Reincarnation

There are lots of misconceptions surrounding the concept of reincarnation. In this post, I'm just attempting some clarification based on what I've read over the years, not based on any personal revelation. Unless something about a past life reveals itself to you, there's little point in pursuing the matter. There's a reason you don't remember your past lives and it's simply that such an awareness would interfere mightily with the life you are currently living. If you don't remember your past lives or you don't even believe you have any past lives to remember, then that's fine. Just get on with your current life and do the best you can. There are plenty of people who will supposedly help you remember your past lives and many techniques that can be applied to this end but I'm not advocating any of that here. 

To reincarnate literally means to incarnate or take flesh again, in other words you get a new body. But are you really reborn? As Barry Long said, you are not reborn. It is only your ignorance that is reborn. Your body, your memories and your personality, everything that you might consider as constituting you, does not return. It was this identification with these false elements of yourself that precipitated your return, according to Barry Long. You were ignorant of who you really were and so you have to return again in an attempt to dispel this ignorance. So who are you really? Well, you are certainly not your body, memories or personality and it doesn't help to have an intellectual conviction about what you think you are. You have to experience who you really are, as Gautama the Buddha did:

Seeking but not finding the house builder,
I hurried through the round of many births:
Painful is birth ever and again. 

O house builder, you have been seen;
You shall not build the house again.
Your rafters have been broken up,
Your ridgepole is demolished too. 

My mind has now attained the unformed Nirvana
And reached the end of every sort of craving.

So, if you can find "the house builder" then you won't be coming back but of course, you - that is the false you - is the builder and while you might even realise that intellectually, you still identify with the builder because who else can you identify with. You still experience yourself as solid and permanent. Of course you are anything but. Solid? You are largely empty space. Permanent? You are have changed from baby, to youth, to adult and sooner or later you will die. You are hardly permanent. Tricky.

Your false you, and all the other false you's who came before you, are part of a vast chain of life leading up to that moment of enlightenment in which Siddhartha Gautama:

... remembered all his previous lives—infinite number of lives—female and male and every other race and every other being in the vast ocean of life forms. And he remembered all that viscerally so his awareness expanded until all the moments of the past were completely present to him. 

It might help to think of yourself as part of a team, a relay race if you will, and unwittingly you are passing the baton on to the next runner and any missteps on your part will affect the next runner's fortunes. This analogy conveys the operation of karma. Your actions in this life have repercussions in the next, for the next you. As an illustration, if you run a factory farm in this life that exploits and abuses animals, then you may find yourself drawn in the next life to caring for them and easing their suffering.

So what happens when you die? The following explanation about the purpose of life after death will clarify things further (source):

The purpose of this stage is to extract the essence of the life just lived. We do this by re-living our Earth life, with particular focus on the deeper meaning and finer feelings of each experience. During this process, countless psychic impressions are sifted and reviewed in great detail. Whatever material is no longer needed is cast aside, like chaff from the grain. At the same time, the true value of our life experience is gathered together into a concentrated spiritual essence.

When extracting gold from the earth, miners may collect 50 tons of raw ore to produce a single ounce of pure gold. Likewise, the huge volume of psychic impressions from a lifetime yields only a tiny germ of spiritual essence. The exact nature of this essence is a mystery. It could be called the deepest meaning, or the finest expression of a human life. From another perspective, it represents the accumulated truth, love and wisdom of the Earth experience. Once gathered, this essence ascends to the next plane where it becomes a permanent part of our spiritual body, or soul.

As we distill the psychic impressions, we're actually consuming our astral body, for really they are one and the same. By getting rid of what is no longer needed, we're becoming less. And at the same time we're becoming more, in the sense of more real, true, and eternal.

This process culminates in what could be called a "second death", at which point there are two possible outcomes. If the astral body has been sufficiently consumed through the process described above, then individual awareness makes a "quantum leap" to the spiritual plane where it merges with soul. However, if an astral body remains intact, then residual desires can pull awareness back to the Earth plane for another cycle of birth and death. These desires are like psychic seeds, or DNA, which become the template for a new birth, or so called, "reincarnation".

The term "reincarnation" usually refers to a soul incarnating a human form repeatedly, over many lifetimes. This is a misunderstanding. The soul always remains on the spiritual plane and can neither incarnate nor reincarnate a human form. Rather, the soul participates in recurring human births and the degree of participation, as well as the number and frequency of recurring births, can vary widely. Likewise, a recurring birth may take place soon after death or hundreds of years later. There are many variables which influence this process and the range of possibilities is enormous.

The astral body tends to just fade away rather than to die abruptly as the physical body does. For most of us, our "residual desires" draw us back to the Earth plane and the dance of life continues. Here is Meher Baba's comments on reincarnation (source):

IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 

"The worldly man completely identifies life with the manifestations and activities of the gross body. For him, therefore, the beginning and the end of bodily existence are also the beginning and end of the individualised soul.

