Conundrum of rebirth

Since my childhood I had a wrong notion of rebirth. My parents told me that after one dies, one is reborn and there’s a soul that does this job. When my great grandmother passed away when I was eight, I used to look for her in the newly born children around my house. I used to call her name and see if the child responds. I also used school physics and mathematics to calculate the distance soul travelled using time. Nothing worked. I used to feel sad. And I thought I lost her forever. It took me a long while to realise that I made a fundamental category mistake. The notion of absolute identity. How can we look for our identity after we pass away when we never have an absolute identity when we are alive? We only have a conventional one…

The Zen teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh helped me a lot to understand and re-formulate the notion of rebirth. Today morning as I bathed, I used up the last piece of soap. It just disappeared into lather. I thought it is gone. Completely. But then I asked: “my dear soap, where did you disappear?” And I realised it never disappeared. It transformed into the lather, which thereby cleaned my body and gave me the sense of “freshness”. And with that freshness I may respond a bit more happily to people who wrote to me or with those I interact with. I may compose a poem or eat my meal more happily. Can I say the soap is gone? No. A piece of soap continues to stay in the emails I write and in the poem I composed. In the smile I offered to someone. And it passes on. I realised that such is the case with my great-grandmother as well. I know that her smile shaped my day and that day continued into years and she continues to live in multitude forms. It’s the case with everyone.

Maybe there’s a soul or maybe there’s not. The soul dynamics maybe hard to understand and perceive with a naked eye. But I don’t bother much. When I see rebirth in action right here and right now, why should I dwell in a metaphysical jail?

#Reflection