THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED
WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR
This is Part 4 of an 11-Part Series
Extracted from Chapter Two of my book The Seven Gates of Soul
Previous posts in this series include:
The Fear of Death in Early Cultures
The Fear of the Soul’s Journey After Death
Toward a Cyclical Conception of Death as a Part of Life
The Cyclical Worldview and Its Association
With a Desire for Release From Suffering
A cyclical awareness of the soul’s journey was taken to a pinnacle of understanding in a somewhat different way in a number of religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Orphism, and the Mesoamerican worldview. These cultures attempted to catalog not just the cycles of an individual life, but those of our collective evolutionary process as well. In Hinduism, for example, elegantly imaginative chronological systems were worked out, involving cycles within cycles within cycles. A kalpa, or day in the life of Brahma, the Creator, was equivalent to approximately 4,320 million earth years. 360 kalpas made up one year in the life of Brahma, who lived for 100 years, and spanned the duration of a world from its creation to its destruction. After a period of dormancy, Brahma then recreated the world for another round (Willard Oxtoby, World Religions: Eastern Traditions, p. 45). Here in the West, the early Mayans worked out a system for contemplating larger cycles beyond the span of a human lifetime, derived from a combination of the earlier Olmec tzolkin cycle of 260 days and the Venus cycle of 584 days, and a Long Count, equal to 5125.36 years (John Major Jenkins, "The How and Why of the Mayan End Date in 2012 AD," The Mountain Astrologer, December 1994/January 1995, p. 52). Astrologers speak of the precession of the equinoxes, a grand cycle involving the movement of the vernal equinox backward through the zodiac. The entire cycle takes 26,000 years and in turn, is divided into ages, such as the Piscean age, the Aquarian age, and so on.
These cyclical worldviews are innately more useful to a language of soul than those based upon a fearful contemplation of the horrors of death, where death is conceived as an abrupt termination of a linear life. Many of these worldviews, especially those derived from religion, however, are plagued by the belief that the embodied life is a struggle and a source of suffering from which it is desirable to be liberated. HInduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism believe that incarnation (and embodiment) is a form of imprisonment in matter, and that the end goal of the spiritual journey is an emancipation. Hindus conceive life to be the result of previous actions, the consequences of which remain to be played out endlessly, or at least until one completes a course of karmic retribution that entails suffering through multiple incarnations. Although Buddhism denies the existence of an individual soul capable of surviving from one incarnation to the next, it similarly believes that the residual karma of each individual becomes a “seed of consciousness,” called vijnana ("Reincarnation," Encyclopedia Brittanica, Vol. 9, p. 1009), around which future incarnations perpetuate the cycle of suffering that marks the material world of the body. To end this cycle, Buddhists seek the gradual extinction of the worldly desires and attachments that keep the soul trapped here. In the Orphic tradition, successive incarnations were construed as "the cycle of sorrow and misery[i]" from which the soul hoped to escape after initiation into the secret knowledge imparted by the cult.
All cyclical traditions agree that disidentification with or detachment from the body and its desires, in combination with an ethical life, are the keys to liberation from the physical realm and a return to union with Spirit. They embrace a cyclical model, potentially useful as a catalyst to the integration of life and death, but they reject the embodied soul no less fiercely than the fear-based hunting cultures, albeit in the opposite direction. Instead of fearing death and its finality as the hunting cultures did, these early cyclical traditions seemed to welcome it as an end to the terminal suffering inherent in life. Within the context of these cultures, death itself was no guarantee of a release from suffering, since rebirth was imminent to the extent that there remained unfinished business, desire and/or attachment to life. Nonetheless, implied within these religions was the assumption that liberation could not be achieved while the soul was embodied.
Such an attitude is antithetical to the evolution of the embodied soul in this life - which given the uncertainty of the Great Mystery that is Death, despite our beliefs about, may be the only one it has.