Dante and Beatrice, from Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1480, by Sandro Botticelli. © Bibliotheque Nationale/The Bridgeman Art Library
Emmanuel Swedenborg. © Mary Evans Picture Library
Cities in the Spirit World, 18th century by Emmanuel Swedenborg. Reproduced courtesy of The Swedenborg Society
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, As a New Heaven is Begun, c. 1790, by William Blake. © The Bridgeman Art Library
Last Judgement by William Blake. © A.C. Cooper/The National Trust Photographic Library
The Gates Ajar
Spiritualism photo
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini. © Mary Evans Picture Library
The Resurrection: Cookham, 1924–7 by Sir Stanley Spencer. © Tate, London 2002
Illustration from The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. © Pauline Baynes
Buddhist temple. © Ian Cumming/Tibet Images
It is five in the morning and my five-month-old baby daughter, already settled into a pattern as an inveterate dawn riser, is shifting around in my arms, her eyes wide open, her back arching, and looking every inch a miniature version of my own mother. It is not so much the composition and arrangement of her features that bridges the generations, as a particular grimace of steely resolution that she makes, and the look she sometimes gives, with eyes guarded and slightly nervous, as she weighs you up before volunteering a broad but bashful smile. In these moments, the coincidence of her birth and my mother’s death within twelve months of each other makes me believe, without a shadow of a doubt, in reincarnation.
Bleary-eyed through lack of sleep, I see such a familiar expression that unthinkingly I latch on to it. For an instant I am as true a believer in reincarnation as if I were kneeling in saffron-coloured robes in a temple in the East: for, despite however many rules of science it violates, it seems so obvious that some essence of the life that is now over has been reborn in the new life in front of me. I even convince myself that it’s more than just the looks: they seem to share the same spirit – determined, unswerving, but cautious. As I slip back into a half-slumber, my daughter is distracted by an old watch strap, which she sucks and stretches. I add a few Christian ingredients to my Buddhist brew and fondly conjure up a scene in that mythical white tunnel which, in the standard church imagery of heaven, links this world to the next. There is, I imagine, a halfway point where those going back to the pavilion pass those going out to the crease. My mother and my daughter are both there, frozen in time, suddenly alone and utterly absorbed in each other. In my dream both can walk, though for the last twenty-five years of her life my mother was a wheelchair user. They embrace, and, as they take their leave to go in opposite directions, my mother kisses my daughter gently and hands over a parcel of her own characteristics, her legacy to the grand-daughter whom she will never know in straightforward earthly terms.
At this point in the dream my wife wakens me, and suddenly our daughter, who is still doggedly playing with the watch strap, appears in an entirely different light – her own mother’s double. As swiftly as I signed up to my own hybrid version of afterlife, I now see its absurdity. My certainty dispels so quickly that I cannot even get a grip on what it was that had, only seconds before, seemed so cosy and real. Any assurance I had is gone.
Of course, when my mind is more alert and my thoughts more earthbound, I realise that the popularly understood concept of reincarnation is the ultimate comfort-blanket with which our age soothes away all the traumas and difficult questions of life. Reincarnation focuses on this life, which we know, rather than on some other life which we can only dream of. Thus it works in the short-term to assuage any anxiety about mortality, and can even take the edge off grieving. As a long-term prospect, though, it has its drawbacks. In the sixth century BC Buddha developed the already existing idea of samsara, constant rebirth, and regarded reincarnation as something negative. He wanted to liberate his followers from the cycle of dying and being born since, far from welcoming the prospect of having another go at life, many of them were terrified by the prospect of death after death. If they had had hospices and morphine perhaps they would have thought differently, but at that time it was considered bad enough to have to go through all those final agonies once, without having to do it ad infinitum. Buddha taught of nirvana, not as a physical place akin to heaven where one might get off the treadmill, but as a psychological state of release, separate from death, that could be achieved in this life.
There is an enormous contrast, then, between the reality of Buddha’s teachings and my half-awake efforts at toying with reincarnation as something to keep grief and loss at bay when cold reason offers no relief. As a simple answer to the eternal dilemma of suffering, Buddha realised, reincarnation only works in parts. It introduces a tangible degree of justice into each individual death to replace the injustices of each individual life by teaching that sinners will return humbled and the righteous will enjoy greater favour in their next incarnation, but fundamentally it embraces earthly suffering as each individual goes on and on and on trying to achieve enlightenment.
There is another drawback, even to the caricature of reincarnation that is now embraced by many in the West as a way of avoiding their own mortality. Such a scheme of things can only reassure those who have a high opinion of their own merits. My mother, who suffered the ravages of multiple sclerosis for forty years with exemplary steadfastness, once admitted to me, devout Catholic though she was, that she had tried to imagine reincarnation, albeit distorted through the filter of Catholic guilt, but had decided that rather than get an upgrade she would come back as a cow and have to endure what for her was unendurable – flies constantly landing on her face and her having no way of shooing them away.
Flirting with reincarnation appeals only to that arrogant, selfish, self-absorbed part of us all that cannot quite believe that our own death will be the end. This is the eternal attraction of every other form of belief in an afterlife. We may act every day as though we disbelieve the inevitability of death – driving too fast along a rain-soaked motorway, hanging on to the tail lights of the car in front, popping pills which will give us a high but which may also kill us – but in the midst of our oddly ambiguous relationship with mortality, there is always the abiding thought that, even if the inevitable happens, our unique being, shaped so laboriously, must live on in some form. Surely we cannot just vanish in a split second.
Sometimes I sit at traffic lights, my foot twitching on the accelerator of the car, and try to contemplate what would happen if I shot out into the line of oncoming traffic. More specifically, what would happen if I killed myself doing it? Would it all go blank at once, as doctors tell grieving relatives, reassuring them that their loved one wouldn’t have felt a thing at the moment of death? Or would I, in best Hollywood tradition, float up out of my body and look down on the crumpled tangle of cars I had left in my wake? And, if there is an afterlife, at what stage does it kick in? Straight away, after the funeral when I have the Church’s blessing, or after a sojourn in purgatory when I have waited in a queue for a few months (or years) and people on earth have prayed for the repose of my soul? I’ve never been good at queuing, and even if I managed to stick it out, what would I get to at the end? Would I even recognise it as having any connection with what went before? Would it be a physical landscape, or an illusory one? Would it exist outside my imagination, or would it even exist at all? Would others be there too? Would they recognise me? Suddenly oblivion seems so much more straightforward. As the lights turn to green and I cautiously set off on my way, I realise that these seemingly overwhelming questions are so earthbound as to be trivial compared with what I am contemplating.
Yet what is absolutely true is that we fear death because we fear the unknown: the rich build monuments to earn immortality, the wordy write books which will sit in library catalogues forever after, and the competitive strain to get their names engraved on cups and shields and prizes. All offer a