A Birth with No Name
By Michael Erlewine
Wriggley worm that I am, I squirm trying to get where? That’s the problem, there is no place to go or get to other than here and now, so why wriggle? There is only stopping wriggling, so why don’t we.
From eternity up to now, the dharma texts say it has never been any different, so what is it that we are not used to? What do we want or lack?
The dharma teachings say that we are right out of the “Wizard of Oz,” and what we is to be a ‘Soul’ and yearn to have some kind of permanent existence, i.e. reincarnation, when in fact all that is offered by birth is and anonymous rebirth — a birth with no name.
Yet, where did that idea come from? If until now we have never had permanent existence, how do we even know about it, or is that the whole problem, we just make stuff up.
The dharma teachings tell us that we have always been becoming and are at the verge of being but we never actually have been or ‘be’ and so we have no permanent existence. Impermanence is universal, and change is our only constant.
Again, my question is where did the thought of a permanent soul or anything permanent come from if we exist only in a world of impermanence and change? No one has ever had the experience of permanency.
Yet, here we are, about as permanent as we get, just intermittent rebirths that jettison the persona or Self we were in life at death. Again, yet here we are bobbing for rebirths in eternity. It seems we do have some kind of eternal life, driven by karma, but intermittingly and incognito, and, as mentioned, without personage.
On the one hand we acknowledge that our Self is just a construct made of our attachments, our likes and dislikes. And dharma wisdom suggests we need to de-emphasize the Self at that. Yet, when we already do that through death (lose the Self) and take a fresh rebirth, what’s the problem?
For me, it comes back to letting go of this abstraction called a Self, which we are terrified of losing sight of, letting go and detaching, but also there is the fact that wisdom tells us the Self is just a clutter of distractions and attachments that we created by force of habit. It is not a real being, which is why I am writing about it here.
It seems that somehow, here we are, bobbing at the surface of life, with no memory of who we were before this life, and little idea what we may become in any rebirth. That seems to be true, doesn’t it?
And we are told all this will happen through rebirth, rebirth again and again and again. Somehow something, our karma perhaps, makes it through the interim between lives and pulls around itself a new self and persona, thus rebirth. We, ourselves, are just left out of the equation, and left at death to deteriorate.
Yes, this ‘persona’ we have now only goes around once as the old Schlitz beer commercial put it, but through our karma which is paid forward to rebirth which comes around over and over and over. And we are told that the Self we leave behind is just a mess of old attachments, so exactly who and what is lost?
What are we afraid of losing and why?
The dharma teachings say this disembodied consciousness is what moves from rebirth to rebirth, not our persona or Self. That is clear. And apparently, we have to take off our old persona in order to put on a new one. Who is going to see us naked of a bodily sheath while we do this? There is no one around in the bardo and once there, our consciousness itself is like a Will-O’-the-Wisp.
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Our fear apparently is the letting go and snuffing out of our current Self, the ‘Me, Myself, and I’, during the pause between rebirths, yet there is not anything we can do about this but suffer it. And we have done this innumerable times or so the dharma teachings say.
If we did not somehow survive, we would never know about it and just be gone. Yet here we are… present, again and again.
We’ve been through the womb, a tight fit if there ever was one. And death looks to be another ordeal, but just the reverse, not a tight fit, but wide open, letting go of this body.
Therefore, we must be old timers by now when it comes to being born and dying, if anything consciousness-wise even gets old. Apparently, most of what we call us is left behind, our Self, what is worn out and we are gifted with a new rebirth, including all the tight and not-so-tightfitting placements.
How do any of us know anything? There seems to be so much misunderstanding or no understanding that all that’s left is what we are now, where we are now.
I have kind of studied this, and experienced more than I ever expected, but there is no diploma for me in this seat-of-the-pants tour. I try to string together what I read, am taught, and have experienced, ready or not.
Mostly we are just channeled along like cows in a cattle chute. I go where time puts me and remark as I am travelling or carried along through life.
“Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.”
Perhaps it is.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
