Reincarnation – an original Christian doctrine

25 In spite of many dangers, parapsychology makes a not to be underestimated contribution these days in regards to the survival of the soul after death thereby underpinning the possibility of spiritual connections with the hereafter. This belief is one prerequisite required to be able to accept the ideological environment of the doctrine of reincarnation. When representatives of the Church ridicule this faith in the effectiveness of another world in spite of all the parapsychological evidence by dismissing it as “spiritism” in the sense of an irrational superstition, they only reveal their own lack of information . One does however have to take note of the fact that two separate camps, with different models of explanation, have formed within parapsychology: Whilst animists 32 want to place all extrasensory apparitions squarely at the feet of psychically capable, living human beings – like clairvoyants or telepaths – thereby coping without religious components, spiritualists and spiritists assume that a lot of these occult phenomena are caused by souls from other worlds, often also by souls of deceased human beings. The word “spiritism” is generally defined as “doctrine of the spirits” in dictionaries, it has however suffered a negative change of denotation in the meantime and a lot of religiously minded groups, those that receive doctrines from the hereafter, consciously avoid it. The literature dealing with the doctrine of reincarnation uses the term “spiritualism” most of the time. “ Spiritualism differs from spiritism in that it deals with the living, whilst the other deals with the dead. Spirituality is part of spiritualism, that is to say, enhancing the soul and the augustness of the spirit.” 33 According to another definition: all that believe “that there is more than just something physical about them…are spiritualists.” 34 Spiritualists therefore conspicuously differ from materialists and also from leading theologian and philosopher engaged in a battle of opinions that assert that the soul, separated from its terrestrial body, can lead an independent existence. This somehow makes all occidental proponents of the doctrine of reincarnation spiritualists . The negative conceptual restriction of the word “spiritism” simultaneously reveals a difficult problem to us, namely burdened with the extraction of information from the world of the hereafter: How is one going to recognise whether the spiritual messages do actually come from the divine regions, the regions of things that are alive, and not through spiritism from the lower regions, the regions of the “dead”, those removed from God? Why is it that a lot of messages contain the doctrine of reincarnation, whilst others don’t? 35 Adler sceptically writes: “Such messages are however contradictory and the assertion, by those that negate reincarnation, that they are mentally still underdeveloped do not scotch this either.” 36 The reason why Adler doesn’t take this argument serious must astonish most, particularly when one takes his extraordinary level of knowledge into consideration. He himself cites the condition these messages from the positive world of spirit, subjected to God’s control, take place: 32 See Miers, see P. 30 33 Miers, see P. 382 34 Adler, see P. 123 35 See Köberle, see P 148 36 Adler, see P. 173