The Mystery of Reincarnation
To take a break from writing the Hexagramatic Scene, I figure I would write an article I already have formulated in my head. Recently, I came to an understanding of my own reincarnation, and it was rather strange. I have been studying this discipline of reincarnation studies, and have been trying to marry it to generative anthropology for a while now. I feel that I am at an adequate head-space to now begin to write on it, in a way I can see as level-headed, scientific and ostensible.
To begin with, what is reincarnation? While I am presuming some marginal degree of familiarity with the topic, I will outline some pertinent questions and context behind it. Now, weaving back to the question, we can begin by stating that reincarnation is considered as transmigration of the soul. This means that each being in reality that we consider a self-contained entity does not disappear when it dies; rather, it goes into a state which is body-less and then, under some form of spiritual law, gathers forces in this body-less state. Once it has regathered strength it finally “reincarnates”. Many different disciplines and religions consider this state of being free of the body differently, but they all generally agree that reincarnation is a spiritual fact. Most mystics state this as a reality, so it certainly is a serious enough topic, given how universal of an experience it is.
How might this be possible is not necessarily the question that needs to be answered, per se, but rather we need to adress our prima facie experience with reincarnation first. This is, one, the moral concerns of reincarnation, and, two, the self-conscious experience that the idea of reincarnation evokes. This is to say, how reincarnation affects human culture, how we consider morality, and how reincarnation concerns our own experience of self.
I will, for now, presume that my readers are familiar with the originary scene, so we will not restate it exactly, except for its implications herein. We hear from Gans and plenty of thinkers within generative anthropology that consciousness, as we consider human consciousness, is dependent upon language. This particular feeling of consciousness, which we consider in our culture more precisely the feeling of self consciousness, is something that only comes much later after the originary scene. This must be so, because to be conscious of your self is to be able to state, linguistically, or to announce your own precence. So we can consider the second experience with reincarnation aptly here, where all of what we do indeed consider our true personality, our self consciousness, is dependent upon the development of language through history. This is also to say, that we are dependent on how people before us have used language, thus how people have defined what it means to be conscious, such that we now can make use of their previous molding of what it means to be conscious as the ground of our own actions.
It is very appropriate from this point of view, to see how reincarnation becomes an obvious fact to many. Everything that you are is built upon the “shoulders of giants”. There is nothing that we have that is not indebted to people before us who have paved the way for what we currently have now: you are indebted to your parents, to your society for its monetary system, to many other things we may take for granted. (There would be an interesting intersection here between a study of reincarnation as a study of debt. It would be interesting to disect Adam and Zach’s paper on There is No Economy in regards to this.) We can imagine that, under a state of mystigogical perception, we may even begin to attain a certain ostensive memory of our past lives. These would be the individualities that we previously had possesed, or that is to say, we would gain memories of people who would have been necessary for the development of our own self conscious perception. Without them, we would not be able to be conscious of the things we currently are conscious of. How exactly one may attain this kind of percpetion is then not defined, necessarily by us, but rather by those who have already gained this perception—as we can only learn how to use and invoke this ostensive memory from those who have held this ability before we had.
The first prima facie experience of reincarnation, its moral and societal implication, is hidden within this second experience. By being human you belong to a lineage of other humans who have been engaged with a moral-linguistic scene. And now, you have found yourself participating on the same scene, and thus, to a degree feel that you must continue their legacy. In order to participate in the present discourse you must believe that you have something to contribute, to begin with, and thus, you already have unconsciously signed a deed, a debt, to be a welcome possessee of the originary dialogue that has been occuring throughout all these human centuries.
Anthropoetics of Reincarnation
Before we begin to talk about my own reincarnation, we must now discuss that use of ostensive memory. Let us consider this: in order for the originary scene to have taken place to begin with, there must have been various evolutionary factors at play that led to an increase in human mimesis. These I have outlined in my Erda article; such as the exit away from being a tree people, to then attaining bipedalism through the fusing of the tailbone to the hip, etc.. We can then see that there were various events that led us to the originary scene, and thus, as we begin to dispute more and more about the possibility of the originary scene itself, and thus the emergence of language, we begin to grow conscious and make linguistic (that is to say we make these events grammatical) what are originally pre-linguistic events.
This is part of what is meant by memory of ostensivity: it is the essential fact that to use the ostensive we must have been gifted or have chosen the option to participate on the scene of language, at all. We, then, begin to track all of the geometric lines that lead to the new transcendental geometry that appears in the originary scene.
Thus, there is only ever so much that one can pursade someone of the truth, of the ostensive. You can continue to track all of these geometric figures that lead to the point of paradox, but none of these non-paradoxical lines can, by themselves, lead to the ostensive which is a different kind of geometry. And so, when we are speaking about, lets say, an ostensive “fact” such as reincarnation, we must be sure that we have learned properly how to discern what is ostensible and what is fantasy.
(When we wish for such and such spiritual fact to be real, we begin to track every infitesimal geometry to force something that is false to now be true—it no longer is apparent but is manufactured.)
Now, for myself, I have vetted my reincarnation as ostensibly true and went through the various intiatic procedures to be able to discern the difference between fantasy and reality. In order to give a new kind of anthropoetics of reincarnation studies I will inaugurate some idioms to help bridge the gap between what we may define as a personal ostensive memory and a scenic imagination which can be shared among others. In reality, these two things are very marginally different and in most cases are identical, except when they are not, in which case we see a gap break out between formal linguistic utterance and recognized institutionalized idioms.
