The Dream of Reincarnation
God made the tree and the sky, the life which has no continuity and promises nothing. Man made the theory of reincarnation, and its counterpart the theory of death and survival.
Nothing can happen in the external world before it is energetically in place in the world psyche; that is, has a place in the one human psyche where everybody on earth can connect with it. What is in the human psyche has been put there by either man or God. By man through his constant thinking about his beliefs and impressions of existence; by God in sheer simplicity, through things simply being as they are.
Every man and woman is responsible for their own personal psyche. The purpose of their life is to clear that psyche of distortion and emotional instability by ridding themselves of attachment to existence, along with the things and people in it. This takes a long time and few people ever manage it in their lifetime.
Nonetheless, life and the one human psyche continues. What one individual is not able to do in working out his or her life is of no consequence. Another individual arises out of the world psyche and takes the former’s place. The newcomer doesn’t live precisely the same life that the other had been given to live. But the new life will include aspects of that life which were not cleared or faced, as well as unresolved aspects of numerous other unconnected lives.
There is no reincarnation in the sense that an entity comes back to have another go. Since nothing personal or individual survives death, there is nothing to come back or go on – only impersonal life itself, which is always present and continues to take on a new person.
The new person does his or her best and dies, never to be seen again. But life – that which never comes or goes and is never born or dies – continues to continue discontinuously. (Or to put it more simply, it continues without survival.)
However, there is hope for the traditional reincarnationist or anyone looking for survival in a heaven or ‘hereafter’. The hope of reincarnation, like all hope, is a dream.
Most people live and die in a dream. They live in a dream, in hope, and they die still dreaming and hoping. This dream does continue. That’s why you hear stories of people giving widely different accounts of life after death. The accounts are as numerous and varied as dreams. There’s no consistency – except that they are all able to describe the dreaming.
As reincarnation takes place in the dream it can be said to exist – but only in the dream.
Reincarnation only exists in ignorance, and only ignorance reincarnates. It is the same ignorance dreaming all the dreams. And the reincarnation dream has been going on for thousands of years. This dreamer in the human psyche will never wake up. It just goes on and on like the notion of reincarnation itself – a never-ending dreamtime.
Ignorance reincarnates because ignorance lives in a dream. While you live in a dream you can indeed join the dream and reincarnate, or dream that you do. Although in the actuality of existence impersonal life will be living through you, in the dream you will have a separative existence – believing in reincarnation and devoting a good deal of your dreaming time to dreaming you are reading or talking about it.
Your body will eventually die with the dreamer (you) still in the dream – until such time as you are awakened in existence by a master who punctures your dream, your hope of survival.
But I must say this: There is no death. Life continues because it never ended or ends. The reality of this – this death – is a mystery beyond the dream of existence. I do not know what it is and nor does anybody else. I do not need to know for I love life and am life. I am free of attachment to the dream, the need for personal continuity, the need for a third act to tie up all the loose ends in some fancy rational solution or traditional hand-me-down dream theory.
~extract from Barry Long's book, Journal 3
Changing Karma