The Nature of Reincarnation – Lessons from a Reluctant Buddha – Part II
When you’re reincarnated you don’t come back. At first that may seem paradoxical but it’s not. Reincarnation exists but the popular perception of it is flawed.
The problem is how you think about “you.” Who are you? Are you your job, your children, your relationship, your thoughts, you ideas, your feelings, your khakis? The part of you that’s real is none of these things and that’s the only part that comes back.
So what part of you is real? What comes back? You can see this real self by learning to observe the observer. See yourself seeing the world. Watch as your mind criticizes, attacks and defends, is filled with fantastic fantasies and fears. You might see a stranger walking and picture yourself attacked or heroically defending yourself. This is all the illusion. All that you are passes away to nothing, never to come again. In a way that’s terrifying. In another way it’s wonderful. You are unique. You, the part of you that loves one sports team and hates another, the one who found your true love or didn’t, will never exist again. Your thoughts are nothing but the music of the universe. But there is something indestructible inside you and that is the thing that survives. People have called that the spirit but the word is now corrupted, covered in layers of rust that obscure its true meaning. The corrosion is people confusing what is actually part of the spirit and what is not. I’m sorry to say, that the part of you that hates your neighbor and doesn’t like brussel sprouts doesn’t make the cut.
To understand this we just have to understand what makes up Dan. I’m nothing more than a passing form, a current configuration of energy in a kind of semi-frozen state. I exist as a passing fancy of the universe. I’m born, I grow old and die, picking up beliefs and ways of viewing the world as I go. I look a certain way. I hold certain ideas sacred and others useless. People and institutions all around me shape me and my thoughts. I’m a collection of concepts and circumstance. I’d love to believe that Dan is important enough to warrant continuing past whatever untimely demise awaits me and everyone else but it doesn’t. To some people, that’s heresy. They cling so fiercely to the idea that they continue on that they’ll go so far as to kill others who don’t share that desperate belief structure. That’s what makes a religious extremist. He is so warped by his belief systems that he perceives his beliefs as if they are actual reality. As if God, a perfectly supreme being, all powerful and complete would require his subjects to murder others who don’t have a beard or listen to music. A truly supreme being needs nothing from his creations. It’s got bigger things to worry about.
But what about us non-extremists, those people not bound by such fierce demons of delusion that we still have a chance to look closely and see reality as it really is? Unfortunately, most of us won’t this time around. Like virtual extremists we can’t get over ourselves. That’s understandable, as you are all you’ve ever known so how can there by no you? But no you there will be.
Like most entities in my current configuration as a human, I’m prone to egoic delusions. I like to think of myself as pretty important from time to time. It’s easy to see how I might want to exist indefinitely when faced with the reality of my impending doom. When I can’t face this reality, like most mortal creatures, I tend to throw myself into a sensual lifestyle as a way to escape these realities. You may throw yourself into your work, or extreme sports, or helping others. But pleasure comes from the outside. It is dependent on other things, other people or desires. It can be given and taken away and so I suffer. You can recognize the true things in yourself by asking: does it bring joy from within? If it doesn’t it is false, a passing illusion, fun and not to be scorned or hated, but simply calmly refused. When you stoke desire it burns brighter and brighter. You can never get enough pleasure to slake your thirst. Yet when you do true things, things meant for you to learn in this lifetime, you can feel the difference. Joy is not pleasure, sometimes it hurts, but it always leaves you feeling whole, whereas pleasure leaves you empty and wanting more soon after.
Are you empty or whole?
The ancients when faced with this hard truth came up with concepts like heaven and hell. It’s helpful and comforting that the bad guys don’t get away with it, the good guys get rewarded even though they got shit on throughout life and that at the end of all this I get a nice long vacation of eternal rest and hanging out on clouds playing music. Or if I were perhaps born in a different configuration, in a different time, say Asia around the time of the Buddha, I might conceive of a concept that when I get things wrong, I just come back as another version of me, with some core essence of my personality there somewhere, so I can work out some cosmic level problems. It doesn’t work like that either.
You come back, it’s just that some of you goes into the grass, some to the sea, parts of you to animals or people, your energy moving around to help create a thousand new forms not like you at all, but equally unique. Eventually when all your little bits do happen to mostly form another person, it wont really matter because that person will be nothing like you at all.
To see this principal in action you just have to go down into the fundamental structure of the universe. The further you go, the less differentiation you have until you have none. You don’t have to go very far until you get to a spot in matter where everything is made out of the same stuff. At our vantage point on the universe we see lots of things that appear different, flesh and steel, light and dark, but its all made out of one universal building block: atoms. Below that is more of the same, more universal building blocks like quarks. Think of atoms as the Lego bricks of the universe. I can make anything with those blocks. I can make a Dan or I can make a Wendy. I can make a turtle or a stormy sea or a frog or light. I can make mist or mountains. I can make the sun and the moon and the stars spinning in the heavens. I can make anything. But ask yourself this, if you take the moon and break it down into its Lego atoms and use those atoms to build part of a tree somewhere else can I truly say that the nature of the moon survived? No. The same is true when we die. For tens of thousands of years we’ve perceived ourselves as continuing beyond this life and we weren’t wrong, it’s just that we made the egoic wish fulfilling mistake of thinking we were important enough or that we were so crucial to the functioning of the universe in our current form that we can’t ever be thrown away. In fact we are nothing more than a temporary iteration, a random configuration of energy that came together for a short time and will fall apart. The American Indians were closer to understanding it than the maniacal European minds that wiped them out over 300 years. They perceived of God as universal effluvium, inhabiting us all, animating all life, setting everything in motion. That spirit is what survives, but that spirit does not remember being Dan anymore than it remembers being a turtle or the footsteps in the mist.
Over time it became useful for people to institutionalize the ideas of heaven and hell or reincarnation as a way to keep people in line. Do bad things and you come back again and again. Do bad things and burn in Hell. The truth is nature and the universe has a much simpler method: recycling. Nothing is lost. Nothing is wasted. If your random people generator gets an Adolf Hitler, you just grind it up and turn it into puppies and a storm at sea where it can’t hurt any more people. You delete all copies and start over. That is what the universe does. It doesn’t care about you at all and yet you are one of its most important creations. It’s just that you’re only important right now. You were important enough to be conceived of and created but that’s as far as it goes. As long as you are alive and thinking and doing, you fulfill a purpose and when you die you fill a different one. The universe retains nothing of the passing form except the essential nature of matter that built that form, like a sculptor smashing a statue back into clay. In the same way when you return you will be so different as to be unrecognizable to your current self.
This hurts a little. Let’s face it. I’m pretty attached to myself and I’m betting you’re pretty attached to yourself too. The truth is we are not that important. And that’s ok. Your current incarnation, the way you see yourself, the clothes you wear, the people you love and hate, the things you obsess over and those secret, crazy thoughts you have are all passing fancies of the universe. They exist one time and then they’re gone, never to return again. While you remain the same underlying substance, like water turning to ice, you are so different from one life to the next as to be something that even if it is you, might as well be someone else. Now we know from quantum physics that energy can’t be created or destroyed. The consequences of that are that we live in a closed system. It is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from infinite. So when we pass away that energy doesn’t disappear, it simply changes into something else. The energy moves from one state to another, like liquid evaporating into gas. But does the gas know it was a liquid? Or is it just liquid now with no remembrance of things past?
You do come back, it’s just that the you, you perceive as you doesn’t make the cut.
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