Rebirth,Community and Communal Karma in Shan Communities in Northwestern Thailand

In the Shan community of Thongmakhsan, northwestern Thailand, where I have done most of my ethnographic research, children are often identified as so-and-so who was reborn. These identifications are based on appearance, personal proclivities, and dreams around the time the child was born. I begin with the account of Ay Phit and his rebirth since it is this story which piqued my interest in rebirth. I then provide some background information on Shan in Maehongson Province. With this background, I begin the discussion of rebirth by examining local ideas about attachment and its consequences and then go on to discuss the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead, reborn or not, through the transfer of merit. I then describe possible rebirths to argue that rebirth as a human being is the most likely rebirth. In conclusion, I discuss communal karma to raise the question of the relationship between textual analyses and current local practices.     

Future Generations and the Metaphysics of the Self: Western and Indian philosophical perspectives

Our present actions can have effects on future generations - affecting not only the environment they will inherit, but even perhaps their very existence. This raises a number of important moral issues, many of which have only recently received serious philosophical attention. I begin by discussing some contemporary Western philosophical perspectives on the problem of our obligations to future generations, and then go on to consider how these approaches might relate to the classical Indian philosophical tradition. Although the Indian commitment to pre-existence and rebirth precludes the arising of the Non-Identity Problem, this does not mean that there is not still a problem about justifying our obligations to future generations. The Indian Non-Reductionists about personal identity have difficulties with this that are comparable to the difficulties of their Western counterparts, but the Indian Buddhist Reductionists offer some provocative arguments for impartiality and the rationality of altruism.     

Women's bodies,rebirth, and Shin Buddhism: Insights and challenges for Christianity

In this article, I examine a traditional Shin teaching on women and women's bodies as they relate to rebirth in Amida's Pure Land and ask how that teaching might inform Christian doctrines on women's bodies. After an analysis of the role of women's bodies in the broader Shin teachings around Amida's compassion and rebirth in the Pure Land, I conclude by raising questions for Christianity this analysis invites and suggest further lines of inquiry that might help open up more positive understanding of women and women's bodies in contemporary Christianity.     

The Concept of Intermediate Existence in the Early Buddhist Theory of rebirth

This article investigates the concept of intermediate existence in the early Buddhist theory of rebirth. The main sources investigated for this article are the Pāli canonical and commentarial literature. My main thesis is that early Buddhist discourses contain instances that suggest a spatial-temporal gap between death and rebirth known as ‘intermediate existence’ (antarābhava), in contrast to the idea of Theravāda Buddhist theory that rebirth takes place immediately without a spatial-temporal gap. In order to prove this, I argue that the ‘one who liberates in interval’ (anarāparinibbāyī) attains Nibbāna in the intermediate existence and the concept of gandhabbā in early Buddhist discourses refers to a being in intermediate existence, not to a dying consciousness (cuti-viññāna), and there are indirect inferences to an spatiotemporal gap between death and rebirth in the early Buddhist discourses.     

A Shamanic Journey under the Wildebeest Skin

Journeys taken in both the outer world as well as the inner world can become experiences of initiation. These adventures speak to us, and when we later decipher their meaning, they give our life purpose, value, and direction. By focusing on the compelling images and symbols that appear repeatedly over one's lifetime, the thread of one's myth can be revealed.

Inspired by an animal scar that appeared on my body, I traveled to Africa and embarked on two safaris. I returned home to process the meaning of my African pilgrimages by way of an inner safari wherein I reflected on the images and insights that came to me during and after these two outer journeys. In this article I include the dynamics of my totem animal (the wildebeest, a herd animal), and what was born out of my dialogues with them in active imaginations when I lay under a wildebeest skin. I came to realize that what I was participating in was a shamanic initiation process. My soul and “bush soul” seemed to have merged together and were lodged in the wildebeest as a symbol for their existence in my life. The integration of animal symbolism, dreams, and active imaginations can lead to an unanticipated renewal. Reflecting psychologically on my travels, I became increasingly aware that these inner and outer peregrinations were essential ingredients in my individuation process. This whole venture evolved into a shamanic endeavor and resulted in a psychological and spiritual rebirth.     

