rebirth

Let’s get this one out of the way.

Rebirth is not about future and past lives but about future and past selves. 

It is an ongoing process and is happening right now as you read this article. Your person before reading this is different to your person while reading this is different to your person after reading this. You in the bath is different to you in a fight is different to you in the bedroom.

There are multiple components to your being, which the buddha termed the five aggregates. I am not smart enough to get my head around the nature of being just yet, but what I can tell you is that you are never the same from moment to moment and your past self will shape your present self will shape your future self.

Emotions change and you change and you are never the same. Thoughts change and you change and you are never the same. You imagine a task and you are engrossed in a task and you remember the task and you are never the same.

You cognise things. You see them or you hear them or you smell them or you sense them with your mind. Each one of these things enters your memory and becomes either a literal memory or a mod within your cmem which impacts how you simulate your version of reality. This is where karma comes into play.

This feeds into the theory of no-self because there is no identifiable axis around which these things revolve. It feels like we have a lasting soul, but so too does it feel like we have a lasting body. What we really have is a cross-section of time and matter within an eternal flow. Things feed in, they shape internal reality, and then internal reality shapes external reality.

We have all heard the ‘7 years to change every cell in the body’ myth. Most cells are actually a lot faster than this, and but a handful are permanent (neurons, eye cells, some cardiac muscles). I guess that this means your heart, or a % of it, is for life. Maybe that can be a soul if it brings solace.

But your neurons are different. They may not have physical overturn but they can change how they are connected and how they behave, and they can do so in both gradual and explosive manners depending on the level of dopamine they are exposed to.

This may explain why some of us bounce from one personality to the next with little seeming crossover. Dopamine dysregulation could be the cause of some rapid changes in the encoding, resulting in me being reborn as an alcoholic, workaholic, atheticaholic, artaholic, yogaholic and I now I guess a nibbanaholic, but that last one is excusable as it is the first step on the path to liberation.

Anyway this is what the buddha was talking about with rebirth. He lived a life of extremes. Shelter and wealth as a prince. Solitary exploration and shock as a youth encountering sickness and death after leaving the palace. Time as an ascetic and religious seeker, trying to find and extinguish the cause of his suffering. Time testing the theories of all the different schools to the maximum; I mean… he starved himself to the point of skeletal emaciation; the guy was hardcore. Multiple encounters with nibbana and the non-sense-pleasures, also leaving him with the same fundamental encoding for suffering.

All of these were different lives, different people, rebirths.

When we touch nibbana our entire understanding of the world is reset according the life we have led to that date. Our minds are blown apart and rebuild themselves with optimised rules. The buddha had intuited the transient and ever-changing nature of the self and he had to both understand it in the framework of his mind and pass that information on to a society which believed in rebirth.

The buddha was very clear in how he communicated the (not)importance of the matter in 3.65 - Kesaputti sutta.

• “The first assurance he has won is this: ‘If there is another world, and if there is the fruit and result of good and bad deeds, it is possible that with the breakup of the body, after death, I will be reborn in a good destination, in a heavenly world.’

• “The second assurance he has won is this: ‘If there is no other world, and there is no fruit and result of good and bad deeds, still right here, in this very life, I maintain myself in happiness, without enmity and ill will, free of trouble.

• “The third assurance he has won is this: ‘Suppose evil comes to one who does evil. Then, when I have no evil intentions toward anyone, how can suffering afflict me, since I do no evil deed?’

• “The fourth assurance he has won is this: ‘Suppose evil does not come to one who does evil. Then right here I see myself purified in both respects.’

The reality is that greed, anger, delusion… they hurt you more deeply than they hurt anyone else. They hurt you and they make you hurt others, then those people are more prone to greed and anger and delusion and so the dominoes fall.

The easiest way to extinguish greed is to extinguish the belief in a permanent, lasting self. You can’t take it with you. The b-man was a philosopher, speaking the language of the times. He laid out all the possibilities and showed that his way was the way to extinguish suffering regardless of the reality of any reincarnation or lasting heaven.

This remains the case.

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