Irrelevance Glorified

(note : originally written in 1998)

Sometimes I wonder what happens after we die. This is a matter of great debate, although perhaps for strange reasons, since it doesn’t quite matter since you’re, well, dead. It’s interesting how the afterlife, or even just the suspicion of one, influences the way we live and how we interact with each other. There are many schools of thought, ranging from the whole “hell and heaven” idea to reincarnation. Well, I just started wondering about the logistics of reincarnation……

If I figure reincarnation correctly, you get your little turn on earth, and after you die, you come back in altered form, in another body and place in the social order that is dependent on how well you lived your previous life. For reasons beyond my control, the criterion for what qualifies as a good life isn’t available at the time of the writing of this thought. And I further understand that reincarnation isn’t just limited to people, but also other animals. Maybe even plants, but then that would make even vegetarianism unacceptable. At any rate, people are born, and then are reborn, except for the select few that are just so kick-ass and one with the universe that they don’t have to go through the loop anymore.

This got me to wonder just how many souls there are. I mean, it’s not like tissues; use one, throw it away. You get to reuse them over and over in a giant cyclical movement. Well, at some point there were only a few hundred million people on this earth. Now it’s approaching seven billion. Where are all those souls coming from? Some may say that many animals have died, more than picking up the slack, but I would argue that many other animals, such as rats, ants, and cockroaches have easily made up for the decimation of many species, and most probably number hundreds of times more than the loss. Again I ask, where are these souls coming from?

Another thing to consider is the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I’m a firm believer in extraterrestrial life. I just don’t believe that they’ve visited us. But I find it hard to believe that in the vast cosmos, amids the trillions and quadrillions of stars, there won’t be at least a few that can support life. And it would be unreasonable to think that these beings wouldn’t be able to reincarnate too. So we have to add them to the pot, too.

So a couple of thousand years into the future, when we’ve no doubt colonized other planets and are fruitfully multiplying there, too, and other civilizations are busy prospering, too, there’s gonna be a lot of souls running around in the universe. And this number will only increase.

Assuming there are a finite number of souls, there are two extreme choices to choose from. There could be a small number of souls (small meaning only a fraction of a googol) and eventually all the souls will be used up, meaning they will be in existence. That, I suppose, would create some sort of mysterious limit on the population of the universe. No one can be born until someone dies. This isn’t even including the gradual attrition of usable souls because people attain nirvana. This number will only increase with time, assuming nirvanage isn’t a revolving door. The other possibility is that there are a vast number of souls, enough to keep us going for a great long while, longer(dare I say it?) even than the lifetime of this page. In that case, at our present point in time, there isn’t a lot of turnover among souls. In fact, we could still be going through our first turnover, in which case no one has been reincarnated, and no one will be maybe for some time. Those souls who’s material bodies have already succumbed to biological death are at the end of the line(even if the reincarnation lottery o’ souls is a random process, the vast number of souls insures that the probability of dying and then immediately reincarnating is small enough to be pragmatically comparable to going to the end of the line) and won’t get around to being reincarnated for quite some time.

It seems to me that if people are already talking about reincarnation, then reincarnation must in fact already be going on, meaning that there are a relatively small number of souls. But this is just unfeasible. Really, the only way to accomodate everyone would be have an infinite number of souls. But if there are an infinite number of souls, then there would effectively be no reincarnation. Which is just as well. I would really be scared about what I’d come back as.