The Concept of Reincarnation as a Pathway to Continual Growth and Evolution
Hello Humans!👋
From the dawn of religions, the preaching style did not evolve considerably and the ideas we receive seem rigid and unchanging. We hardly position ourselves in a perspective of questioning the walls around beliefs. As Scott Peck quoted in his book The Road Less Traveled :
The path to holiness lies through questioning everything.
As I have gotten into different books traversing the corridors of knowledge and reflection, I have come to realize that religion is the gate to philosophy. Combining the both leads to introducing a new style of preaching that broadens our way of analyzing sacred books. Let’s break this solid thinking and talk about Reincarnation today, from a religious lens, which has been beckoning to me for quite some time. Yet it was hard to know where to get started exploring such an exciting mystical topic.
I will walk you through a short spiritual journey and, together, we may reach the edges of certainty and beyond which conscious knowledge can’t pass.
PS: I would like to begin on a note of caution. This article is a mere translation of the echoes of my thoughts to unlock a key to clarity amidst confusions and to ascend the staircase of spirituality through personal meditations. I hope to teleport you from the mental world to the spiritual realm. In this article, I will throw light on reincarnation but from an Islamic viewpoint, bringing into surface the verses that give hints about it.
The Concept of Reincarnation
Reincarnation is the belief that after death, a person’s soul or consciousness is reborn into a new body. This belief is frequently associated with Eastern religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism… Reincarnation is thought to be a part of the Hindu cycle of birth, death, and rebirth known as Samsara. One’s current actions and karma determine their next rebirth. Buddhists believe in reincarnation as well, but see it as a cycle of suffering with the goal of breaking free through enlightenment or Nirvana. Many Western religions, such as Christianity and Islam, do not believe in reincarnation, but rather in the soul’s afterlife destination of heaven or hell.
Reincarnation from my Islamic Perspective
As all sacred books, the Quran has been made available to all people, allowing one to benefit from its deepest meanings and teachings according to their spiritual level. Many scholars had explained interpretations of verses according to their terms of understanding and perception that has been inherited up until today.
However, the more we delve into their explanations, we fall for the common questions related to God’s justice and equity. One may ask: Where is God’s justice in allowing a child to be born with a fatal disease? Or to die between their mom’s eyes? Why don’t oppressors and tyrants live an affluent wealthy life while a poor man lives misery and oppression? I am sure many similar questions have been crossing your mind frequently without having a clear straight answer.
As humans, our limited mind cannot grasp the full image of any event in this reality until time goes by, then the truth expands and we tend to understand some missing pieces of the puzzle. For this reason, God’s plan and the full image of his manifestations and creations cannot be understood “fully” by a human mind.
He is The Exceedingly Forgiving, The Wise, The Merciful, The Utterly Just, (Allah has ninety-nine names). What we face as pain in our life is but a mere call to evolve spiritually and attain higher levels of awareness to get closer to Him, also to push our human side to thrive against our animal instincts. We are alive for a personal purpose, for a deep mental and spiritual evolution. Thinking that we are merely living to be tested by God, or as long as our faith is known by Him, why did he create us? Moreover, can he change his decisions while he had already written our destiny? Such alluding thoughts seem illusory and absurd at a point.
Such questions and queries got one common answer from different cultural and religious beliefs: God can only be fair if He gives Man many life opportunities to redeem or destroy himself by his own Will, and not by the Will and Might of God.
This way, he can either deserve the suffering or get the reward of the Afterlife. As stated in this verse:
فَمَنْ يَعْمَلْ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ خَيْرًا يَرَه وَمَنْ يَعْمَلْ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ شَرًّا يَرَه — الزلزلة 7–8
“So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it. (8) And whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.” — Az-Zalzalah 7–8
It is inconceivable that a human being will live for two or three years and die as a child in order to go to heaven without deserving it or doing an atom’s weight of work. Or, someone born and raised in the favelas in darkened, cruel, and unfair conditions, living among criminals and only learning crime, dying to go to hell without having chosen a good way of life and behavior, especially since no one has given him the opportunity to Know God or learn to read to recognize the Creator before facing God’s judgments on doomsday?
To those who believe in reincarnation, it means that God is The Fair and that what happens to man is not the act of God because man is giving his fair share of lives throughout his timeline on earth. God provides us with opportunities so that when He reincarnates souls into new bodies, we will have all the chances we need to either survive or completely destroy ourselves on the day when we Return back to Him, but as neutralized blissful souls and not as physical bodies:
يَا أَيَّتُهَا النَّفْسُ الْمُطْمَئِنَّةُ ارْجِعِي إِلَى رَبِّكِ رَاضِيَةً مَرْضِيَّةً فَادْخُلِي فِي عِبَادِي وَادْخُلِي جَنَّتِي — الفجر 27–30
“Allah will say to the righteous, “O tranquil soul! Return to your Lord, well pleased with Him and well pleasing to Him. So join My servants, and enter My Paradise.” — Al-Fajr 27–3
That being said, now let’s gear towards the Quran verses that give hints about reincarnation as I understood them from the context. However, I will let your mind take the lead and hover over their meanings that seem to whisper secrets on the cycle of the soul’s rebirth. Are you ready to explore the uncharted territory of your own beliefs and uncover profound wisdom in these verses? Make sure to leave your insights in the comments section.
Conclusion
In this article, I shed light on my own thoughts regarding reincarnation from an Islamic perspective. According to its karma, the soul reincarnates in this world in a different body after the death of the previous body. The questions that abound here, when does the reincarnation cycle stop? Does the cycle have an ending or, as Nietzsche stated, we will be in an unending eternal recurrence (aka Ouroboros cycle)?
A striking verse in Quran shed light on the same question:
قَالُواْ رَبَّنَآ أَمَتَّنَا ٱثْنَتَيْنِ وَأَحْيَيْتَنَا ٱثْنَتَيْنِ فَٱعْتَرَفْنَا بِذُنُوبِنَا فَهَلْ إِلَىٰ خُرُوجٍۢ مِّن سَبِيلٍۢ — غافر 11
“They will plead, “Our Lord! You made us lifeless twice, and gave us life twice.1 Now we confess our sins. So is there any way out?” — Ghafir 11
The deep understanding of the Quran can elevate you to the zenith of spirituality. In stark contrast to this sacred book, the most rhetorical question that caught my attention was:
فَأَيْنَ تَذْهَبُونَ — التكوير 26
“So, where are you going?” — At-Takwir 26
That being said, I hope this article opens up new horizons in your awareness on how to interpret the Quran or any sacred book. Also, to grasp its meaning on a deeper spiritual level and to dissect its mysteries while reading between the lines to tap into the unseen, the real Ether of the Quran.