"The overwhelming importance of death is derived from man's attachment to particular forms, but death loses much of its sting and importance, even for the worldly man, if he takes a broader view of the course of life. 

"In spite of their transitoriness, there is an unbroken continuity of life through these forms, old ones being discarded and new ones created for habitation and expression. 

“The recurring incident of death is matched by the recurring incident of birth.

“Old generations are replaced by new ones; life is reborn in new forms, incessantly renewing and refreshing itself..." 

THE THREE FORMS OF NATURE 

“Immortality of the individualised soul is rendered possible by the fact that the individualised soul is not the same as the physical body. 

“The individualised soul continues to exist with all its sanskaras [impressions] in the inner worlds through the medium of its mental and subtle bodies, even after it has discarded its gross body at the time of death. 

"So, life through the medium of the gross body is only a section of the continuous life of the individualised soul; the other sections of its life have their expression in other worlds." 

“The whole of nature may therefore be conveniently divided into three parts – (i) the gross world, (ii) the subtle world and (iii) the mental world.

“When the individualised soul has incarnated itself in a physical body, it expresses its life in the gross world. 

"When it drops the outer sheath, the physical body, it continues to have its expression of life either in the subtle world through subtle body, or in the mental world through the mental body.” 

SANSKARAS 

“Ordinarily, life in the physical body is terminated only when the sanskaras released for expression in that incarnation are all worked out. 

"When the soul drops its physical body it is completely severed from all connections with the gross world, though the ego and the mind are retained with all the impressions accumulated in the earthly career. 

“...ordinary spirits try to reconcile themselves to severance from the gross world, and conform to the limitations of changed conditions and sink into a state of subjectivity in which a new process begins of mentally reviewing the experiences of the earthly career by reviving the sanskaras connected with them. 

“Thus death inaugurates a period of comparative rest consisting in a temporary withdrawal from the gross sphere of action. It is the beginning of an interval between the last incarnation and the next.” 

KARMA 

“In the successive incarnations of an individual soul, there is not only a thread of continuity and identity…but here is also an uninterrupted reign of the law of cause and effect through the persistence and operation of Karma. 

“The successive incarnations with all their particulars are closely and unfailingly determined by rational law... ” 

“The actions of past lives determine the conditions and circumstances of the present life, and the actions of the present life have their share in determining the conditions and circumstances of the future lives.” 

Sri Ramana Maharshi

Barry Long gives the following advice in his book on Meditation: Go to the great sages - for example Krishnamurti, Meher Baba, Ramana Maharshi, among others." It occurred me that I didn't know anything about the last mentioned person and so I read the Wikipedia article about him. He lived from 1879 to 1950 in Southern India and Meher Baba thought highly of him, referring to him as a saint of the sixth plane. This means that he saw THE ONE everywhere and in everything but he had not yet crossed the great abyss that the separates the sixth plane from the seventh. Having crossed this abyss, there is no longer subject and object, there is only THE ONE.

Ramana attained to his near supreme spiritual state spontaneously in a Hindu temple in Arunachala at the age of 16 and, as with Meher Baba, his mother (Alagammal) became very concerned at his sudden and unexpected spiritual awakening and tried to persuade him to return home and resume a normal life. Ultimately though she ended up attending to him at the temple, as did his younger brother Nagasundaram. He was with his mother at the end of her life and announced on her death that she had been liberated.

Though he did not take a vow of silence as did Meher Baba, Ramana did approve of "the power of silence and the relatively sparse use of speech" and he led a very simple life. His teachings are summarised in the Wikipedia article as follows:

• As all living beings desire to be happy always, without misery, as in the case of everyone there is observed supreme love for one's self, and as happiness alone is the cause for love, in order to gain that happiness which is one's nature and which is experienced in the state of deep sleep where there is no mind, one should know one's self. For that, the path of knowledge, the inquiry of the form "Who am I?", is the principal means.
  
  
• Knowledge itself is 'I'. The nature of (this) knowledge is existence-consciousness-bliss.
  
  
• What is called mind is a wondrous power existing in Self. It projects all thoughts. If we set aside all thoughts and see, there will be no such thing as mind remaining separate; therefore, thought itself is the form of the mind. Other than thoughts, there is no such thing as the world.
  
  
• Of all the thoughts that rise in the mind, the thought 'I' is the first thought.
  
