history to be endlessly repeated in
an eternal recurrence, or indeed in a single recurrence. If
we think of ourselves simply as individuals, I would say Yes,
as one of those who have been fortunate in the lottery of life.
But should I say Yes on behalf of humanity as a totality, including
those who have been desperately unlucky in that lottery? Would
I want those who have lived in miserable slavery, or in constant
fear and anxiety, or with debilitating and painful diseases,
to have to live that life again and again without knowing, as
they did not, that their situation was never in fact going to
change for the better? Would I want those who have become sadistic
monsters, from serial rapists and murderers to evil dictators,
to live again and again? Would I want all the wars, persecutions,
tortures, murders, rapes, cruelties and all the famines, droughts,
floods, earthquakes and diseases to happen again and again?
This is a challenge to the world religions, because each of
them is in its own way a form of cosmic optimism, affirming
the positive value of the totality of the process of which human
history in this world is, according to them, a phase.
At this point I want to bring in Jean-Paul Sartre. He makes
the very important point that the meaning or significance of
a present event in our lives depends upon what it turns out
to have led to in the future. For example, speaking of adolescent
love, he says, The adolescent is perfectly conscious of
the mystic sense of his conduct, and at the same time he must
entrust himself to all his future in order to determine whether
he is in process of "passing through a crisis of puberty"
or of engaging himself in earnest in the way of devotion'. And
in general the significance of our present choices depends upon
the larger pattern of our lives to which they contribute as
this develops over the years. And it is true of us collectively,
as societies and nations, that the meaning or significance of
what we do now is determined in part by what comes out of it
in the future. We can all recall career decisions, personal
relationship decisions, commitments of many kinds, deliberate
and accidental actions and inactions, whose significance both
positive and negative has been determined retrospectively. I
want to project this principle onto a much larger scale. I shall
argue that, for the great religions, our present life receives
its ultimate meaning from the eschatological future which they
all in their different ways affirm. There are, to use visual
imagery, widening circles of meaning, from the immediate meaning
inherent in each present moment of experience, to that same
moment as it takes its place in the larger context of a further,
say, ten years of living, to the further, sometimes different,
meaning that it takes on after another period of years, and
so on as our life develops, to its final meaning in the light
of the all-encompassing eschatological future.
For Sartre there is no such final all-encompassing circle, no
state that, in his terms, has its value in-itself-for-itself.
Death is an absolute end and there is no possibility of further
life within whose enlarging pattern our present life could become
a stage on the way to an all-justifying good. And so we are
about to enter the culturally forbidden territory of speculation
about death and the possibility, affirmed as more than a possibility
by all the great world religions, that our present life is only
a very small part of our total existence.
However thoughts of a life after death are all alike ruled out
by the naturalistic assumption that nothing exists but matter.
For if we think, in traditional Christian terms, of a further
resurrected life there must presumably be a disembodied phase
corresponding to the sleep' before the general resurrection,
or the purgatory of Catholic doctrine, or if we think in Buddhist
terms there is the between-lives period described in the Bardo
Thodol, and all of these possibilities are incompatible with
physicalist naturalism. Physicalist or materialist naturalism
assumes either consciousness-brain identity, according to which
mental events literally are electro-chemical events in the brain,
or epiphenomenalism according to which consciousness is not
itself a physical object or process but a non-physical by-product
temporarily generated by the functioning of the brain and having
itself no executive power. Whether either of these theories
for they are theories - is sustainable is today the hottest
point in the whole science/religion debate. Practicing neuroscientists
themselves are generally not very interested in such theories,
because it makes no practical difference to their work whether,
in mapping brain activity in ever greater detail, they are mapping
thought itself or the neural correlates of thought. However
those of them who have discussed the question, and these are
among the most eminent within the profession, have had to conclude
that the nature of consciousness and its relation to neural
activity remains a mystery. All I have time to do at the moment
is to quote a few of them. Thus Professor Susan Greenfield of
Oxford, well known for her TV advocacy of identity, admits that
I cannot at this stage describe exactly how a large number
of neurons has the emergent property of consciousness'. Professor
Roger Penrose, also of Oxford, who advocates an emergent property
theory, adds that conscious actions and conscious perceptions
and, in particular, the conscious phenomenon of understanding
will find no proper explanation within the present-day
picture of the material universe, but require our going outside
this conventional framework to a new physical picture . . whose
mathematical structure is very largely unknown'. Professor Steven
Rose, Director of the Brain and Behaviour Research Group at
the Open University concludes that the issue of consciousness
lies beyond mere neuroscience, or even psychology and philosophy'.
