Reincarnation question

[zack]

I asked the question, "Is there an individual soul or mind or ego that reincarnates?"

I received the Hexagram 18 -Corruption (with changing line 1) changing into Hexagram 26 -Great Accumulating.

I think I got an idea what it's saying, but could anyone give me their interpretation?

Thanks,
Zack

 

[micheline]

If, during your sojourn here on earth, you commit many sins and do nasty things, you will of course accumulate a great deal of karmic debt and then, because GOd is merciful, you will return to work on what is spoiled in you and in your experiences.
is there an icon for tongue-in-cheek?

but maybe it is not so tongue-in-cheek. What is this earthly sojourn we are on? Some say it is a boot camp for souls where we need to learn lessons and thus become whole, pure, unspoiled...and we do this over the course of many lifetimes.
I Like to think instead that the earthly sojourn is like a wonderful game devised by One Spirit to experience polarities and contrast. Maybe it is a little bit like a board game. the first time you play, you get yourself in deep sh*t and mess things up really bad...so you get to come back , with accumulated knowledge and resources, to play again. and the next time or the next hundreth time, you get really good at it. and it gets kinda fun.

you keep coming back to "tweak" your experiences, do it better........or to just experience another kind of searing tragedy like a warrior who can overcome it for the good of ALL the other players....or you come to experience a great deal of goodies... or to interact with your buddies in new and more excting/sad/happy/comic ways.

each time you come back, it takes less and less time to remember that it is all a game. You get really good at using the acumulated energy...and then when you finally come back one time, you remember right away that it is a game, but you feel bad for all the players who don't remember the game aspect, so then you come back to work at helping other souls remember that it is all a game, and that the earth/universe is a playground we take far too seriously most of the time.

Until one day we will accumulate so much energy collectively (26.6) that we will no longer feel we need to fix anything. and we will all go back HOME and sit around a kind of fire and laugh really hard about all the fun we had, and how it seemed so real.
and then One Spirit will say, HEY let's do something else.

 

[jte]

Micheline's take, while playful, is interesting.

Very interesting to note that if you reduce 18.1 to a yes/no answer in the context of your specific question, then it is essentially Yes. As Michelle alludes to, it even suggests a possible purpose for reincarnation.

There is an ambiguity though, in that the son is not *the same person* as the father, so the question becomes whether it is an *individual* soul/mind/ego that reincarnates. Not sure what to make of that part of the answer. I guess some things get to remain mysteries...

- Jeff

 

[heylise]

Reincarnation seems to me always an effort to put something in a form, to give it a tangible name, which is formless, and which cannot in any way be named. A very human need for things to have a meaning, or a result. Maybe in essence there is a meaning to everything, from a human life up to the entire universe, and maybe a result, but it is far beyond any name or form.
I think 'something' does not get lost, lives on, in all eternity. But if that can be connected to anything individual.. I don't think so.

I really love Yi's answer. Especially "before Jia three days, after Jia three days". What happened on the third day of creation, beginning of life or something similar? Or is there a 'time' before the start of creation?
But it also sounds, as if Yi is talking about a human lifetime. Three days, such a short span. Maybe there is something big - and life, the conscious life we experience, is just a tiny moment? Decaying almost immediately again. An short episode in a big whateveritis. What would we see if we could cross the big river between our own small understanding and universal consciousness .. maybe at the end of life, we cross it, and we say "so this is it, wow!" Although there is no 'so', 'this', or 'it' left then, I guess it is bigger than that.

No, I think stemfather is not 'me', it is the ancestor, so either my universal spark, or god, or what 'I' was before I was this I. Me before I.. that makes most sense to me. If my human life on this earth is ok, then I meet the demands of my Before-Me. I don't have to live a good life for a reward afterwards, never liked the idea of Karma anyway. No, I am the son, I have to live up, literally, to my Before-Me. Sounds familiar: "Nothing evil, nothing good. My original face, NOW", the famous koan. I gave it caps, because I think this NOW is the essence of the koan. The beginning of the koan is interesting too: nothing evil, nothing good. Good and evil are our thoughts, or maybe assignment, about life, but the bigger one has no concepts of good and evil, no choice. What is, is.

For us, there is life, which is 'good', and there is against-life, which is 'bad'. Death is simply part of life.


LiSe

 

[frank]

Hi Zack,

I do not believe in Reincarnation. I think it?s an (to) simple way of saying: ?heee, I?m not to blame, it?s my past life.? and then walking out of responsibility in the life you live. Hexagram 18 in this case could be very well get in to that, as a ?restoration? for what has been spoiled. As longivity and reincarnation is not within ourselfs, but within the generationwave we are part of, our anscestors and the way we have been raised. But the Chinese, and certainly the I Ching could have been ?written? with the idea of reincarnation in the back of the mind of the writers, as we end with ?not yet crossed?... (64).

