To start a sentence with “I believe” and end it with “in Christian reincarnation” is perhaps, at this point, more than I’m ready to commit to. I, myself, have no recollection of past lives. If we see time as linear, the sheer number of myriad Catholics, whose myriad incarnations would proceed from time’s beginning till now—these all make Christian reincarnation a dizzying possibility to consider. The objective of the post “Crucified and Risen: A theory of Christian Reincarnation” remains a good one—seeking, as it did, to explain the experiences of the Christians I’d known who’ve remembered living past lives. But doing so requires that we look critically at our view of time, at the Christian view of spiritual actualization, at who precisely is the one—in a proper view of Christian reincarnation—who is constantly being reborn, living, giving and receiving teachings, suffering, dying, rising, manifesting as a stranger, identifying with all creation, and ascending. In light of all that, saying that "Christ's perpetually incarnates" is another way of expressing Christian Reincarnation. Similarly, time, when it flows, does so in a circular pattern, and present moments have more to do with detaching from falseness than Christianity has previously admitted.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the Church has the resources to buy in to Christian reincarnation. The Church already condemned the “Preexistence of Souls” back when Origen wrote about it. There wasn’t a time when souls existed before they became human, said the Church. But the crux of this issue isn’t about existence—in this moment, no two people having a discussion doubt their own existence. “The Preexistence of Souls” is really about whether times other than now exist. In short, whether souls existed before bodies would matter less if we could figure out whether “before and after” exist. As it was, the Church busied itself excommunicating those who believed souls existed before bodies, thereby missing its opportunity to proclaim that neither the past nor the future exist, that “now” is the only moment there is.
The Church’s linear view of time is a problem—as the post “Koans and Care: the Dangers of Dualism” said. The Church sees time as a linear and dualistic medium in which God, who is in heaven, chooses a particular historical moment to take flesh in Christ, who is on earth. The Church condemned Arius for saying “there was a time when [Christ] was not.” This argument could have taught that“now” is the only existing moment, but it became, instead about whether Christ existed before “now.” In maintaining this dualistic view of time, Christ’s de facto absence from certain portions of time reasserts itself.
A more helpful way to frame it, and the model I’ve come to use personally, is this: rather than being linear, time is a circular double helix. On that double helix, Christ’s historical incarnation is one of the “rungs,” just as all of our incarnations are. But Christ is also the entire circular double helix. Furthermore, we speak of Kairos time and Chronos time, the present moment and the successive string of moments respectively, as moments in-and-out of which God bobs. That’s the “Deus ex machina” argument with little interruptions—that God wound up time and creation, and basically left them to whirl about except for the 33 years Jesus took flesh—when God issued some correctives. Hear the dualism in that idea: God “took flesh” when all flesh was God’s in the first place. God chose “the fullness of time” to come, and yet all time was his in the first place. God “came to redeem all creation—“ had God been previously neglecting it?
This is in fact, not the case. To kairos time and chronos time, it seems important to add a third category. To use a phrase that means “The Master’s Time,” I’d like to suggest we begin to speak of Kyrios time: the time when individuals become their true selves, which is at once “hidden with Christ” and is Christ. Christ was born, lived, suffered died and rose in the now. Christ appeared to his apostles as a stranger in the now, his students to recognize him in each other in the now, ascended in the now because the teaching was his body too. There is no part of time from which the body of Christ was absent, and eventually the Church’s task is to become that Body.
One of Christ’s biggest objectives in taking flesh was to show them that time itself had been Christ’s mystical body the whole time. Kairos time, the now in which Christ manifests himself, and Chronos time, the history Christ recapitulates, are both preparations for a now in which we see that Christ is our true selves. Christ has been reality the whole time. “In the beginning was the Word” simply means that the Logos is a set of laws each incarnation, living in the now, obeys. “The fullness of time” of which the bible speaks actually means “the fullness of this particular chronological understanding of history.” Were time as full as scripture claimed, there would be nothing left to actualize. Properly understood, the “fullness of time” is the point at which we all realize, (right now, the only time that exists) that we are Christ. Additionally, that “Christ was with the Logos in the beginning” is simply a statement that the laws Christ’s incarnation followed were paradigmatic of all incarnations. If there is, in the present moment, a progression, it’s in the individual believer’s consciousness: from denial to consciousness, through the working out of their “purgatorial predicament.” Each believer moves, by and by, from individual consciousness to cosmic consciousness.
