Instead of studying, I was staring at a dead mosquito. Usually the sight of a dead mosquito is one smashed flat with legs and wings in disgusting array, unsightly to just be unceremoniously washed or wiped away.
This one had died because it hadn't been able to get out of the library. It fell where it died, starved, all parts where they belonged. It didn't even look like it had fulfilled its mission, it looked quite lean and unladen, with neither blood nor coconuts.
It's just instinct I'm going on now, to believe that beings like mosquitoes, basically saying it was not endowed with the liberty and opportunity to influence its own karmic fate, die and also go through the same death betweens as humans and all living beings. But they shoot through the betweens almost instantaneously.
There's nothing in their karmic fabric to slow them down, to reflect on or experience. Very quickly upon hitting the point of death between, they're zipped through to another round of rebirth as a mosquito. By the time I was staring at this dead mosquito, it might have already been forming in some swamp as a baby mosquito.
Why a mosquito again? Because that's the habituated "being" that it knows. It's all it knows. Which is why Tibetans teach that it is very difficult to obtain a human form (I think they put it that way to urge people to appreciate this human life). From one form to the next, we are drawn to what is most familiar, what is most templated in the basic fabric of our being based on the only thing we know – our past experience.
So once human, it's easy to be re-born as human. It's even just natural if no other karma or thought goes into it. But even as humans, depending on karma, people still might live an existence not far removed from other types of "advanced" sentient being, the most apparent in our physical lives being animals.
And even as other types of beings, many exhibit characteristics of humanity. Basically suggesting that from a human form it's possible to be re-born as a dog, if the template or imprint or affinity to dogs was that strong as a human.
But as a dog, the karma is still human, so the dog would probably be karmically predisposed to a dignified existence, pampered, or living close to humans, even functionally in human society, even to a further extent than some humans. They are dogs with a strong affinity or imprint of their human owners, and they karmically wouldn't have too much trouble being reborn as human.
(This discussion can go on forever. It's also possible that as a dog, with whatever experiences it has, it finds an affinity to its animal nature, and that gets more strongly imprinted into its being. Maybe it kills, maybe it hunts, and the taste of that is exciting and pleasurable, and that is indelibly imprinted. And then stuck as a dog, until some lifetime comes along where the imprint of humanity is strong enough so that in the betweens, there's a sense of some attraction to becoming human, instead of what it naturally is familiar and comfortable – a dog. I'm saying it might pay to cultivate taking left turns and breaking out of habits.)
I was admiring a dog like that this afternoon. The Summer heat has broken and the weather has been pleasantly warm lately. I was sitting at a picnic table on campus with a cup of coffee and this dog was wandering around.
It didn't seem like one of the many random, disgusting strays that roam Taipei. Quasi-wild animals as far as I'm concerned. This one had a beautiful coat and an air of dignity. It neither threatened nor felt threatened by me.
Then I realized I saw this same dog yesterday, and I had thought the same thing about it. But curious, it had just pulled food out of a garbage to eat. It had a bright red collar on, but no indication of an owner. I'm guessing it is a domestic dog that got away and is off on an adventure for a few days before returning home to a worried owner.
And then one answer to the old philosophical chestnut of why we're here occurred to me, and it came to me in the voice of the little girl in "Field of Dreams" when she's explaining why people will come to the field.
And it's so obvious based on what I've written before about the development of consciousness from a cosmological point of view. If consciousness developed out of the fully natural evolution of an energy we haven't identified yet, something like dark energy, then the reason why we're here is because we naturally developed to be here.
Physical sciences have a good running theory of our physical existence, religious extremists of all stripes notwithstanding. And by extremists, in this context I'm covering most of the center mainstream, too. But for some reason, scientists have stayed away from the slippery, tricky question of consciousness – intangible as God or any religious construct.
And that's why it's such a big deal to me to put a purely scientific stamp suggestion on the development of consciousness. It's purely natural, purely a result of the physical universe. It's just portions we aren't able to detect.
Whoops, slippery slope.
Why am I here? It's just natural. It's part of the cycle, part of the evolution, the transformation. But it's different from the scientific formulation that consciousness is just a function of biology, and when the biology stops, so does the consciousness. It's separate, but it's interwoven, inter-being.
And maybe Buddhists think (without wording it this way) that the enlightenment or extinction the Buddha found is a return to that primordial state, that being. Consciousness and physical reality is manifestation of it, and the Buddha got beyond it all and melted back into the universe, became the universe, the basic energy that is everywhere and beyond conception.
Upon his breakthrough, there were no more karmic impressions or templates left. When he died, he died at the death-point between where our existence and consciousness melts into primordial components.
Only we with our strong, clinging attachments and template to exist still exist and in non-corporeal form flow the river of the betweens to be reborn – to cycle through another round of nature, another round of seasons, another round of the the water cycle, another revolution around the sun, another turn around the Milky Way. Those things happen just because it's natural.
And the Buddha isn't gone. When I say extinct, when I say melted into, these are just problems with words and conceptualization. The enlightenment of the Buddha means that he became the energy of the cosmos, no separation, and we are all part of it, he is part of us, no choice in the matter, no religious dogma. Just nature.
Oh hey, I just called him my very definition of God. I guess I don't believe in God after all.
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| SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 11:04 a.m. - Coming home after a 45 mile ride up Yangmingshan. |
