Within the diverse variants of hypotheses concerning the concept of transmigration of souls (including but not limited to the concept of reincarnation) karma occupies an important role.  However, an alternative related karma-free concept appeals to me, that of panentheistic monism.  In the variant of panentheistic monism to which I am most drawn, a hierarchy of self-aware intelligences exist which include us, evolving constantly based on experience, but based on a concentric form of collectivism.  Thus, in our case, we are comprised of diverse collectives; one includes our cells, then, on a higher plane, we are a collective comprised of our organs which are collectives of our cells, then, we are bodies comprised of a collective of our organs and our cells.  Further up the concentric ladder, we perceive of ourselves as individuals but also as members of collectives in which we are parts, e.g., our bond pairings, our families, our clans (extended families), our social groupings (religions, social communities, racial and ethnic identifications, etc.) culminating in our belief that we are part of a collective that we identify as humanity.

The interesting thing is that the collectives of which we are members, albeit subject to numerous variable tensions, seem to have identities of their own, a concept central to sociological hypotheses where groups act in a manner significantly different than would their individual members, willingly sacrificing the interests of individual members for what the collective perceives as a “greater good” (but which much more often seems to involve the interests of elites capable of manipulating the group for their benefit through coercion, very much in the manner that cancers function in our individual bodies).  That is a phenomenon that seems omnipresent in human collectives, at least as far as we know.  An open and critical question involves whether or not the collectives of which we are a part culminate at the level of our species, or whether our species is itself a part of an aware and volitional series of more complex entities such as the complex varieties of life found on our planet and, perhaps, the complex of biological and non-biological components of our environment, including air, water, weather, etc.  If so and, if we are just incapable of perceiving the levels of sentience of which we are a part (for example, the concept of Gaia), perhaps our planetary system is itself only a component of a series of greater sentient wholes, wholes such as our solar system, the group of solar systems of which our own is a part, the galaxy, the universe, etc.

Panentheism is generally viewed as a religious or spiritual concept but that may be misleading.  It may also involve an organizational reality where the omniverse (the total of all multiverses which, in turn, involve the organizational structure of individual universes, each with its own laws of physics and evolution) is sentient and self-aware, sentience being the extra-physical factor that separates the concept of panentheism from the related concept of pantheism.  In their religious variants, pantheism is the belief that divinity is the sum total of everything to which panentheism adds sentient self-awareness.

Monism adds an evolutionary element thus, each component of the pantheistic omniverse is deemed to be evolving and, in evolving, is assisting its superior structures to evolve so that, in a sense, inferior structures (inferior in terms of their level rather than their abilities) are the engines that drive the evolution of the structures of which they are components.  In a sense, there is a striving towards never-attainable perfection at all levels, a striving that is not always constant or successful so that evolution does not involve constant progress, although progress, in the long term, tends to be consistent.

The foregoing applies to the function we refer to as the transmigration of souls as it is apparently through experiences during myriad lifetimes that the systems of which we are components learn and evolve.  We are the tools for their perception of experiences, experiences that test their own evolutionary hypotheses, testing them and converting them into theories, and perhaps, eventually, into natural laws, laws being concepts impossible to violate.

Good and evil are hypotheses which we, in our diverse human groupings, develop, develop as guideposts, but they probably do not, except perhaps in very rare cases, rise to the level of theories and certainly even more rarely to the level of laws, although we tend to treat them as such.  Concepts involving good and evil tend to involve evolutionary processes that start as a practices, evolve into traditions, then customs and then, perhaps, into social norms which may eventually become codified into obligations whose violation is subject to penal sanctions.  But, since violations are possible at all levels and exceptions prevail, they do not really, regardless of how denominated, evolve into real laws.

The foregoing, at least for me, explains the incoherent societies in which we live and in which humans have always lived, where deceit, treachery and hypocrisy seem to be the norm, especially when we describe them in patriotic and religious terms.  But, on the brighter side, we are parts of an infant omniverse taking baby steps which perhaps in time may produce an evolutionary structure worth admiring.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.