Re-birth

With palms together


Good Morning Everyone,



It is late in the morning already. There is something about being cradled by your partner that is arresting. In such a position, it is best to release one’s grip on schedule and relax into it. Such good practice.



My colleague, Jue Miao Jing Ming, is working on his message regarding re-incarnation for the Zen Living list at Yahoogroups.com. In the meantime he has asked me for my thoughts regarding a book which explores past-life regression. While I have not read the particular text, I have read several excerpts and reviews, but more to the point, have some experiential understanding of the phenomena.



Similar to near death or death resuscitation experiences, past life regression stories are anecdotal evidence. Assuming the individuals are not being guided,, they are simply reporting what their brain is telling them. Our brains are totally unreliable organizers of sense data. Our brains rush to place data in categories. We see this in experiments where subjects read texts with missing letters and are able to make perfect sense of them. Our brain fills in the gaps according to pathways that have been developed. When our brain does not know what to do with particular data, it makes up something that allows the data to make sense to us.



So, under hypnosis, what is happening? Are we actually touching a “past life”? Or are we adding to a sensory data array a frame within which to place the data so that it makes a degree of sense to us?



Trusting a memory can be dangerous. Memories are constructions, like all other thoughts. Three people witness an accident and three versions are described. Someone, a crime victim, just “knows” a particular person did something, only to discover they were in another state at the time. People have used memories of abuse to charge alleged perpetrators only to discover the alleged perpetrator was not, actually, the perpetrator at all. Memories can be, and are, manipulated.



So, does a memory of a past life mean anything? Does it offer any sort of evidence that re-incarnation is an actuality? Maybe, maybe not. I rather think that these things point to other explanations such as a potent connection with all life, a sort of genetic memory, if you will, and not a memory of a single soul migrating through time.



From a Zen perspective, all time is in all being; being and time are not two, but one. So, too, all things. The Buddha’s memories of past lives, memories of animal existence, etc., are, in my opinion, expressions of present moment, deeply interconnected, manifestations of the oneness of life. “My” Buddha-nature is not separate from “yours.” There is no mine or yours, there is just Buddha Nature.



Be well.