The Moon and the Matter of Resurrection.

Each month when the moon moves into its third quarter and then becomes a waning crescent, it’s always in the eastern sky when I go to bed. We had a run of clear skies during the final phase of last month’s moon, and so every night I saw it from my bathroom window moving ever further to the north, sinking in the sky, and looking weaker and sicklier as each night passed. Eventually there was no moon.

Over the past few nights the sky has been unremittingly beset by a heavy cloud cover, and so the new moon hasn’t been visible. Until this evening. At twilight I saw the moon again, already grown to a first quarter and looking fresh, bright, and full of vigour through a clear patch in the southern sky. And here’s what’s odd: for the first time in my life I was quite forcibly struck by the fact that it was the same moon I had watched dying just a week or so ago.

Why should I be suddenly so struck? I know, as we all do, that there is only one moon (at least only one that is routinely visible.) And yet there I stood, gazing in near-awe at a body that had been dead but had now been resurrected into a new life.

My thoughts naturally turned to the process to which all living beings are subjected: we’re born, we grow, we become strong and functional, we perform our various and random acts, we experience the many vicissitudes of good and bad fortune, and then we succumb to weakness and sickness and eventually die. And so the moon is simply a metaphor for life.

Except it isn’t, not quite. Unlike the moon, we’re not resurrected in the same body; and there are those who believe that we’re not resurrected at all. I choose to suspect with some degree of confidence that they’re probably wrong – we are resurrected, but in a different body. It’s a common enough belief in many cultures and spiritual traditions, and it raises a simple question:

Are we really the body in which we function for whatever time we have in this version of reality – the one we see in the mirror every day, the one to which we give a name, the one that feels pain when it’s damaged, the one that struts and frets its hour upon the stage, the one to which people say ‘do this, don’t do that; do as you’re told and you won’t be punished’? Or are we something else entirely - a non-physical entity which might be more truly represented by what we call consciousness? I’m reminded of the forensic pathologist who said to her students: ‘The first thing to remember is that what you see on the slab is not a person. The person’s gone.’ Quite, but gone where?

We don’t know, of course. Nobody does; it’s life’s ultimate mystery.

But let’s for a moment accept that reincarnation (or the wheel of life, death, and rebirth as the Buddhists prefer) is a fact as simply understood. You cast off one body and then take up occupation in another (possibly in the future or possibly in the past because time has no meaning in worlds beyond this one – or so it is said.)

At this point my mind wanders off to consider another possibility. Suppose there really are an infinite number of alternate dimensions, a proposition which has now gained some respectability in mainstream science. Might it not be that after death in one dimension we take up another life as the same person in another? In other words, we carry on being the same physical entity over and over again but in different parallel universes? It would certainly explain the phenomenon of déjà vu, which I used to experience a lot as a child and a teenager. Or maybe we have a choice in the matter. Who knows?

And I know I’m not the first to propose this theory. Other minds got there before mine (including JB Priestly, for example, whose ‘time play’ An Inspector Calls is probably the second best known, non-classical play after The Mouse Trap, and who also wrote the series of short pieces called Outcries and Asides.) But I do so love to muse on such unknowables. It’s probably why I never had any money.