Dr Wolf Singer, Director of the Max Plank Institute for Brain
Research in Frankfurt, believes that self-awareness and the
subjective connotations of qualia transcend the reach
of conventional neurobiological approaches'. Professor Antonio
Damasio, Head of the Department of Neurology at the University
of Iowa College of Medicine, says, If elucidating the
mind is the last frontier of the life sciences, consciousness
often seems the last mystery in the elucidation of the mind.
Some regard it as insoluble. . [A]t the moment the neurobiological
account is incomplete and there is an explanatory gap'. But
there is, surely, more than just a gap that a more complete
knowledge of the brain may one day fill, because no knowledge
of the workings of the neural networks, however complete, can
convert correlation into identity. Damasio himself is clear
that he and his colleagues are researching the neural
underpinnings' of consciousness, the neural architecture
which supports consciousness', but not consciousness itself.
Once this is accepted, the door is open to a huge range of possibilities
that were automatically excluded by the widespread naturalistic
assumption. That assumption has long been, for us in the industrialised
west, a paradigm so firmly fixed in our minds that we do not
so much see it as see everything through it. However if we have
to accept that the universe includes the non-physical reality
of consciousness, and no doubt also a huge range of unconscious
mental life, as well as the physical reality of matter, then
the materialist or physicalist assumption becomes a ghost to
be exorcised. This does not of course entail a religious interpretation
of the universe, but it does show that such an interpretation
is an open possibility, not to be excluded on the mistaken ground
that it has been ruled out by the sciences. And any re-formed
naturalism will have to be much more complex and sophisticated
than the old version.
Moving now within the realm of religious possibilities, and
still on the culturally forbidden subject of death, we are confronted
by two very different options. Most westerners, whether they
accept, or more often reject, the idea of a life after death
think in terms of an eternal heaven and hell. For most easteners,
on the other hand, what they either accept or reject is the
idea of a journey through many lives. Which of these options
is for us the standard idea to be either accepted or rejected
depends in the great majority of cases on where we were born.
However philosophy, in contrast to theology, tries to transcend
this global postcode lottery. And it seems to me that, given
the possibility of more life than the present one, then from
a religious point of view the eastern model is to be preferred.
For at the end of this short life very few, if indeed any, are
ready for either eternal bliss or eternal punishment. But on
the other hand all are ready for further growth and development.
And if such a process is indeed taking place, we are all clearly
at an early stage in it. If it is to proceed it requires further
interactions with others within a common environment. It seems
that this must take the form of further mortal lives, lived
within the boundaries of birth and death, because it is the
inexorable pressure of these boundaries that gives life the
urgency that an unlimited horizonless future would lack. The
cosmic scenario that best meets these requirements is some form
of the concept of rebirth or reincarnation. So this is the option
that I now want to explore a little.
Let me bring in at this point Milan Kundera's strange but striking
novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. At one point
he has his central character Tomas reflect as follows: Somewhere
out in space there was another planet where all people would
be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had
spent on earth and of all the experiences they had amassed here.
And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all
be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives.
And perhaps there were yet more planets, where mankind would
be born one degree (one life) more mature. . . Of course we
here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience)
can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man
on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within
man's power? Can he attain it through repetition? Only [Kundera
says] from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to
use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification:
an optimist is one who thinks that on planet number five the
history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who
thinks otherwise'. This points very well to the sense in which,
within the multiple lives option, religion involves the cosmic
optimism which believes that through a series of lives in which
any moral/spiritual maturing achieved in one is carried forward
to the next, human existence will eventually be perfected. Each
life story, and the human story as a whole, will lead eventually
to a limitlessly good state. This cosmic optimism anticipates
an end state that has a value in itself so great as to make
worthwhile the long path that has led to it, so that in retrospect
we will all be profoundly glad to have travelled it.
