The Secret, Esoteric Writings of Seymour Lessans — Deconstructed!
Now I’m going to look at the ideas that Lessans puts forth is his Secret Writings, writings that Maturin (who, alas, is all hair but no substance
) dug up via Amazon.
What is his Big Secret that peacegirl didn’t want to tell us?
We will all live forever — just not as ourselves!
What happens when you die? “Your” subjective point of view, “your” consciousness, “passes over” to the next person born in the world!
I put “your” in quotes here because we have to very carefully explore what “I” and “Your” mean in such a scenario, meaning we have to study this within the framework of the philosophy of personal identity.
Notice that this is not reincarnation. Usually, reincarnation is presented as the thesis that we each have a “soul” that is the bearer of our irreducible personal characteristics, and the life that we lead is but a vessel for that soul. When we die, under the thesis of reincarnation, the soul somehow inhabits a new body, and so personal characteristics in some irreducible sense are passed on from one life to the next. Usually, accounts of reincarnation posit that we are either rewarded or punished in the next life for our behavior in the previous life, and so it goes on and on for generation after generation. Many eastern traditions counsel the pursuit of enlightenment to attain Nirvana — the escape from the endless wheel of birth, death and rebirth.
The idea that Lessans puts forth involves no soul whatever. So it’s very different from reincarnation. In fact, what Lessans proposes, so far as I can tell from reading his writing on it (yes, peacegirl, we really do read what Lessans writes, as this very post I’m making proves) is
exactly the same as what Wayne Stewart proposes in an online book,
here.
Stewart calls this phenomenon “existential passage,” and that is what I will call it, since it’s rather colorful and easy to remember, and since, so far as I recall, Lessans gave no particular name to this alleged phenomenon.
Why is “existential passage” such good news? Because according to Lessans, The Golden Age will soon be upon us, when everyone realizes that Lessans was right about all the stuff that he wrote, and the world will be perfect. Hence, when you die, you will be born, again and again and again, into a perfect world!
If the Golden Age does NOT come to pass, then existential passage doesn’t sound very attractive, alas.
Remember, it’s not reincarnation, and there is no notion of karma — of being rewarded in the next life, for example, for virtuous behavior in this life.
Existential Passage is just a big roulette wheel. For instance, Einstein died in 1955. For all we know, the next person born in the world after Einstein was Billy Buttfuck in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who grew up to be a racist Ku Klux Klan member with an I.Q. of 35. Existential passage: not so good for Einstein.
In fact, if EP is true, since it happens again and again, the probabilities converge on unity that each of us will experience
terrible lives, again and again: We will raped by an abusive parent, we will be tortured to death as political prisoners, we will die in a fire. And so on.
Of course, one can’t appeal to negative consequences as a way of rejecting some hypothesis or theory. The hypothesis will either be true or false regardless of the consequences.
Both Stewart and Lessans make the following key point about EP: You are conscious only in relation to others, and so your consciousness will be yours, your personal identity consistent across time, while you are in “this” life. That is, you cannot have the consciousness of anyone else in the world, who is alive at the same time you are. You can only “pass” to a future, non-existent person. That’s very important to keep in mind, as I hope to show.
So does the existential passage promoted by Lessans and Stewart make any sense? I’ll present the arguments pro and con in a later post.