Death, Birth, and Reincarnation

All is impermanent,

All is without a self.

–The Buddha

Today I have had some time to reflect and allow various ideas that have been bouncing off the walls of my skull to coalesce. These ideas were inspired by several films that I have seen recently and that I highly recommend to those on the mystic journey. The one that has dominated my consciousness today is Sukhavati–A Mythic Journey from the collected works of the late Joseph Campbell. This film has helped to flesh out many of the ideas I gleaned from The Quantum Activist, a film about Dr. Amit Goswami’s theories about the nature of existence based upon his lifelong study of physics.

These films and others have allowed me to greatly expand upon an insight I have been playing with for the past several years. It’s difficult for me to put it succinctly into a type of “Executive Summary,” so please bear with me as I try to put it all into words. The central idea has to do with what happens after one’s physical body dies, but it spins off in several different directions from there.

I’ll start with the seed of an idea that has been germinating for some time. As a minister, I was asked by a woman who was terminally ill to talk with her about death. I knew her from having conducted her marriage ceremony a few years earlier. The main question she had was, of course, “What happens after we die?”

I asked her if she wanted the truth or some bullshit answer that might make her feel better. She opted for the truth, so I said that I honestly did not know, but that shortly she would. I also told her that fear and excitement were physiologically identical–it is only how we view them that makes the experience of them differ. She was about to go on a great adventure–the next stage in whatever it is that we are all doing here–and that she could choose to begin the journey feeling fear or excitement.

I don’t know if any of that helped her, but she said it did. A few weeks later, I officiated at her funeral.

This encounter got me seriously pondering humanity’s age-old question of what’s next after this. So I began as I often do with the principles of Taoism. Taoism says that the answers we seek can be found in the natural world. The first question that came to me was, “What happens to the material body when it dies?” The answer–it returns to from whence it came. The Taoists often refer to this as “returning to the source.”

All the material “stuff” that is the body almost immediately begins to decompose so that its stuff can return to the Earth and be recycled. What if the same is true for our non-material stuff? Does that which briefly inhabited the body go back from whence it came and, if so, from whence did it come?

I initially had the idea of a sort of “spiritual compost bin” where the elements that made-up the non-material also decomposed. I didn’t go much further with this until I became aware of Dr. Goswami’s theories via The Quantum Activist.

The core tenant of Dr. Goswami is that consciousness, not matter, is the ground of being–that matter comes forth from consciousness, rather than the other way around. This is actually a very ancient idea in religious traditions, but basically turns science upside down. Undifferentiated consciousness (Dr. Goswami uses the term “non-local consciousness”) is the “pool” from which differentiated or individual consciousness is drawn. This, to me, answered the “from whence it came” question.

The only “problem” with this idea is that it really is a buzz kill for all those people who believe in the individual consciousness continuing to exist after death. So my next stop was Buddhism.

In the film Sukhavati–A Mythic Journey, Joseph Campbell describes the “lake of bliss” where one’s consciousness arrives upon achieving Nirvana. All along the shore of the lake, all the creatures (birds, animals, etc.) are chanting “All is impermanent, All is without a self.” This was the key that seemed to unlock the puzzle so the other pieces could fall into place.

The Buddha taught that there is no self–that the idea of different, individual selves is an illusion. This is the basis of the greeting “Namaste.” It is the acknowledgement that we are not two, but one. Extrapolated out–we are not 7 billion, we are one.

So just as the body is a brief assemblage of material elements that returns to the source, so it is with the non-material. And I feel the word “consciousness” fits better than “spirit” or “soul” as these historically imply an individual consciousness that continues to exist.

This also illuminates the idea of reincarnation. Most people view the concept of reincarnation as the individual “spirit” or “soul” being reborn into a new body. With this new insight, I believe that reincarnation was never meant to be about an individual consciousness being reborn, but rather about the “stuff” of consciousness being recycled–just as the material elements of the body are recycled with each new birth.

One of the things Dr. Goswami discusses in The Quantum Activist is that he had a dream in which he was very clearly told, The Tibetan Book of the Dead is true and that it is his job to prove it. Well this fits in rather nicely. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is about how to guide one through the Bardo–the intermediate state between death and rebirth.

Traditionally, of course, the idea of the death-to-rebirth journey is viewed as something the individual consciousness (spirit) does. It now seems to me that what the Bardo refers to is the intermediate state when the individual consciousness is travelling from death to the “pool” of undifferentiated consciousness. It is then reincarnated from the pool–not as the individual consciousness that it was–but as a new assemblage of “recycled” elements of consciousness.

This could also fit within the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition if one views “Heaven” as the return to undifferentiated consciousness (which, coincidently is what Dr. Goswami refers to as “God”).

This would, if one were looking for it, also provide an explanation for the phenomena of ghosts. Ghosts being individual consciousness becoming stuck in the Bardo. In fact that is the purpose of the Tibetan Book of the Dead–to keep one from getting stuck. This would imply that being stuck after death of the body as an individual “spirit” is not a good thing.

Using the analogy of water: when a body is alive, it is the vessel that holds the water (consciousness). When the body dies, the vessel breaks and the “water” returns to the ocean from whence it came. When a new vessel (body) is created, it is filled with water (consciousness) from the ocean. Yes, there may be some elements of the former vessel’s water in the new vessel, but it also contains water from many other broken vessels. If the water can’t get back to the ocean, it gets stuck becoming a stagnant pool (a ghost, or a soul in Hell).

Just some thoughts during the confluence of Earth Day (material) and Easter (spiritual). Namaste!