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Resurrection and Reincarnation
Peter Novak's Consciousness Research
 The
apparent contradictory concepts of reincarnation and resurrection
can be resolved by a very interesting theory developed by
Peter Novak, author of
The Division of Consciousness:
The Secret Afterlife of the Human Psyche
and
The Lost Secret of Death: Our
Divided Souls and the Afterlife.
His compelling theory, which he calls the "Division
of Consciousness Theory," is based both on modern science
and ancient scripture. It explains for the first time how
each of these ancient perspectives might be true simultaneously.
Visit
Peter Novak's website
for more information about Peter and his research.
Novak's
research uncovered extensive data from both scientific and
scriptural sources that all pointed to the same promising
yet highly disturbing conclusion - that the human psyche
does survive physical death, but often divides entirely
apart in the process into separate conscious and unconscious
components. Novak suggests that the traditional "reincarnation"
and "resurrection" hypotheses can, at long last,
be reconciled by factoring the dissimilar scientific qualities
and functions of the conscious and unconscious minds into
the equation, pointing out that scriptures from a great
number of different traditions already reflect just such
a divided, "binary-soul" vision of the afterlife.
Basically, Novak's theory states that
the soul body and spirit body separate after death. The
soul body is discarded and the spirit ultimately reincarnates
with a new soul body. After a large number of reincarnations,
the spirit has discarded a large number of soul bodies.
At the time of the "Final Judgment," a doctrine
held by all Middle Eastern religions, the so-called "resurrection"
will occur. Novak theorizes that at this time, all the discarded
soul bodies will reunited with the spirit body. The result
will be a world of highly enlightened people knowing all
their past lives and their associated life experience and
knowledge. Thus, reincarnation and resurrection are not
mutually exclusive concepts according to Novak's theory.
Not only do elements of both classic
psychology and modern sociological research support such
a hypothesis, but eerily similar concepts appearing in
Biblical,
Persian,
Egyptian,
Gnostic,
Greek,
Hawaiian, Chinese,
Native American,
Swedenborgian,
and many other traditions raise the intriguing possibility
that this peculiar and unfamiliar "Division Theory"
may actually be a millennia-old case of deja-vu.
If this extraordinary
hypothesis is proven to be true, it will revolutionize the
entire field of religion. A number of respected scientists,
theologians, and philosophers are already convinced Novak's "Division
Theory" will do just that.
The following are
excerpts from Peter Novak's book reprinted by permission
from Peter Novak.
The Science
Early this century,
our scientists discovered and proceeded to map out the basic
characteristics and functions of the conscious and unconscious
halves of the human mind. But for nearly a century, those
psychological discoveries have quietly contained an unnoticed
surprise of incalculable significance to the world of theology
and life-after-death research. According to the commonly
accepted tenets of modern scientific theory, if the human
psyche actually was to survive and continue to function
after death, but did so in a divided state, then the two
surviving components of the psyche would, due to their very
natures, encounter entirely different conditions after death,
conditions startlingly similar to those described in Eastern
and Western traditions:
The conscious would
completely lose all traces of its memory, but it would also
remain free to go on to new experiences (in effect, reincarnating).
Its partner, meanwhile,
would undergo a memory-review, and then become trapped in
a dreamlike, unconscious heavenly or hellish netherworld.
In short, modern
science has found that the conscious and unconscious each
possess the very characteristics necessary for them to perfectly
reproduce the millennia-old afterlife scenarios of Eastern
and Western traditions, but only if they divided apart at
death.
A bizarre coincidence?
Perhaps. But an after-death division would also explain
a number of extremely peculiar details routinely reported
by researchers investigating near-death experiences, past-life
regressions, and ghost reports.
The History
Such an after-death
split was widely recognized in ancient times, being mentioned
in Gnostic scriptures as the division of the soul and spirit,
in Egyptian texts as the detaching of the "ba"
from the "ka", in Greek teachings as the rending
of the "thymos" from the "psyche", in
Hindu doctrine as the withdrawing of the "vital spirit"
from the "reasonable soul", and in Zoroastrian
works as the separation of the "urvan" and "daena".