In Kundera's imagined scenario he looks forwards from human
life as it now is to a supposed better future. But let us try
the thought experiment of thinking back from that imagined future
better state. Suppose that on the fifth planet human beings
have become distinctly more caring towards one another, distinctly
more inclined to care for their neighbour as much as for themselves,
no longer able to be stirred to communal hatreds and wars, sharing
the earth's resources equitably by no means yet perfect
beings in a perfect society but manifestly having moved in that
direction. If we were part of that future world, and could see
the emerging projectory, would we think that the earlier stages
are now justified retrospectively by the increasingly better
states to which they have led? We know what pain and suffering
and despair and unhappiness there is in the world today. Would
even this be justified within Kundera's imagined scenario?
I think that most of us, perhaps all of us, including those
who now suffer most, would say Yes. We would all think that
if that is indeed what is going on then we are glad to exist
rather than not exist as part of this process. It is not a matter
of a balancing compensation in the hereafter for pain suffered
is this life but of the ultimate fulfilment of the human potential.
In the course of this some may well have suffered much more
than others at any rate this is certainly the case within
any one particular lifetime, - and yet all will have come by
their own individual paths to the same end. Some may well have
had a harder journey than others, and in this respect life may
very well not be fair. It may be more like the situation in
Jesus' parable of the workers in the vineyard who all receive
the same reward even though some have done much more work than
others. Further, in the scenario we are considering, it is not
the case that the particular experiences which happen to each
individual were specifically necessary to lead them to the future
great good, or that the events of each person's life had to
be just as they are, nor that the course of our lives is planned
or directed by an omnipotent and loving God. Rather what happens
occurs through the unpredictable interactions of very imperfect
free beings. Remember that much the greater part of human suffering
is caused by human actions or inactions. But whatever may be
the largely accidental course of our life, or our many lives,
it can according to the religions - become the path by
which we shall eventually have arrived at what John Bunyan symbolised
in Christian terms as the Celestial City.
In both east and west the rebirth or reincarnation idea is popularly
understood in an unsophisticated way as the present conscious
self being born again in this world, including even sometimes
being born in lower forms of animal life. But this popular picture
is far from the conceptions found in some of the Buddhist and
Hindu philosophies. These are themselves diverse, and there
is no one official doctrine. But three major differences from
the popular idea are fairly standard. The main one is that it
is not the present conscious self that is re-embodied, not the
persona gradually formed by the set of circumstances into which
we are born - by our genetic inheritance, our various innate
gifts and limitations, the family of which we are part, our
short or long span of life, the region of the world and the
society and culture and historical epoch in which we find ourselves,
and the way things go in the world around us. That which is
re-embodied in a future new conscious self is a deeper unconscious
dispositional structure which Hindu philosophers speak of as
the linga sharira, or subtle body though this has to
be understood within a whole philosophical framework in which
it is not a body at all in our ordinary sense, - and which Buddhist
philosophers speak of as a karmic bundle or complex. For them
the conscious self is entirely evanescent, not an enduring substance.
I suppose the most obvious Christian term for the deeper on-going
self would be the soul. It is an aspect of our nature that exists
far below the level of consciousness. All of the various factors
in terms of which we live our conscious lives constitute, so
the speak, the hand of cards which this deeper self has been
dealt in this particular life, the stream of challenges and
opportunities, capacities and limitations, with which life presents
us. A major question, which I do not take up here, is whether
or not some automatic process provides the reincarnating soul'
with a hand of cards' appropriate to its need for further
development. But what both affects and is affected by our basic
dispositional structure is what the conscious personality makes
of these cards. We are all the time both expressing and forming
our deeper self by our responses to the circumstances, both
agreeable and disagreeable, in which we find ourselves. And
it is this cumulative quality of response that is built into
the basic moral/spiritual character that will be re-embodied
in another conscious personality.
The difference between Hindu and Buddhist understandings of
rebirth is a topic which deserves further exploration. Broadly
speaking, Hindus have taken a pessimistic view of the process,
as involving further lives of suffering, whilst Buddhists take
an optimistic view of it as a means of progress towards nirvana.
(But there are exceptions. For example, Mahatma Gandhi, as a
Hindu, had a more Buddhist outlook at this point).
