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In philosophy, metempsychosis (Ancient Greek: μετεμψύχωσις) is the transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. The term is derived from ancient Greek philosophy, and has been recontextualized by modern philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, [1] Kurt Gödel, [2] Mircea Eliade, [3] and Magdalena Villaba; [4] otherwise, the word "transmigration" is more ...
Plato considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal occupant of a person's being. Plato said that even after death, the soul exists and is able to think. He believed that as bodies die, the soul is continually reborn (metempsychosis) in subsequent bodies.
Spirit's return to matter (reincarnation), as many times as necessary, as the natural mechanism to achieve material and moral improvement. However, for the doctrine, the perfection that humanity is capable of achieving is relative, as only God possesses absolute perfection, infinite in all things. Spiritists reject belief in metempsychosis; [55]
It is thus the equivalent of metempsychosis. The term has a narrower and more specific use in the system of Arthur Schopenhauer, who applied it to his doctrine that the will does not die but manifests itself afresh in new individuals. He thus modified the original metempsychosis doctrine which maintains the reincarnation of the particular soul.
The teaching most securely identified with Pythagoras is the "transmigration of souls" or metempsychosis, which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. He may have also devised the doctrine of musica universalis , which holds that the planets move according to mathematical equations and thus resonate to ...
Another nominal derivative from the same root is saṃsāra, referring to the same concept: a "passage through successive states of mundane existence", transmigration, metempsychosis, a circuit of living where one repeats previous states, from one body to another, a worldly life of constant change, that is rebirth, growth, decay and redeath.
Belief in metempsychosis was common to both currents, although it also seems to contain differences. Where the Orphics taught about a cycle of grievous embodiments that could be escaped through their rites, Pythagoras seemed to teach about an eternal, neutral metempsychosis against which personal actions would be irrelevant.
Between the 1870s and c. 1882, Blavatsky taught a doctrine called "metempsychosis". [71] In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky stated that on bodily death, the human soul progresses through more spiritual planes. [72] Two years later, she introduced the idea of reincarnation into Theosophical doctrine, [73] using it to replace her metempsychosis doctrine ...