  
• That which rises in this body as 'I' is the mind. If one enquires 'In which place in the body does the thought 'I' rise first?', it will be known to be in the heart [spiritual heart is 'two digits to the right from the centre of the chest']. Even if one incessantly thinks 'I', 'I', it will lead to that place (Self)'
  
  
• The mind will subside only by means of the enquiry 'Who am I?'. The thought 'Who am I?', destroying all other thoughts, will itself finally be destroyed like the stick used for stirring the funeral pyre.
  
  
• If other thoughts rise, one should, without attempting to complete them, enquire, 'To whom did they arise?', it will be known 'To me'. If one then enquires 'Who am I?', the mind (power of attention) will turn back to its source. By repeatedly practising thus, the power of the mind to abide in its source increases.
  
  
• The place where even the slightest trace of the 'I' does not exist, alone is Self.
  
  
• Self itself is the world; Self itself is 'I'; Self itself is God; all is the Supreme Self (siva swarupam)

Sri Ramana warned against considering self-enquiry as an intellectual exercise. Properly done, it involves fixing the attention firmly and intensely on the feeling of 'I', without thinking. It is perhaps more helpful to see it as 'Self-attention' or 'Self-abiding' (cf. Sri Sadhu Om - The Path of Sri Ramana Part I). The clue to this is in Sri Ramana's own death experience when he was 16. After raising the question 'Who am I?' he "turned his attention very keenly towards himself" (cf. description above). Attention must be fixed on the 'I' until the feeling of duality disappears.

Practical Meditation

It was timely that I happened upon Barry Long's book on meditation (as described in my last entry) and started to apply his suggested approach to daily meditation over the past couple of weeks. This was a time of intense pressure for me as I was the sole person responsible for printing out all of the Secondary School reports by the start of the final week of school. The meditation, undertaken for about 15 minutes prior to going to bed, proved consistently effective in allowing me to remain calm under stress. I also came to realise that I have to do what works for me and not follow any suggested methods or techniques too rigidly. For me, sinking deep into the body and feeling its solidity and density, markedly slows the activity of my mind. Thoughts are so quick and light that I find the contrast between them and the heaviness of my body helps me to catch myself before I'm carried off too far into either the past or the future.

The focus on the body leads to an awareness of its energy and rate of vibration, a rate that is so much slower than thought and even the emotions that arise from thought. This creates a real sense of stability, of being rooted in the present. I'm starting to feel less of a helpless spectator caught up in a crazed thought machine and I'm sensing that I might be able to use the machine when I need it and turn it off when I don't. Of course, I've always applauded the "thought" of being able to do this but it's so very different to actually achieve this, even if only for a few moments in meditation. So I'm very much encouraged to continue my daily practice.

Stillness is the Way

I just happened to spy a book on my bookshelf called "Meditation: A Foundation Course" by Barry Long. I'd quite forgotten that I had it and even though I'm a great admirer of this now deceased guy, I'd never sat down and read it through. It's not a long book and its emphasis is wholely practical, just what I need really because lately I've been reading about various techniques for meditation and not deciding on any one in particular. In practical terms, I've been doing nothing and that's why chancing upon this little gem is so serendipitous.

Barry has a no-nonsense style about him. For example on page 3, he writes: "A great deal of mumbo-jumbo has been written and talked about meditation" and he goes on to say that "some meditation techniques introduce emotional excitation or arousal - through visualisation, chanting, imaginative exercises, trance and so forth - but these will not get you real results, only more confusion."

He divides the book into ten lessons to be followed sequentially over a period of days. Lesson 1 is titled "Posture, Breathing and the Still Mind" and in this Barry briefly outlines the ideas behind the practical lessons that follow, the first of which (Lesson 2) is titled "Meditating on the Body". The approach outlined there is more or less the same as the Vipassana Meditation as taught by S.N.Goenka that I'm familiar with from the 90s and so I have no conflicts or reservations in following his directions. I'll practise what he says in the second lesson for a few days and then move on to the next. At last I'll be actually meditating.

In setting up the hyperlinks for this post, I notice that the people behind Barry Long's website are still marketing his videos, audio tapes and books even though he died on December 6th 2003. This is regrettable as their focus should now be on freely disseminating the material via the Internet. To this end they should follow the example of the Meher Baba Trust and digitise all of Barry Long's books and make the ebooks downloadable at no cost. Similarly all his audio and video recordings should be freely downloadable. However, I doubt that will happen.

I also noticed that there is a Vipasanna Meditation Centre at Bogor (near Jakarta) that is offering 10 day courses in May and July but the times aren't convenient for me. In any case, I don't know if I could endure a full ten day session again. I managed a couple when I was in my mid-40s but I don't think I'd have the stamina for it now. The problem with these sessions was that they were so exhausting that I always stopped meditating after leaving the centre just out of sheer relief. I think I'll stick with a little bit of meditation every day if I can manage it. As Barry says: "Stillness is the Way".