With the elections two days off, I’d like to bring up something cool about the idea of “holding office” that has absolutely nothing to do with politics. And no, this isn’t just a clever rhetorical trick to fool you down some byzantine path at the end of which is a political surprise. Actually, I want to talk about reincarnation.

Dane Rudhyar was an astrologer, theosophist and synthesizer of philosophical and metaphysical traditions. You can check out a rather lengthy bio of him here. I guess he was “in vogue” around and before WWII. The scope of his work is just enormous and covers all manner of spiritual phenomenon. It’s really interesting, and if you want a (lengthy) introduction to his essential teachings, go for it.

Anyway, the “classic” way people ususally talk about reincarnation is that when you die, you essentially “come back” in the body of another person. So that souls are basically just shuffling around through bodies like some kind of ectoplasmic deck of cards. While there is a certain beauty to this metaphor or story of how souls, death and birth functions, it has always felt a bit too contrived for me to buy. Nature doesn’t often exhibit a 1-to-1 sort of correspondence like that.

While I’m not really sold on any one particular view of what happens when you die, Rudhyar put forth a very cool explanation of how reincarnation works. Of course, I have to warn that this is me interpreting and paraphrasing, and his concepts are actually much more intricate and complex than this, and I don’t really “get” a lot of them. Anyway, in his terms, reincarnation doesn’t revolve around one person’s soul going from body to body over and over again. It more has to do with this idea of “holding office.” The example that is given to describe it is that of a CEO, who is in charge of the workings of a company. When a new CEO takes over a company, they inherit the problems and successes of the person(s) who preceded them in that office. If that person almost ran the company into the ground, the new CEO will have to do something about it.

In other words, Rudhyar is saying that souls are not so much recycled through a successive chain of bodies, as each soul is assigned a particular “office” - or perhaps “role” would be a better word. A variety of souls then are connected to a particular role, or to the completion of some specific spiritual task which is to be accomplished or manifested in the world. Each soul who holds this one office will either move that goal towards or away from its ultimate fulfillment. When you are elected to your office, you have to deal with the successes and failures of the people who preceded you in it.

It’s fun to think about the office of President in this way too. From a metaphysical perspective, you could think of the “President” as being an almost magical entity which is both a guide for our country, as well as some sort of spiritual manifestation of it. The President-entity has a cyclical magical renewal process in the form of the election. The election consists of the inhabitants of the country focusing their psychic-spiritual powers so as to manifest a new physical body for the President-entity to be born into - reincarnation.