Time as a circular double helix is not a new idea, just an old one reapplied. In a move that retrieves the snake from the blame for universal human sinfulness, Jeremy Narby claims, with Shamanic tribes, that the mother of the Logos is a snake. He claims that mystical experience grants shamans access to certain “inner senses” with which they see biological structures like cells from the inside out. DNA is the “snake” who is the foundation of all life. I’m simply claiming that the circular double helix is also time itself: it’s the present moment (kairos time), it’s the apparent “flow of moments” that comes from our being stuck in a purgatorial predicament (chronos time), and it’s every event by which Christ teaches us to come out of denial and become his body ourselves (kyrios time).
Kyrios Time is not a new concept, just an old one, more accurately labeled. St. Paul thought the physical world would end, that a messiah separate from the believing community would return in his lifetime. The messiah apparently failed to do that—which is itself a perfect expression of the self-emptying implied in the Logos—causing Paul to expand his theory of the end times, his eschatology. The trouble is, he expanded it in a dualistic, illusory direction. Instead of his former immanent eschatology—saying the end is now—Paul and the Church began to employ “delayed eschatology”—saying the end is later. The fact is, the end was more about telos—purpose or potential—than it was about the ceasing of chronological time. What Paul was speaking about was Kyrios time, with its invitation that all people cease to identify with their falseness and become Christ in this moment.
Seen in a non-linear fashion, and in light of the perpetual incarnation of Christ, time seems ripe to accommodate Christian reincarnation. It isn’t “particular souls” that are reborn. Instead, Christ is all time and all potential, realized in each life. Insofar as birth is a perpetual happening, Christ is the one who is reborn. He is, for all people, perpetually present, perpetually doing all of the incarnating, living and teaching dying and rising, all of the identifying himself with our own true nature. We experience ourselves as “selves” distinct from Christ because we’re still attached to bits of our false selves. Those bits of “false self” may even seem like the accumulated sensation of “past lives.” If we spend the now which is our lifetime disentangling from those attachments, the Christ we truly are might come to light. If we become further entangled, that Christ will be obscured.
Tradition already hints at this. The term “alter-christus,” a way of speaking of the priest as “another Christ” is, properly and rightly these days, broadened to all Christians. Therese of Liseux said “Christ has no body now but yours.” The post-resurrection appearances of Christ teach us nothing if not that we, with the constant help of grace and the outpouring of the spirit, are Christ as well.
It’s important to clarify: Christ is consciousness, not self-consciousness. One who self-consciously claims that he is the Christ, and everyone else isn’t—that person might be a maniac with a savior complex, or an idolater. To paraphrase Ram Dass, “when an ordinary man pursues wisdom, he becomes a sage, when a sage pursues wisdom he becomes an ordinary man.” The enlightened one, at the moment of kyrios time may “realize he’s Christ” or he may not. If he realizes that he is Christ, he also realizes that everyone else is Christ as well—and that each moment and all time is Christ etc., etc. In short, the man who is Christ is like everyone else.
If he does not "realize he’s Christ” a student may still experience Kyrios time. As I wrote about in “Orthomorphosis: An Effort to Say the Whole Word,” he may either realize the illusory nature of self, desire, mind and body. Or, as the “Drawing from the Old Wells” posts claimed, It may manifest as it does in St. Benedict’s “Ladder of Humility.” A student may realize the full extent of the tension between his sinfulness and God’s love. All of those ways are one in the same. They all produce Christ.
Let me end by revealing why this is all a personal question for me: I have often wondered why I was born with a disability. Shallow as it is, I’ve tried to make meaning out of “what I did to deserve it.”
In the gospels, Jesus dismisses the old belief that disabilities in children are due to the sins of parents. For a while I believed that there was a causal link between what my parents left “ungrieved” and the sadness I felt. I had grand notions of learning the Jewish prayer for the dying, saying Kaddish for former generations. While that might be applicable if we look at my life in terms of limbic resonance, limbic regulation and limbic revision, it ultimately doesn’t help me much. My mom and dad have their own, heavy purgatorial predicaments to negotiate. There’s no use in my owning what isn’t mine.
In the same Gospel story, Jesus says these things happen so that God’s glory would be revealed: with apologies to my close and personal savior, I find that inadequate too. Particularly because I am disabled, don’t want to ride the short bus of my own uniqueness into God’s consoling arms, I want to be normal and anonymous. God wouldn’t wish something bad on me so that he could grandstand or showcase his awesomeness. He wouldn’t call me special as a way of highlighting my isolation. These days, the most adequate explanation I can find for “why I am the way I am” is that every sensation in my body, painful or otherwise, with which I’m preoccupied is an attachment from a past life, stored in my body. Every thought to which I’m too attached was gained in a past life.
