Tag: rebirth

The Present as Path

On May 14, 2016

In Body, Death, Enquiry, Mindfulness, Positivity, Practices

Invincible, unmovable, see clearly whatever is present now –
this, right here – and so develop wisdom.
Today, right away, do what needs to be done.
Who knows? Death could know you tomorrow.
There’s certainly no bargaining with Death’s great hordes.
But one who lives ardently, day and night,
Such a one is an auspicious day, the peaceful sage announces.
– An Auspicious Day, Bhaddekaratta Sutta (MN131). Translated by Christopher J. Ash.

When I first sought the historical Buddha in the early Buddhist Nikāya texts, I was troubled by my inability to accept the cosmology in those texts. The Nikāya Buddha believes in literal rebirth; and, presumably the historical Buddha accepted rebirth.

I wanted not to make my enquiry dependent on a rebirth theory. I still see no necessity to do so, forty-plus years later. On the other hand, living in the present – that made and makes sense to me. (Of course, the irony of living in the present is that you meet death while living.)

The irrelevance, to me, of the common belief in ‘rebirth’ hasn’t been an obstacle to understanding. Because I look on these texts as not only a great wisdom tradition but as an oral literature which is to be engaged in dialogue, then I have found it possible to extract the honey from sentences which would otherwise be difficult to feel nourished by. Sentences such as the following (in the Sutta of Conveying the Nature of Reality): “Immovable is my freedom. This is my last birth. Now there is no cycle of becoming.”

When I look upon these texts as reflecting something about human experience in the present, I can look past the ‘rebirth’ belief, and ask, “What in human experience, now, might this refer to?” Then I am curious about experience, and not about what the secondary texts say about ‘the three lives theory,’ and other such doctrines.

I have a body which can guide me in the feel of the language in the texts. I can know immovability, now – if I have the necessary passion to know. I can know the dissolving of ‘identity’ now (which is surely all that is reborn – our habits). I can know the end of identification with what comes and goes (becomes).

Don’t I know where to find ‘birth’? Don’t these texts show me where to find birth, death and liberation? It’s in human experiencing – in my mental states, with their self-representations, and the hunger, grasping, in clinging. Where else to find the dynamics of dukkha, but in the present?

The Nikāya Buddha wanted to find a way out of an unsatisfying continuity of experiencing. Haven’t I, too, found myself in unsatisfactory cycles of becoming – repeating the ‘same old, same old’? Haven’t I, too, found myself asking the kind of questions that the Nikāya Buddha asks at the beginning of his quest: “There must surely be more to this? Is life only continual rounds of grasping for happiness, only to have it dissolve; and then to seek again?”

So, surely, what this practice is about is the life I am living now, not the one I may live some time in the future. When I first understood that I didn’t need to be a believer in rebirth (at least, not in any traditional form), in order to understand the essential nature of consciousness, I committed myself to interpreting these texts as documents pointing to the liberation of consciousness from its self-made limitations.

In regard to freeing the mind, these are texts of self-evident sophistication, emphasizing the cultivation of present awareness, ‘traceless, like the sky.’ The Buddhist way provides valuable tools for dissolving layer upon layer of habitual identification with false ways of being; allowing an open, spacious, groundless ground to emerge. Then, as it says in the Mindfulness Sutta, one goes about ‘independent, not clinging to anything in the world.’

To be free, though, you necessarily undertake the humiliating recognition of delusion in yourself, and take responsibility for the harm that flows from your delusions. The wheel of birth and death – that is, the stranglehold of materialistic personality – is very hard to escape.

Our dukkha involves the interplay of ignorance, unconscious shaping factors, consciousness, identity, sense domains, contact, feeling tones, craving, grasping, and becoming; resulting in ignorant conceptions of birth, old age, sickness and death, which in turn feed back into that dynamic mesh. This is dukkha.

It’s no wonder that the Nikāya Buddha is portrayed, in the days after his enlightenment, sitting on the banks of a river, saying (more or less): “This is deep, subtle, difficult to see. Surely it would be vexatious to try and communicate this to people addicted to sense pleasures.”

However, here is the key: dukkha is fabricated out of our present-moment, lived experience. You and I have that available always. Always, it’s all there is.

