What Reincarnates?

Q.  

gary weber

Dear Gary,

I have a doubt and maybe you have the right answer.

It is often said that any effort toward realizing our true self is never wasted. That even if the body dies before the self-realization has come, nothing is indeed lost.

This implies that something is carried forward and infused in the next body that happens, for further evolution. Mind is not that carrier as it is gone when the body dies. If consciousness is that carrier, that too can’t be the case because consciousness is pure and infinite, and has no reason to evolve. What is it that is carried forward? Then is there such a thing called “individual consciousness” (that is, universal consciousness losing itself to become individual consciousness as when absorbed in thought)? But such a thing sounds belittling like that of a mind-like identity rather than that which is beyond definition and of the order of being Timeless, Spaceless, boundless.

Could you please throw some light?

With best regards,

G.


Am well aware of the assurances in the Gita and elsewhere that no effort is wasted, even if one is not successful @ reaching "awakening" before the passing of the physical body/mind.


"my" personal experience is that as one progresses more deeply and the ego/I becomes less and less, that it is difficult to find anything that would be "worth" reincarnating. There is just a vast full emptiness and stillness with only enough "identity" to respond when called, to know where to place one's food and to not bump into the furniture. Some have called it "the scent of an 'I'" necessary for the functioning of this perfectly imperfect manifestation.


The rest of body/mind is just a collection of idiosyncrasies of genetics, conditioning, environment, culture, etc. that would have no point in regenerating. For example, this body/mind's love of green tea, ripe mangoes and iddlies would hardly be worth the bother of carrying over to another unique manifestation of the Universe.


i believe that whatever is left, however "far along it is", just dissolves into the Infinite.


As to the question of what happens for those who remain deeply, or even perhaps much less deeply, engaged in the illusion of this dream world at the time of that body/mind's passing, i don't find a different answer compelling. It could be that this dream world is a training ground that the Universe uses to ripen individual entities, but, as you point out there are manifold complications in that model.


An example is just the pragmatic issue of "bookkeeping" all of those different reincarnations, deciding who gets what and when, and who was responsible for what and when as there are countless interactions on countless unknown others of even the smallest of "our" actions of which we could have no foreknowledge. The problem gets more daunting when one considers the hundreds/thousands of actions everyday of almost 7 billion folk. How then to hold one "responsible"?


i honestly have no coherent recollection of having lived before, although others have told me i MUST have or i would not be as "i" now am. Past lives practices have limited credibility for me as one could just as easily be accessing the "Universal Consciousness" and drawing a chance fragment/element from That which has nothing to do with a current particular manifestation which is believing it is reincarnated.


i am much more empathic with a "Universal Consciousness is 'Self-aware' and is learning about/dancing with Itself through all of these different manifestations" model. It is much closer to what our best science is beginning to show us than the reincarnation model and it works with Occam's Razor in that it is much simpler and "cleaner", which is usually the more correct model.


Those are 'my' musings on this subject. Hopefully you will find them useful or at least interesting or entertaining.