The Introversion of War

This article brings personal experiences, dreams, synchronicity, archetypal amplifications, and Jungian theory to bear on issues surrounding the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and explores some ways in which the unconscious psyche encourages reflection in the context of political projections. The introversion of war—a phrase borrowed from Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah—is placed in the context of Jung's theory of individuation as the means by which the death and rebirth of collective values, and hence the creative transformation of society, take place. Standing between my deceased father, whose values mirrored those of Donald Trump, and my 11- and 14-year-old sons, whose values are already quite different, I describe the phenomenology of how psyche seeks to create new values through experiences of death and rebirth.     

Affective Relatedness in Stance and Process: Commentary on Papers by Stuart A. Pizer and Barbara Pizer

Although these papers by Stuart and Barbara Pizer might initially seem unrelated, I find in them a deep complementarity, presenting an interlocking approach to analytic stance or attitude and analytic process. Both papers are responses to the totalizing nature of knowing that can reduce our ineffable subjectivity to chattel, to be used as spare parts in the service of avoiding the existential agonies of our own vulnerability in the face of death. I see generous involvement as a contemporary formulation of neutrality and as a necessary foundational stance for an analytic process captured eloquently by the notion of moving feeling forward, a process of de-totalizing, of opening a generous experience of the other as an irreducible mystery.     

Suicide survivors: psychotherapeutic implications of egocide.

Interviews with seven of ten known survivors of jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge revealed that all of them experienced transcendence and spiritual rebirth phenomena. The psychotherapeutic implications of these findings lie in helping depressed and suicidal individuals confront death in a symbolic and meaningful way. The issue is one of "egocide" (symbolic suicide) and aiding individuals in the rebirth process. In this way actual suicides can be prevented. When individuals experience partial "deaths" (like loss, failure, rejection, depression, suicidal states, or negative parts of their egos), there is opportunity for "rebirth" (positive transformation, creative change, growth, and significant spiritual reawakening). The therapeutic task is to help individuals differentiate between "ego death" and total death and to discover through the creative process of psychotherapy that overt suicide need not be a solution.     

Honoring Jonathan Edwards

In this response to the papers on Jonathan Edwards's ethical thought by Stephen A. Wilson, Gerald R. McDermott, William C. Spohn, and Roland A. Delattre, I comment on their efforts to show that ideas drawn from Edwards can be successfully appropriated for use in contemporary ethics. I conclude that the four authors build a strong cumulative case for the view that some elements of Edwards's thought can serve as resources for our ethical reflections. But I also argue for a deflationary view of how much of Edwards we will find it feasible to take on board when we engage in the task of working out a religious ethics we might accept.     

Fordham, feeling, and countertransference: reflections on defences of the self

This is a paper about the difficulties we as analysts get into when we find that a patient has activated something in our unconscious which we cannot resolve in our work with them. Fordham described at the end of his life, in a number of papers, his difficulties and discomfort at not being able to resolve an impasse with one of his patients. From the conversations we had about this situation I knew this caused them both a lot of pain. After Fordham's death his former patient consulted me. Arising from these consultations I describe how I have understood the impasse to have arisen between Fordham and his patient. This paper links character and clinical interests, personality and impasse, developmental failures and defences of the self. It is a personal statement in which I have struggled to represent the meaning in the pain these two men suffered during their analytic engagement, which lasted more than ten years. The theme of fathers and sons was central to the problem.     