Yet, dukkha is derived from experience, and is not basic to it. And, the two fundamental meditation texts in the Nikāyas – the Sutta of Breathing in and Out and the Mindfulness Sutta – teach us to use our present moment living body as the ground for the contemplative enquiry. This is the spirit reflected in: “Immovable is my freedom.”

As Hakuin Zenji said in his Song of Zazen:
Nirvana is here, before your eyes,
this very place is the Lotus Land,
this very body the Buddha.”

Waking up from the Consensus Trance

By admin

On July 18, 2015

In Enquiry, Time, Space, & Knowledge, trance

One of my friends once remarked that I had better give up the big quest for enlightenment, right then, because, she said, she could see me being a bitter old man, at the end of my days. I’m here to report that I’m old enough now, and I’m happy; and I’m glad that I didn’t give up that quest. Imagine going to your death unprepared for meeting true nature, unprepared to meet reality intimately, no-face to no-face. Death is the big wake up.

It is tragic really, that we are in a trance about what’s going on, here, and we don’t encourage inquiry into ‘This.’ So that when our children ask the big questions, they get nonsense in reply; or, at least, nothing straight. Reports that I get from people, in private conversation, show that children are often left feeling that there must be something wrong with them, for not knowing how it really is – this seeing, thinking, smelling, tasting, touching, walking, running, laughing, spewing, crying, and turning somersaults. Exactly what is this? Few are the occasions when a child’s questions about what matters – the ultimate questions – are met with the respect that they deserve. It’s now acknowledged by some researchers, in the Integral Psychology and Integral Spirituality field at least, that children can have transcendent experiences, though they don’t have the conceptual development to integrate them. They slip into the shadows, to await a crisis in adulthood.

As a result of the consensus trance, we have a majority of people die confused. In the spiritual line of development, they don’t ever grow up. I’ll go as far as to say that, they haven’t discovered the only thing worth discovering. (”The only game on the block,” as I heard Peter Fenner say.) So, my childhood question – “Is there anything?” – is a question that has spurred my efforts to be clear in myself about what’s real and what’s not. I’m glad that this has been my life-long koan, because – when rightly handled – it has made my life really alive. It’s certainly not a “habit, like saccharine.”

My father told me (when I was about 26 years old) that when I was a child (younger than five), I would ask him “Who am I?” He said that I wouldn’t take any answer that they gave me. However, there he was sitting telling me this, and he added that he thought that I wasn’t right in the head. Their help, of course, amounted to identifying me with my body, and with the roles of son and brother; and telling that I had a name. So, who wasn’t right in the head? The one who had come upon the enigma of the immediacy of perception; or the ones who had learned, in their childhood, to identify with their narratives?

That was my father’s most repeated message to me throughout his life, that I wasn’t right in the head. No wonder that my entry into formlessness, Buddhist meditative state, was by seeing that I have no head. (Refer to the Heart Sutra for some help with this, and the work of Douglas Harding.) Not having a culture like Tibetan culture – where (before the Communist cultural destruction) if a child asked these questions she was recognised as having a gift – means that a lot of intelligent, sensitive children are not given the support they need.

Of course, I’m all up for an explanation of my childhood doubt which includes the possibility – nay, the certainty – that my ego-development suffered some blows, and that, as a result, I was confused about who I was. There’s something to learn from that perspective. However, it lacks a thoroughness of explanatory power, because it doesn’t include a depth of understanding of the fundamental luminous ground of awareness. How come, when the usual narratives are suspended, in child or adult, consciousness is non-local? Explanations in terms of neurosis don’t let the conventional society off the hook. They don’t get that the childhood questions around identity have a valid basis in existential realities, and that it’s a gormless world that Western children are born and trained into.

This all makes me reflect on the etymology of ‘education.’ It has a Latin origin: from educere. “To educe,” which in this context means to develop something from a latent state. So the meaning is to ‘draw out.’ You would think that a good idea would be to draw out the wisdom within the child, instead of instilling rigid patterns. Parents are, alas, far more often, agents of the culture, inducting their children into the consensus trance.

In case you are interesting in reading a stark description, in terms of trance induction, how our parents bring us into the consensus trance, then the rest of this article is about that, in the form of extensive quotes from Charles Tart, formerly a researcher at the University of Stanford. They’re chilling. I extracted them from his book, Waking Up: The Obstacles to Human Potential.

