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, directly opposite the point of sunset, a nearly full moon, holding about a 45-degree angle in the sky, shines with increasing whiteness as dusk deepens. 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? By ending thought and self every day, awareness predominates 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 re-learn from where they left off. Having ended the recycling process, if one returns at all, it’s 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. It’s up to us.
How do thought and self continue reincarnate when they don’t irrevocably end while a person is fully alive?
Perhaps content-consciousness is analogous to the Internet. 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.
Is it that when someone dies who is still plugged into the Net, they remain part of content-consciousness, suspended until they can be reborn and begin again from where they left off? If so, when a person leaves content-consciousness for good (not just for an hour daily as I do), then their awareness goes on, but the self and its content does not, and one doesn’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, surely we’re meant to grow into fully realized human beings. Perhaps that is what the gods are.
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 very 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.
Martin LeFevre