In this way, the reasons for who I am are nobody’s fault but mine, but the kindness of my own purgatorial predicament comes to the fore. It’s a mercy that I would see my attachments to forms at all—as “Orthomorphosis: an Effort to Say the Whole Word” said, it’s a mercy that I would at all perceive the invitation to let go of self, desire, mind and sensation and the body. I don’t know “who I was” in any of my theoretical past lives, and it absolutely, completely doesn’t matter. I was what I am, and what everyone was and is: Christ himself, just with enough clingy bits that I, and a number of other “Christs” missed the truth of it entirely.
In this incarnation, I am disgustingly aware of spiritual realities. If this has yielded anything true, that is a party bonus: but it’s more accurate, meanwhile, to say, with St. Augustine, “si comprehendis, non est Deus.” If you comprehend it, it isn’t God. Near as I can guess, the defining characteristic of my present purgatorial predicament, of the calling that seems my slice of this moment’s vocational pie, is to look honestly at it all. If my intuition is right, (inshallah, may it be so) whatever honesty I can muster in this life is a letting go of accumulated denial from past lives. If I can be more conscious, more at home in the present moment, the semi permanent egoic distance that the Dark Night of the Self grants, which seems to be my lot to yap about—it might be more fully accomplished. The Divinization that is the culmination of shedding false selves—when, (if I’m right about Christian reincarnation) the cycle of rebirths ceases and separate self consciousness no longer separates me from the Triune Godhead—may God keep me awake for it.
As to how true any of this is, I don’t know: God knows. I’m looking forward to it, and by forward, forever within and within and within.
This is in fact, not the case. To kairos time and chronos time, it seems important to add a third category. To use a phrase that means “The Master’s Time,” I’d like to suggest we begin to speak of Kyrios time: the time when individuals become their true selves, which is at once “hidden with Christ” and is Christ. Christ was born, lived, suffered died and rose in the now. Christ appeared to his apostles as a stranger in the now, his students to recognize him in each other in the now, ascended in the now because the teaching was his body too. There is no part of time from which the body of Christ was absent, and eventually the Church’s task is to become that Body.
One of Christ’s biggest objectives in taking flesh was to show them that time itself had been Christ’s mystical body the whole time. Kairos time, the now in which Christ manifests himself, and Chronos time, the history Christ recapitulates, are both preparations for a now in which we see that Christ is our true selves. Christ has been reality the whole time. “In the beginning was the Word” simply means that the Logos is a set of laws each incarnation, living in the now, obeys. “The fullness of time” of which the bible speaks actually means “the fullness of this particular chronological understanding of history.” Were time as full as scripture claimed, there would be nothing left to actualize. Properly understood, the “fullness of time” is the point at which we all realize, (right now, the only time that exists) that we are Christ. Additionally, that “Christ was with the Logos in the beginning” is simply a statement that the laws Christ’s incarnation followed were paradigmatic of all incarnations. If there is, in the present moment, a progression, it’s in the individual believer’s consciousness: from denial to consciousness, through the working out of their “purgatorial predicament.” Each believer moves, by and by, from individual consciousness to cosmic consciousness.
Time as a circular double helix is not a new idea, just an old one reapplied. In a move that retrieves the snake from the blame for universal human sinfulness, Jeremy Narby claims, with Shamanic tribes, that the mother of the Logos is a snake. He claims that mystical experience grants shamans access to certain “inner senses” with which they see biological structures like cells from the inside out. DNA is the “snake” who is the foundation of all life. I’m simply claiming that the circular double helix is also time itself: it’s the present moment (kairos time), it’s the apparent “flow of moments” that comes from our being stuck in a purgatorial predicament (chronos time), and it’s every event by which Christ teaches us to come out of denial and become his body ourselves (kyrios time).
Kyrios Time is not a new concept, just an old one, more accurately labeled. St. Paul thought the physical world would end, that a messiah separate from the believing community would return in his lifetime. The messiah apparently failed to do that—which is itself a perfect expression of the self-emptying implied in the Logos—causing Paul to expand his theory of the end times, his eschatology. The trouble is, he expanded it in a dualistic, illusory direction. Instead of his former immanent eschatology—saying the end is now—Paul and the Church began to employ “delayed eschatology”—saying the end is later. The fact is, the end was more about telos—purpose or potential—than it was about the ceasing of chronological time. What Paul was speaking about was Kyrios time, with its invitation that all people cease to identify with their falseness and become Christ in this moment.