In the last paragraph of the chapter, he writes: “But,” you might well say, “I don’t feel like I’m in a trance!” Of course not. We think of trance as something unusual, and our ordinary state as usual. We only realize we are in a trance state by reasoning about it, as we have done in this chapter, and/or by experiencing what it is like to be out of trance, to be awake.

Think of it as like being in a dream. You can sometimes reason in your dream – that is, question your experience in the dream – and as a result, realise that you are dreaming. (That’s why the Tibetans encourage dream yoga – not to get mentally healthy, exactly, but to train for the states of consciousness between lives.)

Is There Anything?

By admin

On July 17, 2015

In Death, Enquiry, Memoir, Practices, Radiant Citta, Resisting Death, Time, Space, & Knowledge

“When the time comes, it won’t be our religion that guides us, it will be our spirituality.” – Stephen Levine

What do I think ‘spiritual’ means? I like the approach that says (which comes from Ken Wilber’s work) that spirituality involves taking care of matters of ultimate concern. What do I care about ultimately? For me, ultimate questions are like: What is the fundamental nature of mind? Is love the ground of being? Can humans live in peace with one another? What causes human violence?

Rebirth is only interesting to me to the extent that it can serve to illuminate or carry forward these matters. For me, matters of spirits and ghosts, and so on, are not important, not ultimate. These are phenomena; things that come and go. What is it that doesn’t come and go? That’s an ultimate question. “What is my face before my parents were born”,” asks Zen. Getting off the wheel of rebirth isn’t a literal matter, at all, for me. Human consciousness seems to me to be a prism through which the Immeasurable becomes apparently measureable. It’s not there to get off or on. The Nikāya Buddha says,

Craving is penetrated by one who knows.
For one who sees there is nothing.
– Udāna 8.2; trans John Ireland.

(This is the big ‘no-thing’; not a relative ‘nothing.’) How could something so enigmatic be of ultimate concern? It is about ‘This,’ and it’s about not being in error about what ‘This’ is; because such error leads to violence. Anyhow, I’m confident, because of experiences which I’ve had, that at death the sense of being a separate self dies. It dissolves, and the big life process, one that is birthing timelessly, is all there is.

Of course, one reason that people cling to the thought of rebirth is that the ‘me’ finds it incomprehensible that the world could go on without me. “A world without me?!” From time to time I do an interesting experiment. I contemplate, for a full day, the world going on. People, animals, trees and clouds going on as usual. I watch the world as it is presenting, now and now. I see people shopping, working in offices, travelling by train, riding bicycles. Black-backed magpie intent in the grass. Everything as usual. But here’s the variable: All day, I am imagining that I died, early this morning. People are going about their day oblivious that I am no longer in the world. The magpie darts at the rustle in the grass, without me seeing it. And, I sense the reaction of my ego-system. It’s so interesting to sense what that means to my patterns. Patterns are ‘rebirth.’

So, why did I get agitated over people’s views on rebirth? Upon investigation, I found a pattern that has been with me since childhood. When I was just a little child, I asked, “Is there anything?” To say what I know about any topic, without becoming a slave to what is known, invites empty, spacious, luminous, boundless awareness, where the ‘me’ dissolves. To the extent that the child pattern has not been met in me, he interprets those qualities as being like the childhood doubt, the presence of a relative ‘not anything.’ So, grasping to views follows. In whatever way there is rebirth – it’s that pattern of grasping which is reborn.

Yesterday, I mentioned Ajahn Buddhadasa’s pragmatic approach to rebirth. I’ve put it up on the net, here, so that you can read it, if you’re interested.

Taking Care of the Heart-Mind Now

By admin

On July 16, 2015

In Enquiry, Mindfulness, Radiant Citta, Time, Space, & Knowledge

It seems a big deal to a lot of people, the question: “What happens after we die?” So many words about it, so much conflict. Yet, it seems to me that very few people have understood what being alive is. I might say, “What happens while we exist?” I see people everywhere lost in thought-worlds, who are clearly not in touch with existing. They are being reborn every minute, in one state of identity or another.

Two days ago, in this blog, I said that I seem to have a personal reaction to how the standard models are believed and used – that I get a little agitated. There’ll be more to unfold, so I won’t say too much now. (To articulate things too soon would be like tugging at the green shoot, to force a plant to grow quicker.)

