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Reincarnation Revisited
From Martin LeFevre in California
For one intensely brilliant minute, a golden sun, more pure and riveting
in its hue than I’ve ever seen it, hangs on the horizon.
It doesn’t so much bathe the land as blast it with an amazing light,
which streams through the bare branches of the sycamores and penetrates
every living and non-living thing, including me.
To the east, a nearly full moon, holding about a 45 degree angles in the
sky, shines with increasing whiteness, directly opposite the point of
sunset. There are no clouds in the western sky, but below the moon a
line of purple clouds forms a counter-sunset.
When thought slows to a trifling trickle, the light of never-ending
creation infuses one. At such moments death means no more than the
ending of the day. One sees that there is only the endless cycle of
life, with awareness infusing everything.
The ground of life is death, and it is the same ground as creation. We
fear death because we think it is the end, but continuity is a fate
worse than death, because what continues is not complete. What ends is
whole, and daily contact with the actuality of death makes us complete,
whole in awareness.
If one transcends death when fully alive, then when the body expires, is
there death? I feel that by ending thought and self every day, awareness
does not perish when we die. On the other hand, in living in the
day-to-day continuity of thought and self, something continues after
death, and has to be reborn. Thus reincarnation.
The awakening person doesn’t want to return to the world and learn from
where they left off however. Having ended the recycling process, if one
returns at all, it is as a fully awakened human being.
Therefore a true human being seeks not reincarnation, but incarnation.
‘Re’ means again, whereas incarnation is new each time it happens.
The paradox is that one can only be complete when the ‘I’ is not, that
is, when the separate self has been totally negated in undivided
attention. That may take a thousand lifetimes, or one.
How do thought and self continue reincarnates when they don’t
irrevocably end while a person is fully alive?
The Internet is analogous to content-consciousness. Just as there are
all kinds of good and bad content on the net, there are different types
of people in collective consciousness, past and present. Just as
everything is interconnected and non-localized on the net, so too
consciousness is essentially one movement with innumerable streams.
It appears that when someone dies who is still plugged into the
‘matrix,’ they remain part of content-consciousness, suspended until
they can be reborn and begin again from where they left off. But when a
person leaves content-consciousness for good (not just for an hour every
day as I do), then their awareness goes on, but the self and its content
does not, and they don’t need to reincarnate.
What incarnates when thought and self have irrevocably ended? There
seems to be beings in a dimension beyond physical death that can infuse
the body of a living person for a time, perhaps for a lifetime. But even
if that is so, I feel that we are meant, as human beings, to grow into
gods, not have gods glow through us.
Space for children, animals, and self-knowing adults is shrinking at an
increasing rate. With so many people regressing and devolving, many
people believe that humanity is lost. But that feeling is the projection
of people who are inwardly dead, or don’t want to feel anymore.
Though few people transcend death and completely end the false
continuity of the self during life, that’s the direction in which true
human beings are headed.
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