Time to get rid of the ‘Modular’ in neuropsychology: A unified theory of anosognosia as aberrant predictive coding

Cognitive neuroscience, being more inclusive and ambitious in scope than cognitive neuropsychology, seems to have taken the place of the latter within the modern neurosciences. Nevertheless, recent advances in the neurosciences afford neuropsychology with epistemic possibilities that simply did not exist even 15 years ago. Human lesion studies still have an important role to play in shaping such possibilities, particularly when combined with other methods of enquiry. I first outline theoretical and methodological advances within the neurosciences that can inform and shape the rebirth of a dynamic, non‐modular neuropsychology. I then use an influential computational theory of brain function, the free energy principle, to suggest an unified account of anosognosia for hemiplegia as a research example of the potential for transition from a modular, cognitive neuropsychology to a dynamic, computational and even restorative neuropsychology. These and many other adjectives that can flexibly, take the place of ‘cognitive’ next to ‘neuropsychology’ will hopefully designate the much needed rebirth and demarcation of a field, neuropsychology itself, that has somehow lost its place within the modern neurosciences and yet seems to have a unique and important role to play in the future understanding of the brain.     

A CHARIOT FOR THE SHEKHINAH: Identity and the Ideal Life in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah

In this paper, I seek to present the range of issues involved in the efforts of sixteenth-century kabbalists to understand the nature of selfhood, and the paths prescribed for the formation of an ideal life. I reflect on the mystical writings of Moshe Cordovero, Eliyahu de Vidas, and     ayyim Vital—probing their conceptions of core identity, the polarity between body and soul, and the ethical guidance for a life well lived. In so doing, I consider the following additional themes, and their relation to the matrix of self-formation and religious identity: reincarnation and rebirth; the virtue of humility and self-effacement; the cultivation of wisdom; ideals of piety and prophetic experience; asceticism; and the spiritual transcendence of desire. In presenting this wide range of constituent themes, I argue that sixteenth-century kabbalists understood the soul to be the ultimate marker of personal identity (nuanced and complicated by the doctrine of reincarnation), and that they formulated a vision of an ideal ethics in which the human being functions as an earthly vessel for the divine presence. What is more, the preparation of that vessel required a degree of humility so extreme that the attainment of ideal personhood ultimately involved the effacement of that very identity.     

Cross-cultural perspectives on aggression in women and girls: An introduction

In this introduction to the papers in the special issue of Sex Roles on female aggression, I emphasize the range and variety of our subject and the need for a multiplicity of perspectives. In the work of the eleven authors contained in this volume we can see the utility of both relativist and universalists frameworks. I discuss the problems with identifying aggression and violence cross-culturally and underline the importance of incorporating other perspectives into our theories. I also discuss the potential advantages and shortcomings of phrasing our questions about women's and girls's aggression in terms of sexual difference.     

Are We Agents at All? Helen Steward's Agency Incompatibilism

In A Metaphysics for Freedom (Steward, Helen. A Metaphysics for Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and related papers, Helen Steward advances a new argument for incompatibilism. Though she concedes that the luck objection is persuasive with regard to existing versions of libertarianism, she claims that agency itself is incompatible with determinism: we are only agents at all if we are able to settle matters concerning our movements, where settling something requires that prior to our settling it lacked sufficient conditions. She argues that genuine agents settle very fine-grained aspects of their movements: when and how they move, even when and how their neurons fire. In this paper, I advance two linked arguments against agency incompatibilism. I argue, first, that we do not exercise direct control over the fine-grained aspects of our movements. Rather, we control these movements indirectly, by intentionally engaging in broadly individuated action types (regarding which Steward concedes that the compatibilist has a plausible story to tell). Second, I argue that these aspects of our movements are lucky for us and, since this is true, they cannot play the role of grounding our agency.     

EMBODIMENT AND REBIRTH IN THE BUDDHIST AND HINDU TRADITIONS

The belief that humans are more than their bodies is to a large extent represented in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions by the notion of rebirth, the main difference being that the former envisages a more corporeal continuing entity than the latter. The author has studied the manner in which exposure to science at a postgraduate level impinges on belief in rebirth at universities and institutes in India and Thailand. Many Hindu and Buddhist scientists tend to believe less in a reincarnating entity because of their scientific work, but Buddhists can point to their empty self doctrine, which has resonances with models of an extended self, rejecting the notion of a core self (anattā) and replacing it with a system of interdependent parts (pa?icca samuppāda), which governs previous and future lives.     