However, let me say a little bit of what I’ve found in myself; about my own identifications. The agitation comes because the proponents of one view or another (for rebirth, or against) are making truth claims. Both camps – the Secular Buddhists and the Classical Buddhists, for example – say, “Buddha said…” They then branch off toward different conclusions. For me to discuss what’s going on between them, or to say how I see the issue, leads me into making truth claims also.

To the extent that there is clinging in me, and wanting to be a fixed ‘I’ who knows something, then making truth claims becomes a cause of agitation. The habitual way of thinking is to think that I, too, have to make claims to the truth about rebirth. It’s as though it’s not okay to say, “I don’t know.” Or, it’s not okay to have the process of knowing what’s true, differently – that is, without it being the foundation of a ‘me.’ (Again, I’ll come back to this in the days ahead.)

There are Westerners who take rebirth as a literal fact, and there are those who, if they treat the issue at all, treat rebirth as metaphor for some kinds of human process, processes which are accessible in this life. (Of course, this is a generalisation. Thai master Bhikkhu Buddhadasa, for example, treated rebirth as a metaphor, as a skilful means of entering human process, in this life.)

An associated difficulty, adding to my ego’s ‘Ouch!,’ is that the Classical Buddhist – remember they believe in literal rebirth – often adds that if we don’t believe in rebirth, then the path of understanding the workings of karma, and the path of liberation of mind, are closed. These are narrow-minded claims, which are contradicted by careful inquiry backed by subtle experiencing. Can I let them pass me by, and not need to assert my view? Sometimes I can, sometime I can’t. I also think that such claims are an insult to Christians and Muslims, and to Atheists – groups that also are comprised of decent, ethical people, who don’t believe in rebirth.

More often, though, the issue of rebirth doesn’t affect me at all, because it is irrelevant to living my life sanely, and to recognising the luminous, boundless heart-mind. This luminous presence is not a belief. It’s an experience. So, what is far more important than believing in rebirth is to be in touch with existing now. We can see that we get ‘reborn’ every time we are identified with a mind-state that is clinging to ‘me and mine.’ That is more important than such beliefs – that is, to clean up our act. Then, if there is rebirth, I will have taken care of the heart-mind or soul, anyway.

The issue is an old one, which was around in the time of the Buddha. The Buddha is reported to have said, about one whose heart-mind is free from negativity (free from hostility, free from ill-will, undefiled and pure), that they would have four assurances, two of which were:

“‘If there is a world after death, if there is the fruit of actions rightly & wrongly done, then this is the basis by which, with the break-up of the body, after death, I will reappear in a good destination, the heavenly world.’ This is the first assurance he acquires.

“‘But if there is no world after death, if there is no fruit of actions rightly & wrongly done, then here in the present life I look after myself with ease — free from hostility, free from ill will, free from trouble.’ This is the second assurance he acquires.

– See Kalama Sutta. (Translation Thanissaro Bhikkhu)

The Standard Approach to Rebirth

By admin

On July 14, 2015

In General, Time, Space, & Knowledge

I’ve spent much of today thinking into this. I’m glad of the opportunity. It seems I have two themes going along side by side. One is the possibility that some kind of Western conceptual system needs to be worked out, in the long run, for a lot of experiences that don’t fit our current scientific models of human consciousness. Yet, for me, the available Buddhist ‘rebirth’ models don’t work to carry Western understanding forward, at this point. So, that’s one issue.

The other is my personal reaction to how the standard models are believed and used. I do get a little agitated, and I’m looking at why that happens. It’s a powerful inquiry, which I’ll come back to at some time.

So, today, I’ll just sketch the gist of the standard Buddhist-Hindu model: “Rebirth is literal. It’s a law. Beings roam from birth to birth, and – on the basis of cultivating good intentions and eliminating bad ones – they evolve through these cycles of birth and death, until each reaches enlightenment, where rebirth into a womb no longer happens.”

Human birth is, by this model, something negative; or positive only to the extent that you have a chance of turning toward the ending of human birth. One problem which I have with this is that it is a conceptual system which can’t be confirmed or disconfirmed. The terms of this so-called ‘law’ place it outside the scope of proofs. Secondly, its values are unhealthy, in that it is obviously anti-life.

There are certainly a lot of subtle, unexplained phenomena connected to consciousness. I’ve read, heard, and experienced a lot of mysterious events associated with consciousness. So, I’m not rejecting that there is something interesting going on, and that there are processes for which rebirth might be a useful metaphor. It’s not scientific to reject the data, just because we are committed to a particular model involving a material universe. I’m not committed to such a model. Scientists haven’t been able to establish the existence of anything ‘material’ yet. (They seem to go onward fed by a blind faith that someday they will.)

