The Reincarnating Soul

1
The Reincarnating Soul
Sri Aurobindo
2
The Crude Understanding

• The soul is reborn in a new body.
• Survival is of an identical personality.
• This is attractive to the European mind.
• The major challenge to this understanding is the
  lack of memory.
• Can personality remain the same if there is no
  memory?

3
The Buddhist Understanding

• This understanding does not begin with attachment
  to personality.
• There is no real identity.
• The identical I is not, never was, and never
  will be. (361)
• The language of I is a language of ignorance.

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Sitting astride the senses is a shadowy,
phantomlike figure with insatiable desires and a
lust for dominance. His name? Ego, Ego the
Magician, and the deadly tricks he carries up his
sleeve are delusive thinking, greed, and anger.
Where he came from no one knows, but he has
surely been around as long as the human mind.
This wily and slippery conjurer deludes us into
believing that we can only enjoy the delights of
the senses without pain by delivering ourselves
into his hands. Of the many devices employed by
Ego to keep us in his power, none is more
effective than language. The English language is
so structured that it demands the repeated use of
the personal pronoun "I" for grammatical nicety
and presumed clarity. . . . All this plays into
the hands of Ego, strengthening our servitude and
enlarging our sufferings, for the more we
postulate this I the more we are exposed to Ego's
never-ending demands.--Philip Kapleau, in Thich
Nhat Hanh's Zen Keys
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The Buddhist Understanding

• There is no soul that reincarnates.
• Reincarnating is like a flowing stream or the
  continuous burning flame.
• Karma persists and flows.

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The Vedantist Understanding

• There is a persistent immutable reality, but this
  is not my personality it is not I.
• Katha Upanishad (4.15)
• As pure water poured into pure water
• becomes the very same
• So does the self of a discerning sage become

7
The Vedantist Understanding

• The Self is one everywhere.
• Even what we call the individual soul is greater
  than the body.
• I have spat out the body (362)
• The real Self accepts the mutable personality.
• Mind and ego-sense are inferior instruments

8
The Vedantist Understanding

• To speak of ourselves as a soul reincarnating is
  to give altogether too simple an appearance to
  the miracle of our existence it puts into too
  ready and too gross a formula the magic of the
  supreme Magician. (363)
• The need is to seek behind all of this for the
  Person, the unchanging entity, the Self.