Line 1 of 18 is at least about returning to yourself and what YOU want instead of what the others in the generationstring expect you to do... (line 1 is the YANG line of 24 Return).

Hexagram 26 could be about discovering that you have yourself to be responsible for... and your own life.

In a more imagery-way of looking at things you at least could say that Reincarnation, acording to the Yi, is a way of ?blowing yourself to heaven by climbing mountains...? (18 = wind below mountain, and 26 = heaven below mountain.... and mountains where sacred in the old chinese days...) :-D

Frank

 

[frank]

On the other hand...

In the Yi literature there is a study about two souls... The Po Hun and the ?-Hun... forgot the last one... At the end of the book of Wilhelm he has put a list of The Eight Houses (Harmen is an expert on this issue!), and the last two rowes are hexagrams that suposed to be those Hun?s... I do not know if 18 is one of them... I?m on my work now, and can?t overlook that... Perhaps I shall look further into it at home...

Frank

 

[frank]

You could look at:

www.i-tjingcentrum.nl

It?s formost in dutch, but they do have an english article about those 8 houses...

and say Hi to Harmen for me :-D...

 

[bruce]

I appreciate the possibility of answers given here. My beliefs are somewhere between what Micheline and LiSe have expressed.

Taming the bull in 26 can easily be linked to taming the ego-self through successive soul migrations; while 18 and line 1 could be correcting the errors of ones past. That seems the easiest or most obvious explanation. Whether it?s true or fact, how can one be certain?

18 can also be seen as resurrection from the wormy grave. 26, another opportunity to take on the challenge of the big bull - which again comes back to the idea of self understanding through the experience of another lifetime.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead provides an interesting correlation to line 1 of 18: Dealing with manifestations of the father, an image of ones past life, face to face with ones own psyche, with all its daemons.

 

[zack]

Frank, I understand what you are saying, but I have a very different view of believing in reincarnation.
Certain Buddhists that I know who have a total belief in reincarnation, take responsibility for their life much more so than the average person. They work harder in whatever they do in order to make up for past misdeeds or bad karma that may restrict them.
One person particular that I know seems to never get angry at anyone. When I asked him about this he said something along the lines of, "If anyone does me harm, it is not their fault but my own. For they would not have harmed me had I not committed evil deeds in my past lives. So, there is nobody who harms me but myself."
To me, this seems like someone who has taken absolute responsibility for every single thing that happens to him.

 

[dobro p]

"One person particular that I know seems to never get angry at anyone. When I asked him about this he said something along the lines of, "If anyone does me harm, it is not their fault but my own. For they would not have harmed me had I not committed evil deeds in my past lives. So, there is nobody who harms me but myself."
To me, this seems like someone who has taken absolute responsibility for every single thing that happens to him."

I like the idea of taking responsibility for your own life, and I love the idea of learning how to let go of anger. But I don't like the idea that if someone does me harm, it's my fault, not theirs. That means that if a teenager gets raped, or raped and murdered, it's their fault, they had it coming, etc. It makes the person who committed that action seem like the unwitting agent of a just and remorseless fate. I don't buy it.

 

[micheline]

Assuming there is reincarnation, the concept of "fault" is a little simplistic. It would be more a question of what is in your consciousness.

If in a past life, for instance, I was involved in abuse of some kind and died from it, or perpetuated abuse on others, the whole realm of abuse would be part of my consciousness when I was born into a new life. Because that is part of my (sub)conscious, I might in fact attract the people and circumstances who also share that realm of consciousness....I could be raped or beaten or murdered because I "had it coming" as a function of consciousness....but NOT because I "deserve" it.

Presumably the reason for reincarnation would be to experience the areas of consciousness that need to be recognized and cleansed. The perpetrator of a rape or murder is not an unwitting agent of a just fate exactly, but he or she is on the low level of consciousness where such acts are committed without remorse or without understanding....and these meet up with the people who have the "victim of abuse" consciousness.

To cling to the notion that I am a helpless "victim" of abuse only keeps me stuck there...to rise to a level of consciousness where I am not longer a victim of abuse might take a long time, but it would probably involve letting go of blame and taking responsibility for the work it takes to "forgive" in a very general sense, forgive NOT condone, and thus move on.

 

[micheline]

this is not about blaming the victim, just in case anyone misuderstands....and catholic schoolgirls with peter pan collars can be victimized as easily as women in micro-minis and miles of cleavage. The law of consciousness is impersonal and exacting..or else we are just hapless victims of random events that have no connection to anything at all.
funny that people tend to call things like thelaw of consciousness" silly"new age" but would probably be quick to tell someone that they need to take responsibility for their lives.

. The idea that nothing happens to us EXCEPT by right of consciousness is actually a freeing concept....but a little difficult to accept if one insists that it is only true in situations we can immediately explain.

