When I give a talk on whatever topic, at some point I open up the infinite life dimension and invite people to join me in the year-round, lifelong blissful vacation. People often come up to me afterward. They will say, “I love what you said. I hope it’s so. But, you know, I still have trouble with that future life stuff.” I always say to them, as I say to you now, “The real trouble is with your sense of your present life. You tend to feel boxed in,and you don’t know why. As long as you haven’t come to feel as common sense, as natural, your life continuity, the reality of your own for future lives, then you won’t be able to be the happy person you really are! oT move your mind away from the surface problem and try to look critically at your sense of this life, how it feels, where it comes from, how plausible is it, really?”
If you feel the infinite life perspective is a problem for you, I don’t demand that you just drop everything and “believe” in it. Rather, I encourage you to go to work on the issue. I’ll keep coming back to it. I more and more have come to feel that if anything positive could result from my teaching, any real benefit for any person, it should be that they get just a hint of the reality of their own former and future lives, that they diminish just the tiniest bit their usual “only this one life” sense of cosmic disconnection, loneliness, alienation, and meaninglessness. I want everyone to be able to see more clearly their culturally common belief that, “My life only began when I was born and it ends when I die. So my responsibility tothe universe is limited and even my responsibility to myself is limited.
Nothing really matters because we’ll all be nothing in the end.” If nothing else, I want to help you free yourself from that trap, that imprisoning way of thinking. To intensify your spiritual evolution, the first and most important step you must take is to embrace your boundlessness, take responsibility for your infinite continuity, and live your immortality here and now. Religions make a big deal out of telling people, “You have an immortal soul!” The materialist scientist makes a big deal out of telling them, “You don’t have any soul at all! That’s only a religious superstition! You die, you’re gone, full stop!” The Buddhist “inner scientist” disagrees with the religious claim: “You don’t have some fixed inner essence that can be
disconnected from your total you and put on a shelf in heaven, staying unchanged immortally while the rest of you rots!” And she also disagrees with the materialist scientist: “There is no full stopping of anything, it’s nonsense to say something can become nothing; your consciousness is a something, just like your body! You are body and mind, spirit and soul—the whole ‘you’ is what is immortal! Always has been and always will be, living and dying, changing and experiencing. The question is not really whether or not you go on, but rather how are you going to enjoy it? How
are your friends going to enjoy you, once you’re all going to be there together forever?”
When some people hear the word “reincarnation,” they automatically think that the person speaking is a nut, a weirdo, or some kind of New Age hippie. It’s so ingrained in our heads by our scientific, materialistic culture that the idea is absurd. Carl Sagan thought the belief in future lives was wishful thinking by religious fanatics, an immature clinging to continuing
existence by those not brave enough to face extinction. And Carl was a brave man, leaving his tenured position at Cornell to be what many considered a crackpot, running his SETI project to look for intelligent life on other planets.
Why is it so difficult for us to accept the continuation of our personal existence throughout many lives? After all, due to our educated familiarity with the theory of biological evolution, we freely embrace the concept of
the evolution of life forms. We accept that we all came out of a primordial stew and that now we’re these incredibly complex beings with brains, eyes, and fingers who have created communities, cultures, languages, and highly supportive habitats. We’ve slowly and miraculously evolved from tinyamoebas into lizards into birds into apes into Shakespeares, Mozarts, Emily Dickinsons, Einsteins, Gandhis, and all kinds of amazing human beings. If we believe that this sort of ongoing physical and mental evolution is possible, then why should it be impersonal and random, a haphazard progression of material forms? Why do we have so much trouble acknowledging a spiritual evolutionary continuum interwoven with the material genetic development? If there are material genes, why can’t there be “spiritual genes”?
I’m very sorry to shake up the materialist scientist’s sense of history and “progress,” but long before Darwin and company, the Buddha and his contemporaries had already “discovered” evolution. He clearly saw that the life-form of the human being was not sui generis and was not the creation of a “God,” but was evolutionarily connected with all other life-forms, had developed out of them and could also regress back into them. Only he went even further than the materialist scientists. He made evolution a personal matter; he acknowledged that it involves the subjective agencies of beings,
intentions, and minds. It is not merely an impersonal biological process of atoms and molecules and cells. He saw that living beings do evolve— progress and regress—in a more than strictly physical sense. He taught that we are not merely passive inheritors of genetic codes. We also personally and intentionally evolve ourselves toward higher states of awareness and
happiness, or deteriorate ourselves toward lesser awareness and more wretched embodiments. We do so not just in this life, or in a few lives, but over the course of billions of lives, just as it takes billions of lives for a paramecium to become a butterfly.
Why is this so hard to believe? After all, you and I and Darwin and Shakyamuni Buddha were all in the primordial soup together, little slimy creatures with no brains or eyes. And now we are here. Isn’t it realistic that our continuity of mental awareness is also here with us, in the same radically transformed and transforming sense that our physical genetic
codes are here with us? Why should mind be the one element of reality that is arbitrarily selected to be more nonexistent than matter? Of course, mind cannot be found by means of scientific analysis. But no one has ever found even one atom that can withstand analysis either! There is no thing that anyone has ever found that stands indivisible as a thing in itself. All things, material as well as mental, have only relational, ascribed reality. So it is sheer dogmatism, prejudice, unscientific arbitrariness to insist that matterdoes exist but mind does not. So an evolutionary biology that excludes the agency and continuity of beings’ minds is highly unscientific, philosophically naïve, and pragmatically inaccurate.
I have a theory about why we’re so reluctant even to entertain the possibility that our existences might go on: The idea just scares the pants off of us! We find the vista of infinite future lives simply terrifying. Because if we believe we will live on, it inevitably leads to anxiety about the form of our continued existence. Will it be good or bad? Pleasant or
unpleasant? Will we be human again, angelic or maybe even divine, or insectlike, or something more terrible? When people refuse to believe in their inevitable reincarnation in whatever form their unconscious, instinctual dispositions dictate, they are emotionally trying to avoid the danger of being reborn as a spider, or even worse, in a hell—and the
hellfires of the ancestral preachers are crackling away in their unconscious, now and then vividly illustrated in horror movies. That’s why we are so desperate to believe that we’ll be nothing after death, that the mind is just a buzz of electricity that will one day fizzle out like an old lightbulb. After all, there is a clear relief you can feel, especially when things get tough, in thinking that your life will end someday. We just want to escape.
But don’t be fooled by the false promise of security in oblivion. Bars may keep the outside world away but they also imprison you within them. The denial type of defense against an uncertain yet boundless future traps you in a stagnant present. Instead, see your fear itself as the problem and allow your courage to rise as the more natural response. Feel a new kind of strength surge forth from the fullness of your sense of continuing throughout many lives. Forever changing, but forever taking responsibility for seeing that it’s forever good!
We often sleep on a difficult problem when we are just too tired to deal with it at night. We all know how it feels to wake up the next morning with that problem still before us. We don’t remember it at first—then it hits us. “Ugh,” we think, “it’s still there.” Many of us feel the same way about
dying. We try to push the thought away, but every once in a while it creeps
into our consciousness with a giant “ugh.” We feel queasiness in the pit of
our stomachs. us are ready to die right now? How many of us
have all our projects accomplished, all the loose ends tied up? How many of us are free of any haunting guilt about negative things we’ve done?