Such an after-death division of
dual souls also appears in ancient Chinese religion as the
splitting of the "p'o" and "hun", in
Native American tradition as the cleaving of the "ni"
and "nagi", and, more recently, in Swedenborgian
theology as the parting of one's "inner and outer elements",
and in
Edgar Cayce's readings
as the divide between the soul and spiritual forces
(this same fundamental dicotomy
is also reflected in the philosophies of Kant, Blake, Hegel,
Tillich, Schopenhauer, Buber, and Sartre).
Just as with today's
conscious and unconscious, each of the above traditions
held that one of the two soul-units was more willful, objective,
and intellectual, while the other was more responsive, subjective,
and emotional. And in each case, the two soul-units encountered
radically different afterlife conditions after separating.
The Christian
Connection
Numerous passages
within the recovered Nag Hammadi scriptures make it clear
that such a division-based doctrine was not only present
in the early stages of Christianity, but constituted the
very heart of the mysterious Gnostics' theology:
As did the cultures
surrounding them, the Gnostics viewed man's inner being
as bipartite in nature, differentiated into two entirely
different elements - soul and spirit:
"...without the soul the
body does not sin, just as the soul is not saved without
the spirit. But if the soul is saved when it is without
evil, and the spirit is also saved, then the body becomes
free from sin. For it is the spirit that quickens the
soul...." -
The Apocryphon of James 11:38-39,
12-1-6
For the Gnostics,
death specifically meant having these two parts divide apart,
having one's inner being sliced right down the middle at
death:
"For such [death] is the
judgment which had come down from above. It has passed judgment
on everyone; it is a drawn sword, with two edges, cutting
on either side." -
The Gospel of Truth 25:35-26:4
"On
the day you were one you became two. But when you
become two, what will you do?" -
The Gospel of Thomas 11
They were even under
the impression that Jesus himself underwent such a division
at his death:
"'My God, my God, why, O
Lord, have you forsaken me?' It was on the cross that he
said these words, for it was there that he was divided."
- The Gospel of Philip
68:26-29
To be "divided"
was spiritual doom, while being "undivided" meant
spiritual salvation:
"If he is undivided, he will
be filled with light, but if he is divided, he will be filled
with darkness ..." -
The Gospel of Thomas 61
The story of Adam
and Eve was inextricably linked to their ideas about death,
seeing the separation of Eve from Adam as a profoundly seminal "First
Division", the tragic origin of death itself:
"When Eve [the soul] was
still in Adam [the spirit], death did not exist. When
she separated from him, death came into being. If
he again becomes complete and attains his former self, death
will be no more." -
The Gospel of Philip 68:22-26
This division and
its reparation are themes these Gnostic scriptures return
to again and again, often using the term "woman"
to indicate "soul", and "man" for "spirit"
:
"For they [the soul and spirit]
were originally joined to one another when they were with
the Father before the woman [the soul] led astray the man
[the spirit], who is her brother. This marriage has brought
them back together again and the soul [the woman] has been
joined to her true love, her master [the man, the spirit]...."
- The Exegesis on the
Soul 133:4-9
Repairing this ancient
division was expected to restore the souls of the dead to
life:
"If the woman [soul] had
not separated from the man [spirit], she would not die with
the man. His separation became the beginning of death.
Because of this, Christ came to repair the separation which
was from the beginning, and again unite the two, and
to give life to those [souls] who died as a result of the
separation and unite them." -
The Gospel of Philip 70:9-22
This "Reunion
of the Two" is a common theme in the Gnostic scriptures. But
instead of always calling them "soul and spirit"
or "Adam and Eve", they sometimes portray
the two in terms very reminiscent of science's "conscious
and unconscious":
"When you make the two one,
and when you make the inside like the outside, and the outside
like the inside, and the above like the below, and when
you make the male and the female one and the same, so that
the male not be male nor the female ... then you will enter
the Kingdom." -
The Gospel of Thomas 22
To firmly unite these
two, they thought, would make a person like Christ himself:
"Jesus said, 'If two [the
soul and spirit, the conscious and unconscious] make peace
with each other in this one house [body], they will say
to the mountain, `Move away', and it will move away' ... "
- The Gospel of Thomas
48
Given Novak's extensive
research on this subject and the evidence he provides to
support it, his Division Theory should be considered to
be one of the best theories ever devised to explain the
mysteries of reincarnation and resurrection.
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