Another difference from the popular conception is that our future
lives may well not be lived on this earth or, as in Kundera's
picture, on other planets of our solar system, or even other
galaxies of our universe, but perhaps in the quite other spheres
of existence of which Hindu and Buddhist philosophies speak.
Or some of our lives may be lived in this world and some elsewhere.
Each successive Dalai Lama, for example, is supposed to be a
reincarnation of his predecessor, not only in this world but
specifically in Tibet. But Buddhism also speaks of other spheres
of existence within which life is carried on. If we ask where
these realms are, meaning where in the only universe that we
know, the answer is nowhere. The idea of other spaces has generally
seemed in the west to be pure gratuitous imagining, but we may
have to get used to the idea that there are things that are
real although they don't exist in our customary sense. For the
more we read those scientists who are trying to communicate
with the rest of us, the more we are led to suspend many of
our inherited assumptions. Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal,
who is not himself a religious believer, in his book published
last year, Our Cosmic Habitat, argues for the currently canvassed
cosmological theory that this universe, beginning with its own
big bang some thirteen billion years ago, is one of innumerable
universes, among which there may well be many that sustain life,
some more and some less advanced than the life on our own planet.
He claims that the multiverse concept is already part
of empirical science'. Indeed the range of responsible scientific
speculation is now greater and more exciting than it has ever
been, and the possibilities that it opens up are much more mysterious
and surprising than even a decade ago. Stephen Hawkins' recent
account for lay readers of current scientific cosmology in The
Universe in a Nutshell, also published last year, is far less
dogmatic, far more conscious of surrounding mystery, than both
the mainstream Christian theologies and the dogmatic naturalism
of our time.
Returning to the multiple lives idea, yet another difference
from the popular conception is that in the more philosophical
eastern reincarnation, or rebirth, doctrines there is generally
no conscious memory of previous lives, even though such supposed
memories abound in popular folklore. As Gandhi wrote, It
is nature's kindness that we do not remember past births. Where
is the good of knowing in detail the numberless births we have
gone through? Life would be a burden if we carried such a tremendous
load of memories'. A latent memory of the totality of our experience
is however integral to the dispositional or karmic continuant
which is expressed in each successive new conscious personality.
There may or may not, as some claim, be occasional leakages
of fragments of this complete memory into someone's consciousness.
But normally not. However the full accumulation of memory nevertheless
exists beneath normal consciousness. According to the traditional
story, when the Buddha attained to full enlightenment during
his night of deep meditation under the Bo tree at Bodh Gaya
he remembered the complete succession of his previous lives.
It is in virtue of this normally inaccessible thread of memory
that the many lives are different moments in the same life project.
Returning now to Kundera, in his imagined scenario we do not
now, in the first world, know what the future holds. Suppose
however we had come to the belief that we are in fact taking
part in a journey from world number one to world number five
and then to yet further worlds beyond. Would not this change
the way in which we experience and engage in our present life
in world number one, the world as he says of immaturity? Would
it not give a new and different meaning to what is now happening?
Borrowing John Bunyan's image of life as a pilgrimage towards
the Celestial City, the events on the journey, both its pleasant
and joyful moments and its unpleasant and its terrible moments,
have different meanings for the pilgrim who lives in faith in
the reality of the Celestial City from that which it has for
those who have no such faith. The cosmic optimism of the world
religions consists in their picture of a larger process of which
we are a part, such that we can live now in trust that, in Julian
of Norwich's famous words of Jesus in her vision, All
shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing
shall be well'. And in her vision Jesus adds, Accept it
now in faith and trust, and in the very end you will see truly,
in fullness of joy'. An important aspect of religious faith
within the great traditions consists in living now in trust
of what Julian calls the fullness of joy' to which we
are moving. More generally, to quote a contemporary scholar,
Mark Webb, nearly all religious experiences result in
the belief that the universe is an essentially friendly place;
that is, that we shouldn't worry about the future'. Needless
to say it is also true that, despite occasional vivid awarenesses
of the essential friendliness of the universe in its totality,
the ordinary religious person often gets caught in Bunyan's
Doubting Castle, and falls into the Slough of Despond, and is
bothered by both Mr Formalist and Mr Discontent, and gets waylaid
in Vanity Fair, and indeed falls at some time into all the other
dangers that meet us on life's pilgrimage.