Rebirth fantasy and the psychoanalytic process

In this paper, Jungian and Freudian perspectives on the fantasy of rebirth are explored and a brief review of the literature on the theme is used to show how that the rebirth fantasy seems to be a universal fantasy in the human mind, connected with the experience of both destruction and creation. In the psychoanalytic process the rebirth fantasy is connected with initial hopes for a better life, but is also a vehicle for creating the analytic pair and for separating from the 'totalitarian object'. An account of clinical work with a patient is given to illustrate the mutual and parallel process of rebirth in both the patient and the therapist. For the patient, the therapy was experienced as an awakening or a birth. The therapist was initially doubtful about the patient's capacity to engage in the analytic process but his involvement and interest were 'born' during the early sessions, enabling the patient to rely on him to lead her out of the claustrophobic power of the totalitarian object.     

Capitalizing on the Self-Referencing Effect in General Psychology: A Preliminary Study

After reviewing the literature on the effect of personal relevance (self-schema, self-referencing effect, autobiographical significance, etc.), I implemented a constructivist narrative assignment for general psychology students. I hoped the assignment would enhance learning of and memory for psychological principles. Students wrote personal relevance papers in which they described psychological principles in their own words and provided examples of how the principles they chose were relevant in their own lives. Students assigned to write the papers produced higher exam scores. Moreover, student feedback revealed other benefits, including improved writing quality, higher grades, and increased motivation to learn.     

Ramón García,Featured Poet: Brother Bluebeard and Other Poems

In this commentary on the “Brother Bluebeard” sequence by featured poet Ramón García, I consider the profound and terrible revelations this mythic poem gives about our own dreaded times, as well as the wisdom it brings us, patterned on the archetype of initiation—descent into an underworld. In his gender-fluid retelling of the Bluebeard legend, the narrator of the poem is a man who sleeps with men, but who over the course of the poem identifies with the women whom Bluebeard has slaughtered. This is at once a highly political sequence of poems, in which we can recognize the Bluebeard in our current national story, a Jungian series of poems that illuminates the alchemical process of mortificatio and rebirth, and a story of trauma and spiritual recovery.     

The New Sacred Math

The individual soul is an ageless idea, attested in prehistoric times by the oral traditions of all cultures. But as far as we know, it enters history in ancient Egypt. I will begin with the individual soul in ancient Egypt, then recount the birth of the world soul in the Pythagorean community of ancient Greece, and trace it through the Western Esoteric Tradition until its demise in Kepler's writings, along with the rise of modern science, around 1600 CE. Then I tell of the rebirth of the world soul recently, in new branches of mathematics.     

Secular Buddhism and Justice

Abstract

Starting point: The core idea of secular Buddhism is to grasp the spirit of early Buddhism and transpose it into the present. The best known approach to implement this idea is Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, an approach which advocates an agnostic stance with regard to the doctrine of rebirth and denies its relevance for daily practice.

Type of problem:

? Is there a way to revise the doctrine of rebirth, instead of completely dropping it?

? What is the impact on the notion of justice?

Result: The doctrine of rebirth cannot be revised in a strict sense, but there are some striking similarities between the ancient and modern (biological) view on the topic. Since the stream of genetic and epigenetic information has the power to create consciousness and reflects experiences of past lives, it can be associated with the stream of consciousness (cittasantāna) in the Mahayana model of rebirth. Parents not only determine the genetic constitution of their children, they also transfer character traits by means of epigenetic heredity. If genetic inheritance is associated with karma, then genes become an element of synchronic and diachronic connectedness (pratītya-samutpāda). Instead of an individual learning process across successive lives, there is a collective learning process across successive generations.

Given the biological model of rebirth, the belief in cosmic justice turns into a quest for mundane justice. There is a thought experiment for constructing such a concept, which complies well with the secular Buddhist spirit. John Rawls assumes that the legislative deliberation is taking place ‘behind a veil of ignorance’, so that the participants of the deliberation do not know their future genetic constitution and their future position within the society. If the participants imagine that their future self is contingent and impermanent – in accordance with the Buddhist doctrine of anātman and anitya – then the resulting principles of justice will be impartial.