Conscious Choice: The Ageless Cycle: Birth, Death, and Rebirth

October 2000

The Ageless Cycle: Birth, Death, and Rebirth

by Wayne Teasdale

The notion of rebirth, transmigration, or reincarnation has been around for millennia in both East and West. A regular feature of the religions of the orient, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, it existed in Egypt and the Near East as well, and found eloquent articulation in Plato’s Dialogues. Even the early Christian church debated the belief, before rejecting it. It is fascinating how this view of the mystery of life and death is so resilient, and it’s astounding to learn just how widespread the idea is among Christians. Belief in reincarnation has, in fact, insinuated itself into both American and European culture. It is not an official part of the Christian, Jewish, or Islamic faiths, but it persists just below the surface and pops up at odd moments and in diverse contexts.

Karma and Reincarnation

The view that human beings — indeed, animals too — pass through thousands of lifetimes, rests on the karmic principle that we are morally and existentially responsible for all our actions, thoughts, and words — even our emotions. According to this principle, each action, thought, emotion, and word has a karmic consequence, either positive or negative, and the nature of the consequence depends on the moral quality of the action, thought, emotion, or word. Everything we do, say, think, and feel thus affects our next life.

The Eastern understanding of karma regards harmful thoughts, words, actions, and emotions as a result of ignorance. Yet it holds that we are responsible for our actions, even if we don’t know all that we should to guide them. A wise person is someone who has insight into and experience of this moral dimension of life and reality, understanding that it is absolute, that nature is ruled by karma, and that karma is inescapable. (Though not explicit in Christianity, this karmic doctrine is present in Jesus’s warning that "as you sow, so shall you reap.")

Even those of us who are not wise, may gain wisdom — though it may take us eons. The Eastern view allows for a gradual evolution, a natural unfolding to maturation, through the repetitive cycle of birth, growth, sickness, old age, and steady diminishment to death. No doubt the cosmologies of Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, of China, India, Japan, and Tibet all have been influenced by watching the seasons come and go in their perpetual cycle of renewal, year in and year out, century after century, one millennium after another. The annual regeneration of vegetation, the perennial character of certain flowers and plants, the yearly planting and harvest of crops, all contribute to the Eastern sense of reincarnation, or rebirth.

The cyclic movement of oriental cosmology united with the karmic principle gives us the notion of transmigration, or is an image of it. The cycle of birth to death to rebirth becomes the basis for karmic consequences to be played out in our lives. Yet the essential character of karma has more to do with attachment than with particular actions, emotions, thoughts, and speech. It is attachment, and the ignorance it represents, that leads people to behave in certain ways, desire certain things, and entertain unkind thoughts toward people and conditions they perceive as obstacles to their goals.

In the classic understanding of rebirth in the East, reincarnation happens essentially because of moral imperfection in us, that is, we are often motivated by selfish desires, i.e., our passions, possessions, money, power, and celebrity, etc. Attachments drive the mechanism of rebirth. Any attachment keeps us on the return route until, through inner awakening, we see through the cosmic game, and transcend desire for enlightenment, and realize true reality, or the Divine.

In the Tibetan mystical view, we must overcome our karma in order to enter the Clear Light at the end of our life, but this requires freeing ourselves from our attachments, which hold us bound to this phenomenal reality that is fleeting. Overcoming karma is a matter of letting go of attachments.

The Nature of Transmigration

If all our lives are basically about working through the negative results of our past karma, and life is the "place" of our work and the reason for it, how did the first life in any series begin, since there was nothing preceding it? From where did all our souls arise? And from where do the increasing numbers of souls on the planet originate? These questions of origin plague karmic philosophy as they plague other philosophies, religions, and sciences. We in the West can trace them to Parmenides in the pre-Socratic period, when the great philosopher asked, why is there something rather than nothing?

Parmenides said the reason there is something rather than nothing, or the reason for existence is simply that "being, (or existence) is, and cannot not be"; it must be. Existence is necessary, not in a moral sense, as in the oriental view, but metaphysically. The necessity of existence has something to do with Divine Reality, or God, and not directly with us. That is, our existence represents a possibility for God; therefore, this cosmos is necessary to actualize that potentiality.

One of the profoundest understandings of Hindu mysticism validates reincarnation in a similar way. Most of us who believe in reincarnation assume that each one of us in our particular uniqueness, that is, with our personalities, characters, even egos, is reborn in life after life until we achieve ultimate liberation. The highest teaching of the Hindu tradition, however, has it that the only real transmigrator, the only person being reborn in all lifetimes of human and other sentient beings, is the Lord himself, God, the Divine reality, the Source itself. It is not the earth-bound phenomenal identity of the person that transmigrates, or takes on another life, but the Eternal Self, the imperishable Atman.

Similarly, in the Buddhist understanding, it is not a personal being that is reborn in the cycle of samsara, of rebirth, but the mind itself that transcends a particular form as a personality, or ego. It is the nature of the mind that is reborn, driven on by the karmic residues of past actions, thoughts, feelings, and words. This mind, which we all share like an inexhaustible pool of water, manifests in an infinite number of sentient beings, but all have the same timeless, spaceless, unchanging nature, revealed only through the effort of liberation. Life is primarily a struggle for and a journey towards awakening into our true identity as infinite awareness.

It is sometimes claimed that we can recall past lives in the experience of meditation itself. In that rich silence and stillness, the ego noise subsides, and tides of realization come in as we plunge deeper into the sea of awareness. Past life streams well up into the mind, and we "recognize" them as our own. Is this contention necessarily true? In a sense, it must be. If reality is a unity; life is a unity, and cosmic memory is the thread of identity.

Because of the unity of all reality, we human beings, and even the animals, birds, and fish, are cosmic receptors. All knowledge is available to us, and through intuition, dreams, mystical states, aesthetic experience, meditation, interpersonal love, and parapsychological states we can and do have access. Do we actually have recall of our own past lives, or are they the lives of others we’ve tuned into when we have access? I find this a fascinating and promising question, but the answer may be irrelevant, if we are all aspects of the same Divinity.

The Nature and Primacy
of Consciousness

As philosophers and saints communicate with scientists and each other, and beliefs begin to converge, we are moving towards the conviction that consciousness itself is the "place" wherein all reality occurs. Consciousness is, after all, the container and mediating presence of all experience. All we really can say we know, whether from direct experience, psychological states, dreams, aesthetic insight, intuition, etc., is brought to us by our awareness, through consciousness.

It is not even meaningful to speak of an outside to consciousness, or to awareness, since we have no experience of it, and we are prevented from ever having such experience, or such a perception. We are hermetically sealed in the existential situation of consciousness. There is no outside because we cannot establish an outside. If, hypothetically, we could somehow manage to slip through the seal of awareness and look "outside" to see what was there, we would still have to be aware, or conscious to succeed. Thus everything is internal to us, is happening within the range of awareness, and even reason is only a special mode of knowing, or awareness, a tool of it.

Within consciousness as a vast field of awareness, a unified field, all information, wisdom, knowledge, past, present, and future, is present to us. (That includes past lives.) Furthermore, within this infinite consciousness, there is only the eternal now. There is no past or future, and time is contained within the eternal reality of consciousness as this now. If reincarnation exists it must do so within this infinite field. It is quite conceivable that all past lives ascribed to individuals are actually happening simultaneously within the eternity of consciousness itself, and then temporally divided and perceived as successive. In this novel view, all lives are happening right now. And in this very moment, you are dying and being born again.

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