We can also look at this question of death differently. Death is an everyday experience if we pay attention to it. We live in a culture that fears death and hides from it. Nevertheless, we experience it all the time. We experience it in the form of disappointment, in the form of things not working out. We experience it in the form of things always in a process of change. When the day ends, when the second ends, when we breathe out, that’s death in everyday life.
Practice dying before dying. Breathing in and breathing out can itself be a practice of death. Relax with the present moment, relax with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that everything is changing all the time. If you do this, when death comes you will not be such strangers. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. I’m always letting go of things, people, ideas, so I can bring in new ones. I die to the old ones.
All life is a part of a rhythmic cycle which coincides with the cycle of the natural world. A cycle of fertilization, birth, youth, maturity, death, and rebirth. Not only so-called “living beings” but all beings undergo this pattern of living and dying, and resurrecting. I’m speaking of stars, of suns, of galaxies. Each has their lifetime in which they strut their stuff. But it seems to come to an end for all of them. But their endtime is not final. Rather, they resurrect in a new form. They don’t just disappear. They give off progeny. Supernova explosions unleash atoms and galaxies and stars, which in turn give birth to such as us: earth with its amazing collection of life forms. If this is not resurrection or rebirth, what is?
And is evolution not a story of reincarnation? Might we not say that every incarnation is a kind of reincarnation because all being is some kind of recycling of being? Life itself seems to reincarnate in form after form, with new perceptions or types of consciousness. The human condition can be seen as our shared incarnation, part of our evolutionary karma. Within nine months we develop from a single cell to a complex mammal. We share more than ninety-eight percent of our genes with chimpanzees, sweat fluids reminiscent of seawater, and crave sugar that provided our one-celled ancestors with energy three billion years ago. We carry our past with us.
As I look more closely, I can see that in a former life I was a cloud. And I was a rock. I was the sun. I still am these things, and so are you. This is not poetry; it’s science. This is not a question of belief in reincarnation. This is the history of life on earth.