We can also refer to each reincarnation as a scenic individuality. In this case, each scenic individuality contains, what we refer to in esoteric science as, an ego; or what we have recently discussed as the specific self-consciousness possessed by a specific member of the originary scene. Eventually, this scenic individuality leaves the personage it has possessed and then, when the conditions for a new person appear, it will then begin to possess its next avatar. Of course, in more advanced reincarnation discussions, this is expanded well beyond this, because we never incarnate by ourselves, and we always are in the context of a group of people. This has often been called ones soul group, in new age contexts. We could call this the “originary members of your scenic individuality”, but I find the idioms for this tend to spool outwards fairly far and is not quite as snappy as your soul group. Perhaps, it would be a bit youthful to begin to think about whether this is your “scene” that you belong on, as they used to say fairly often, e.g. “I don’t quite think this my scene.”
A Dance of Ostensives
Rudolf Steiner stated that his next reincarnation would be around the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first, which was exactly when I was born. Further esoteric facts he gave was that when individuals spend too much time in the period between death and a new birth attatched to the relationships the formed in their past life, they develop an abundance of copper consciousness: which to sumerize affects primarily the digestive area, causing disturbances, and as well the region of the larynx and causes overactivity of speech. Near the end of his life Steiner finally took upon leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, and he “untied his karma” with the members of the society. It was said that that caused him a great illness in the last portion of his life. Concerning myself, I was born with a gluten intolerance and further spoke to myself often growing up; which seems to match with Steiner’s karma near the end of his life. (I used this as a testing point for Steiner’s supersensible research as well, where I took his advice on administering a literal copper supplement, and recieved great results on helping heal these illnesses.)
In his early life Steiner always had perception of some invisible world, and knew he wanted to merge both science and faith. To me, I had a very similar experience, with my future vision dreams growing up, that led me to wanting to find the common reality between both science and religion (or the supernatural). There are some very particular experiences we could go into, but both of us as well had very rough paths to follow, as also having a prediliction to emotional sensitivity. We both encoutered a masculine “Master” who helped illuminate our path to us, and gave us a warrior creed.
We could continue to go on and go in depth on each particular life experience, but as you continue to discover these things, it is easier to develop an image of your own life experience and compare it to the image of the others life experience.
Now so far, none of these really bring in the clincher, and we still have not risen to a true ostensible fact, a decisive decision to be had. This happened to me when I considered what happened after Steiner’s death. Much of Steiner’s teachings were taken up, except one, curiously. That was his idea of the three-fold social organism. Adam often talks about a very similar thing in the aesthetic-political-commercial orders, in fact, if one studies these, one realizes they are the exact same idea. There was not a great undertaking in Steiner’s life, that led to lasting results, of this three-folding of the social organism. He saw that there needed to be a seperation of each of these wings of the organism, so as to not have, what we would call, super-sovereigns hijacking the disciplines.
My role in this life is to take and advance many of his approaches (such as the relationship between geometry, mysticism and grammar, which is a unique thesis to me; as well as the three-fold social order). You cannot explain my article Geometry of Anthropoetics without refering to this fact and study of my previous reincarnations; which was a thesis, the merging of mysticism-geometry-grammar, I actually had began when I was between the ages of 17-18. This is a fairly crazy hypothesis for someone of that age to just simply derive, which further reinforces this connection—of course it took me many more years to be able to expand this hypothesis to include the concept of the Hexagrammatic Scene, and finally formalize it.
Studying Steiner gave me the clarity to coherently formalize many of my intuitions that I could not properly translate into ordinary language. Upon studying the people in Steiner’s soul group, it also revealed my own soul group. I learned a lot about the people I stumbled upon that helped me continue to articulate and grow creatively. When you engage in this kind of meditative research, it slowly dawns upon you that this is as real as anything else in life, and even is more real than a lot of previously held beliefs.
A lot of my “destiny” in this life is to serve as the balancing rod between the more ahrimanic instantiation of generative anthropology, as well as the luciferic formulation (known as Buddhist GA). This is worthy of an article in its own rite, and I will illuminate more on this, but to summerize, the three heads of the great sub-disciplines of Gansian generative anthropology are formally: Thirdness or the generation of center-study-center labratories, Promethian Idealism as understood through buddhist generative anthropology, and scenic spirituality as the realization of esoteric (hidden) scenic geometry.
Now that I have finally put my own stamp, clear and precise on my own path, I can start to better communicate each of these branches of generative anthropology back to how Gans originally formulated it. So that we all may consciously understand the value of each of our paths and use them to increase our own consciousness of our scenes. We may all connect back to the center, and thus also realize how each of us can coexist as Big Men who take the center and use it in different ways, all unique and valuable.
I wrote a general twitter thread on some of this, which you can find here, and here.
I believe that is all I have to say for now. I feel like there is not much left to say in this particular article. I will leave you all off with this: you have a lot more potential than you may even realize. All of us have very interesting backstories in this grouping of generative anthropologists, and I could not be more proud of all of you who have stuck around. I do truly believe that this discipline has withstood a great test over the years: a test of love. How long will you stick with something, even if you do not know everything there is to know about it? How long until you stop producing fruits?
Generative anthropology is not just about the “little bang” of the emergence of language: it is about how the wisdom of this little bang creates new creative impulses, new vigour and renewed wisdom, through purely conscious experience. It is not the hypothesis that has always made GA great, it has always been those who entertain it that have made the hypothesis amazing.
You all are the future. Remember that.
Peace.