Some thoughts after not talking for 6 days.

 

Last week, I drove 100 miles north from Salem OR. and parked my borrowed car at Cloud Mountain Retreat Center. Inspired by friends and readings, I wanted to be on retreat with others seeking to deepen our meditation practice. This would be a retreat held in noble silence, no speaking, reading, phones or other digital devices.  

As I walked the grounds at Cloud Mountain, I would reach in my pocket to discover that there was nothing there.  No oblong device there, my pocket had achieved what we retreatants were leaning into: emptiness.  If you attend a 6 day retreat and maintain silence for the duration, stuff happens. Questions come up: who am I?, why am I?, what's my next step? Having a daily meditation practice as I have for a number of years is helpful, but for what?  Sometimes I think my meditation is done in order to check a box to get credit in the category of “spirituality”. As in, "if I don’t go to religious services, pray, chant, perform sacred rituals, or meditate, no box will be checked on the form that is to be handed in to the professor at the end of the incarnation". Maybe I’ll write about meditation practice some other time, but the topic for today is death because, well, because it's today's topic.

In one of the dharma talks, our teacher mentioned her belief in reincarnation.  As my mind rambled down the pathways of judgement and wonder that it always rambles down when that topic comes up, a new path seemed to appear, the path that leads to "belief".  Our teacher explained: individual selves or individual consciousnesses after the physical body dies might be not like drops in the ocean, but like currents. That metaphor had resonance with me. But isn’t reincarnation “implausible” because where would all those souls go?  I mean, everyone who’s ever lived?  Well, now that I think about it yet again, two things.  One, there are so many life-forms on this planet that there will always be at least  millions of opportunities to re-incarnate for each human who dies. And secondly, even if one always reincarnates into human form…I just can’t finish this sentence, too ineffable. If you consider the “beginning” (big bang?  God’s hand?), one can twist the mind around enough to conceptualize a process of consciousnesses moving like a wave thru the ocean of evolution.  Then there's the doctrine of the Law of Karma. I don’t have a clue as to “how” the ledger is kept regarding karma.  That is, who or what is “doing” the cosmic sorting that will ordain the future direction of this current that I am? Karma could be a transcendent understanding. I often experience the doctrine of karma as a frighteningly simplistic, anodyne point of view.

It's funny how these musings seem almost incomprehensible even to me, like I am transcribing something from a different language into another language that I don’t know either.  But I am enjoying writing about these things; it feels comforting.  I am certain that for many a belief in reincarnation offers comfort.  As the size of my remaining time in this body continues to be more and more palpable as it shrinks, the answer to my question “why not believe it?” gets closer to “no reason not to”.  I mean really, are you kidding me? Consider: The number of grains of sand on all of the earth; the number of suns in the universe; the thing that happened for you just at the right time; the mysterious mystery of the next thing one could conjure up to put in this list. I don’t think I will ever grok applying reason to such a thing as brainless consciousness.  Not believing is as baseless as believing. As Bob Dylan sang, you’ve “gotta serve somebody”.  Why is it that I lean toward judging those who believe in brainless consciousnesses as being deluded?  That’s a question for another day, as I look at my own delusions and widen the field of my exploration.

On the path

Good alternative to a cell phone screen

A bridge of cedar roots

Walking or seated meditation happens here

The fog obscures the world beyond, on our morning of re-entry