Reincarnation and Liberation

There are many videos of Prabhupada on You-Tube. Watching one I was given a kick. I only took on a short section but it has prompted a insight toward reincarnation.

Certainly from the outside there is no mystery to reincarnation. It is accepted as fact that the world is a sequence of events triggering one another. When anything happens we instinctively look back in time to see what caused it, and we naturally spend our days trying to work out what the future will be by extrapolating from the present. Time and existence are so connected. It is no mystery then that at some level human beings are caused. Sperms/eggs, parents, cell division, embryo-genesis: conclusion I am caused... at some level anyway. Look into the past before I was born - the letter my mum sent my Dad calling the relationship off and the chance meeting before it arrived where she changed her mind - all these things before I existed that led to the arising of what is called Alva.

But on the inside it is harder. While the brain has grown and is nourished by food, it's hard to see how the ideas themselves are! This is the Ouroboros again. Mind is grander than material existence, it is only because we are conscious that there is a world at all! After all material existence is just an idea... right? Daniel Dennett for example disagrees, I have argued the case before.

People like Dennett, like Dawkins and their ilk, it seems to me they are afraid of themselves and write themselves out of the picture at every step. Obsessed with objectivity and the publishing of their work, no time is given to what is private, what won't be published, what might be called, normally, themselves. It is no less objective, just private. It is no less objective that it can't be measured and "quantized" (I use the 'z' to give it an American "spin" i.e. being inauthentic and artificial). Big argument not getting stuck on this here... and I do argue for the self being a narrative myth myself but that can only be done because the mind is not! No cartesian theatres here, mind is transcendent even of such ideas!

Sitting comfortably with the inside view Prabhupada asks an interesting question. We move to another room, but have we moved? Sitting here, sitting there are we any different?

I thought last night were I to fly to Africa I might say that I am in Africa (which is a joke since the place is huge and the word very small) but asked where are you you will say I am in Africa. Asked then where is Africa? we might reasonable answer it is outside me! Fly to Russia and ask the same questions. Russia is also outside me. And so on.

Everywhere is always outside me. This never changes no matter where I am. So While I may move in the sense that my body moves and the surrounding change, for me I am always here. It is like my friend argued: it is because we don't change that the world changes.

So we never really change, it is only the world that changes. Now I know this seems to contradict the no-substance argument ... that there is no fixed self ... don't get into that here .. it's a different subject.

So Prabhupada asked, if sitting in Africa or sitting in Russia is always "sitting here" when it happens what makes us think that after death things are any different? We never change only the world changes, be that moving the body to different places or more profoundly having the body aging and changing, or even more radically changing the form of body completely.

We can't see Reincarnation happening now because we are alive, any more than you can see moving to another room now because you are reading a computer screen, but when it happens just watch it. It happens... you don't! and because you don't happen, it can happen.

This is true self. And so be liberate a step further.

Now the next level is the realisation that self is empty. This is stage two of non-self. Stage 1 is realising that all things are not-myself (they are outside) , that myself is apart and unchanging. Part 2 is complete unattachment from this inside self as shown in this response to the first stanza:

The body is a bo-tree
The mind is a bright mirror in a stand
Take care to wipe it all the time
And allow no dust to cling.

There is no bo-tree
Nor the stand of a mirror bright
Since all is empty from the beginning
Where can the dust alight

[Platform Sutra]

The world is distinct and apart from myself.
Myself is neither of this world
Nor another, neither in matter nor in spirit
It is simply nowhere to behold.