Let me ask, though: “What is it that is being reborn?” People start from the default point of view of units; that is, that it’s a process universe broken up into separate things. Then they can put the rebirth theories in terms of units – separated-out consciousness, separated-out souls, or whatever, go from life, to life, to life. So, my difficulty is that the whole discussion of rebirth gets hampered from the beginning by the unit model, which, when you investigate it, is not what is going on here. So, how do I talk in accordance with what is actually going on, which is, as I say, a universe that is all process?

Here’s another perspective: There is only one rebirth. There’s not billions and triillions of rebirths, ultimately. It’s just the one big life process that is birthing itself continually. How come we aren’t in awe of the universe doing that, instead of devising ways of thinking of ourselves as getting to another birth, or opting out eventually?

Well, the reason we aren’t in ecstatic wonder, the cause of such devising of rebirth schemes, is a little experience called ‘me,’ isn’t it? A little experience making itself falsely important. We fear the truth that I am a little wave in a particularly amazingly vast ocean. As a result of being caught in our fear, we don’t see that there is not even a drop of a difference between wave and ocean. Like the ocean is waving, the universe is peopling (and dogging, and catting, and birding, and virus-ing…)

The Rebirth Issue

By admin

On July 13, 2015

In Death, Enquiry, Time, Space, & Knowledge

I was reading some correspondence recently, involving Stephen Batchelor and Bhikkhu Bodhi. Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote a piece on ‘Secular’ versus ‘Classical’ Buddhism. You can find the pieces, here: Facing the Great Divide. As some of you will know, the subjects of karma and rebirth feature as important for both those author-teachers, though with marked, polarising differences.

The topics seem to be in the air, presently. Today I received a Siddhartha’s Intent message (part of which is reproduced below) on the same topic.

If you’re in doubt, Stephen Levine’s (author of A Year to Live) approach, as represented in these lines, is helpful, I think:

Although most religions can be defined by their concept of the afterworld and how, or whether, reincarnation takes place, none sounds so much more accurate than the others that I would pack accordingly. When the time comes it won’t be our religion that guides us, it will be our spirituality.

And, I would add, it will be the perfume of our spirituality, which remains – the accumulated strength of our spirituality. And to that end, Stephen’s meditative exercises are meant to expand the heart, not fill the mind with theory.

In 1984, I spoke personally to a Dzogchen teacher, and asked him: “To understand the nature of mind, do I have to believe in rebirth.” He emphatically shook his head and said, “No.” That suited me, and I got on with my practice on that basis. I have no regrets about that. (I’m not even adding a ‘rebirth’ category to this blog.)

I will write more on both topics. I knew that sometime during the year I’d need to say something about rebirth. It looks like it might be soon, and I’ll try to avoid theory. However, I’d just like to say that I’ve always thought that it is an unfortunate thing that writers couple karma with rebirth. It confuses the issue, really. Karma is a word indicating that your intentions (manifested through body, speech and mind) matter to the welfare of yourself and others. Karma is much more easily verifiable, than the standard story on rebirth.

For many people, the issue, whatever the case, won’t go away, as Buddhism puts down roots in the West. Here’s what the Siddhartha’s Intent message had to say:

Is There Buddhism Without Rebirth?
In classrooms and dharma centers alike, westerners encountering Buddhism for the first time must come to terms with the widespread Buddhist belief in rebirth. For many, death represents the ultimate unknown, the ultimate lesson in impermanence. Why then, they ask themselves, should they believe Buddhism’s answer to this perplexing question, any more than the answers of other religions that teach eternal salvation in heaven or damnation in hell? Does rebirth fall into the category of “cultural trappings,” such as sexist views of women, certain ritual forms, and belief in traditional Indian cosmology—cultural accretions that can be dismissed as extraneous to the “core teachings” of Buddhism?
Many westerners view belief in reincarnation as simply irrelevant to their engagement in Buddhism. Yet for centuries, Buddhist texts have been filled with warnings about heretics who deny the existence of rebirth and the ethical ramifications of such views. How are we to understand such warnings? And if we discard all such “cultural trappings” as irrelevant to what is essential about Buddhism, what is left of a religion that teaches the lack of any independent essence?