This is the place to note that this basic cosmic optimism is
marred within the monotheisms by their traditional doctrine
of an eternal hell. And given the prior assumption that this
present life is the only one there is, so that there is no possibility
of continued maturing and moral growth beyond death and
the traditional doctrine of purgatory does not allow for this,
- it is natural to think that some have proved themselves to
be so wicked that their destiny can only be either hell or,
more mercifully, annihilation. The fear of hell was of course
also, notoriously, been used for many centuries as a tool of
social control. Julian of Norwich was one of the minority of
pre-modern Christian thinkers, and Jalaluldin Rumi a hundred
years earlier one of the minority of Muslim thinkers, who have
been hospitable to the idea of universal salvation; and it may
well be significant that they were both mystics, that is to
say experiencers, rather than writers of dogmatic theology.
Buddhism and Hinduism, on the other hand, believing in many
further lives to come, have much less need for an eternal hell.
Their cosmologies do indeed include many states that are generally
called hells, but these are states through which people pass,
not to which they consigned for eternity. It may even be that
we are in one of these now. But the cosmic optimism of these
faiths, shared by various strands of Christianity, holds that
the fundamental element of good at the core of our nature, the
atman, or the universal Buddha nature, or the image of God within
us, or that of God in everyone', will eventually come
to its complete fulfilment through the course of many lives,
each bounded by birth and death and thus subject to the creative
pressure of mortality.
Bringing all this to bear on the question of the meaning of
our present lives, the hypothesis before us is that we are presently
engaged in one phase, by no means necessarily the first, of
a multi-life process of moral and spiritual growth within a
universe which is, as the world religions affirm, ultimately
benign or, speaking metaphorically, friendly. But how can it
be said to be benign when it involves all the suffering, all
the agony and despair, all the cruelty and wickedness that exist
around us? Only, I think, if we grant the very high value of
moral freedom and the consequent principle that goodness gradually
created through our own free responses to ethically and physically
challenging situations is enormously, we could even say infinitely,
more valuable than a goodness implanted in us without any effort
on our part. Putting this in the terms in which it appears in
the intra-Christian theodicy debates, this is the Irenaean suggestion
(as distinguished from the Augustinian theology) that God created
humanity, not as already perfect beings who then disastrously
fell, but as spiritually and morally immature creatures who
are able to grow, through their own free decisions within a
world that functions according to natural law and is not designed
for their comfort, so that there are pains as well as pleasures,
hardships to be endured, problems to be solved, difficult choices
to be made, the possibility of real setbacks and accidents and
of real failure and tragedy. The creative value of what is from
our human point of view a very imperfect world is that only
in such an environment can the highest human virtue come about
of a love that is able to make sacrifices for others, the valuing
of others equally with oneself. In a paradise in which there
was no pain, in which nothing could go wrong, no one would be
able either to help or to hurt another and there would consequently
be no such thing as wrong action, and therefore no such thing
as right action. But a world in which we can hate as well as
love, wage wars as well as seeking peace, persecute and enslave
as well as working for social justice, ignore one another as
well as caring for one another, is a world in which moral choices
are real and in which moral growth is possible and does in fact
often occur. But to voice the obvious objection
surely a loving God would not allow the extremities of human,
and also animal, suffering that actually occur. The intra-Christian
debate involves at this point the question whether God could
intervene to prevent man's inhumanity to man' or nature's
perils without infringing either human freedom or the autonomy
of the physical world. But since I am not postulating an omnipotent
loving personal God, I leave that debate aside. I am postulating
instead a cosmic process of which we are part, which we do not
understand, which we often find to be harsh, sometimes extremely
harsh, which we find to involve both great happinesses and great
miseries, but which is nevertheless found in mystical experience
within each of the great religions to be, from our human point
of view, ultimately benign. And our reason tells us that this
benign character must involve further living beyond our present
life. When we try to spell out what this may involve we are
still, however, dealing only in pareschatology, with what happens
between now and the ultimate eschatological state. That state
itself must lie beyond even our present imagining.