 

[void]

I think that whole area is way out of the realm of human understanding and it is good otherwise we will start thinking we know all about why victims become victims, and that in my view is false and dangerous.

Just because people dislike the concept of 'victim' they will make up anything to say there is no such thing. Unfortunately that does not change the fact that at this time in our world bad things happen, it does not change the fact that there are victims. Its called 'new age silliness' because it is silly to toy with the idea of a savagely abused child for example as having something called 'victim consciousness'.

There is no 'law of consciousness' other than what someone made up to feel better about the fact that evil happens to innocent people sometimes. Hex 25 describes that.

On some level of consciousness somewhere in some rarified spiritual plane maybe theres such a law but here and now I think it has no earthly use to our lives. What possible use would it serve to see the starving dieing kids in Africa on TV and say 'hey that only happened by right of consciousness and thats a freeing concept' Huh !
No, what would be a freeing concept for the child would be a mouthful of food.

BTW I also don't totally buy all this 'taking responsibility for your life' stuff either. Doubtless easier in some countries wheres theres no dictatorship and they're not starving and theres no war. We are porous, what happens to us affects us, changes us, can injure or aid us. New Age thinking seems hell bent on the fantasy we can actually stop others impacting on us, that they cannot affect how we feel. They want to believe for example that ones feelings will only be hurt if one allows them to be. I don't think thats real just how they want it to be.

 

[micheline]

The collective consciousness of the human race as we know it is responsible for the conditions of the planet. Taking personal reponsibility for one's own consciousness is essential if one wants to help at all. No one especially not me blames a poor starving baby in africa, nor any beautiful little child for being abused. That is aan exaample of trying to make the law of consciousness personal


We are part of the human race. the work of taking responsibility for one's own consciousness and unplugging from the whole idea that "wrong" is over there and "I am innocent, you are bad" is the beginning. it's a start.

 

[frank]

Hi Zack,

Perhaps you could do something with this (it's the page of the dutch I Ching site with the article about The Eight Houses):

http://itcn.nl/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=103&func=fileinfo&filecatid=1&parent=category

As respons to your answer there is no doubt in my mind that there are good buddhist people who take the blame for the whole world upon there shoulder if that's what it is going to take to get them free from the wheel of life and there lessons...

As it in our western believe system our sins already have been gone eversince someone took the blame 2000 years ago and was hung up on a cross...

I'm abseluty possitive in the idea that there are even non-buddists who are busy getting a free karma even when they are not busy in what kind of religion what so ever, but for instance are scientists busy with the atomic boms...

All for a good cause or something like that...

I still find it very hard to believe with all the possibiliies around us that we have to make war and hard sacrifices to get what we desire or find a path of letting go our own frustrations that way... I'm convinced that by creating things you will get something in return... (Good OR Bad...) Karma is nothing less then the law of a signal and a respons, although not particularly in another lifetime... It could be done in seconds...

That does not mean by any way that I don't have respect for people who believe in reincarnation, karma etc, and that I think that it all is a bunch of <bleep>.... No, that would be to simple either... I DO respect every way of thinking as long as it does not hurt anyone, and especially yourself... BUT I'm convinced enough that to me you do not save yourself by starvation and walking on japanese, indian or what ever streetcorner to catch some food from other people, so they can buy there responsibities off... (and you having a great snack...).

By taking responsibility I mean to say that you only have yourself to blame, if it's the case... I'm not for one second responsible for the second world war... No way for the Berlin Wall, Chinese Wall, and even the Wall around the Western Bank... NO way! I will not even consider the possibility that it could be because of something I have or haven't done..., because that's the easy way! Ofcourse I'm to blame, and therefor I have to pray 40 holy mary's... yeah right...

I have GREAT respect for people like the Dalai Lama, or Ghandi, or whatever fighter for justice and peace... But I do realise that they are humans and in now way Gods... That the friend of yours is not getting angy to anyone is realy amazing, and I hope to get that kind of state too perhaps someday, but as long as there are people around us who think that you can actually gain something by yelling, fight, make war, and blowing up the ego's we are far from that stage...
(But you are right by getting this back at me and say:... but YOU can start that stage... whoops, yes I can...!)

I'm by no chance a saint... buddists aren't either... They are human, hoping to be a bodistatva someday, so then for at least a final time a buddhist from India for example can look beyond the cast-system...

And I know I'm babbling, and if I by any change have insulted someone I appologize... but this is my view these days... And views do change... (I for instance do start to believe that body and soul are seperated things influencing each other, like yin and yang... My favorite 'god' is Guan Yin, in India bether known as Avakalokitesvara, and I do prey I wrote this name correctly..., so do not think that I am not busy with the buddhist way of looking at things, as I'm, but in THIS life, not in former of later one...)

Hug,
Frank