Seen in a non-linear fashion, and in light of the perpetual incarnation of Christ, time seems ripe to accommodate Christian reincarnation. It isn’t “particular souls” that are reborn. Instead, Christ is all time and all potential, realized in each life. Insofar as birth is a perpetual happening, Christ is the one who is reborn. He is, for all people, perpetually present, perpetually doing all of the incarnating, living and teaching dying and rising, all of the identifying himself with our own true nature. We experience ourselves as “selves” distinct from Christ because we’re still attached to bits of our false selves. Those bits of “false self” may even seem like the accumulated sensation of “past lives.” If we spend the now which is our lifetime disentangling from those attachments, the Christ we truly are might come to light. If we become further entangled, that Christ will be obscured.
Tradition already hints at this. The term “alter-christus,” a way of speaking of the priest as “another Christ” is, properly and rightly these days, broadened to all Christians. Therese of Liseux said “Christ has no body now but yours.” The post-resurrection appearances of Christ teach us nothing if not that we, with the constant help of grace and the outpouring of the spirit, are Christ as well.
It’s important to clarify: Christ is consciousness, not self-consciousness. One who self-consciously claims that he is the Christ, and everyone else isn’t—that person might be a maniac with a savior complex, or an idolater. To paraphrase Ram Dass, “when an ordinary man pursues wisdom, he becomes a sage, when a sage pursues wisdom he becomes an ordinary man.” The enlightened one, at the moment of kyrios time may “realize he’s Christ” or he may not. If he realizes that he is Christ, he also realizes that everyone else is Christ as well—and that each moment and all time is Christ etc., etc. In short, the man who is Christ is like everyone else.
If he does not "realize he’s Christ” a student may still experience Kyrios time. As I wrote about in “Orthomorphosis: An Effort to Say the Whole Word,” he may either realize the illusory nature of self, desire, mind and body. Or, as the “Drawing from the Old Wells” posts claimed, It may manifest as it does in St. Benedict’s “Ladder of Humility.” A student may realize the full extent of the tension between his sinfulness and God’s love. All of those ways are one in the same. They all produce Christ.
Let me end by revealing why this is all a personal question for me: I have often wondered why I was born with a disability. Shallow as it is, I’ve tried to make meaning out of “what I did to deserve it.”
In the gospels, Jesus dismisses the old belief that disabilities in children are due to the sins of parents. For a while I believed that there was a causal link between what my parents left “ungrieved” and the sadness I felt. I had grand notions of learning the Jewish prayer for the dying, saying Kaddish for former generations. While that might be applicable if we look at my life in terms of limbic resonance, limbic regulation and limbic revision, it ultimately doesn’t help me much. My mom and dad have their own, heavy purgatorial predicaments to negotiate. There’s no use in my owning what isn’t mine.
In the same Gospel story, Jesus says these things happen so that God’s glory would be revealed: with apologies to my close and personal savior, I find that inadequate too. Particularly because I am disabled, don’t want to ride the short bus of my own uniqueness into God’s consoling arms, I want to be normal and anonymous. God wouldn’t wish something bad on me so that he could grandstand or showcase his awesomeness. He wouldn’t call me special as a way of highlighting my isolation. These days, the most adequate explanation I can find for “why I am the way I am” is that every sensation in my body, painful or otherwise, with which I’m preoccupied is an attachment from a past life, stored in my body. Every thought to which I’m too attached was gained in a past life.
In this way, the reasons for who I am are nobody’s fault but mine, but the kindness of my own purgatorial predicament comes to the fore. It’s a mercy that I would see my attachments to forms at all—as “Orthomorphosis: an Effort to Say the Whole Word” said, it’s a mercy that I would at all perceive the invitation to let go of self, desire, mind and sensation and the body. I don’t know “who I was” in any of my theoretical past lives, and it absolutely, completely doesn’t matter. I was what I am, and what everyone was and is: Christ himself, just with enough clingy bits that I, and a number of other “Christs” missed the truth of it entirely.
In this incarnation, I am disgustingly aware of spiritual realities. If this has yielded anything true, that is a party bonus: but it’s more accurate, meanwhile, to say, with St. Augustine, “si comprehendis, non est Deus.” If you comprehend it, it isn’t God. Near as I can guess, the defining characteristic of my present purgatorial predicament, of the calling that seems my slice of this moment’s vocational pie, is to look honestly at it all. If my intuition is right, (inshallah, may it be so) whatever honesty I can muster in this life is a letting go of accumulated denial from past lives. If I can be more conscious, more at home in the present moment, the semi permanent egoic distance that the Dark Night of the Self grants, which seems to be my lot to yap about—it might be more fully accomplished. The Divinization that is the culmination of shedding false selves—when, (if I’m right about Christian reincarnation) the cycle of rebirths ceases and separate self consciousness no longer separates me from the Triune Godhead—may God keep me awake for it.
As to how true any of this is, I don’t know: God knows. I’m looking forward to it, and by forward, forever within and within and within.
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