As we said in the previous post, for Christianity reincarnation, or rather eternal life, occurs outside of this life, in a "beyond," while, for Judaism, it will occur on this earth, with this matter, when come the time of the Massiach (Messiah).
And it will be a material reincarnation, the bones and the ashes will be reconverted into new ones, those who died will be resurrected, and death will be banished forever.
Some talented scriptwriter of Hollywood could interpret that it is an alien message, so that DNA of the just ones is kept, and that when the moment arrives -the generation of the Messiah-, with that genetic material they can regenerate their bodies, those that have been buried in Israel, and not lost, nor have they been cremated, namely the 600,000 souls.
This theme of the 600,000 souls is fascinating from the point of view of Kabbalah, and will surely be the subject of another post. But let's conclude what the Kabbalists have said about reincarnation, and how it can happen (happen to us) during our current life. And also in a conscious and desired way.
The issue of the corruption of flesh
This the Kabbalists have always known. That is why Isaac Luria, the ARI, in the Sixteenth Century in Safed, interpreted reincarnation not as reviving a bag of bones, or turning dust into life again. On the contrary, the Mekubalim (Kabbalists) have always said that the body is mortal, and that it is a simple garment in which the souls, which are eternal, enter and leave during the cycles of life and death.
At this point, the Eastern ideas of reincarnation and those of Kabbalah coincide. It is an old soul that happens to inhabit new bodies.
ARI himself studied it in the texts called "The Doors of Reincarnation" (Saar HaGilgulim), where Gilgulim has been lousily translated as "reincarnation", when the exact meaning should be the "transmigration" or "rotation" of souls.
After this is said, it is clear that the soul, which is pure nonlocal information, a derivation of the light of the creator, can incarnate in a new body after it has abandoned the old, the one that dies.
One soul, many souls
It has been said in Kabbalah that there is only one general soul, the Adam Harishom, and at the same time it has been said that there are 600,000 souls, no more. How can we understand this, how to explain it? Is it one or are 600,000? And what about the rest, with the remaining 6,900,400,000 human beings (or more) that exist on the planet? Do not they have a soul?
The error comes from interpreting the soul as the Self, the ego, the sensation of the body, the individual perception of oneself that we all (all?) Have. And to think that it is indivisible, unique, irreplicable. The latter has been enshrined in many treaties on human rights, but it seems that it is not totally this way in biology, nor in Kabbalah.
The soul is non-local information, which is permanently connected to its origin, and which receives that "data" through a kind of "cloud" (as we understand it today on the Internet), which comes from a distant server (aleph, keter, as it is said in Kabbalah), which is held by many religions as "The Creator."
The cloud is the collective unconscious of Jung, so that in that cloud all beings, souls, are interconnected, even with the less complex but "sentient" souls of animals, with the various living energies that flow from the Earth, or that come from the stars, as astrologers have always believed, many of them Kabbalists.
In this sense, the human soul is one. It is the I, the finite body, that possesses a necessary fiction of uniqueness to have identity and to be able to survive. This has been the case so far, in the future we do not know.
But understand that what comes down to a body that is born, is a spark, a point, of that collective soul. We could say that it is just a chip, but enough to contain all the information and interconnection that is required to function with life.
Therefore, the Hebrew calendar counts its time from this Adam (5,778 years), and not from the geological origin of the material planet, or from the anthropological origin of Homo Erectus. They are three very different things.
The general soul split, divide into sparks, and the first ones that are recorded in the scriptures are those of the 600,000 who fled from Egypt.
But these souls in turn are still dividing (the general soul is still fragmenting itself), without affecting the information we call "soul", because this information is non-local, and every new sparks (chips) no matter how small they are, serve perfectly for the interconnection with "the cloud" and the connection with the distant "server" (the Creator).
Suffice it to contain the codes of the Plan of Creation, and they will work perfectly within a body.
And when a sage dies, his light, his information, rises to the cloud, and there he stays, so that he can visit us in dreams, inspire us, and even partially replicate within our own soul, inside our spark.
This is what the Kabbalists tell, who feel reincarnated as Jacob, Shimon Bar Yochai, or any other mekubal. This is the case of creators and masters. From both invoking and reading Borges or García Márquez, those sparks end up becoming part of your soul, they reincarnate in you, you reincarnate in life with sparks from the soul of Mozart, as happened to his disciple Franz Süssmayr, who at the death of the master he had to finish the Requiem, and he did it in such a perfect and beautiful way, that it is as much or more Mozartian than the parts that reach Lacrimosa, written by Wolfgang Amadeus.
This is the way, studying, invoking teachers, Kabbalists think that you can reincarnate in life.
In the next post, we will review what my teachers say in Israel, and the lines of master-student souls from the ARI generation to Baal ha Sulam, the RABASH, Michael Laitman and his disciples, among whom I am.
Shalom!
Óscar Reyes-Matute
(Samuel Ibn Motot / שמואל אבן מתת)
Recommended video:
Rav Micahel Laitman (my master) with Larry King, about reincarnation