I consider the concept that maybe I have been a Tibetan monk in past lives. I play with the possibility that I'm currently in a string of unordained lifetimes in such a way like they're an extended version of the Tibetan tradition in a single lifetime whereby a monk returns his robes and goes back to the outside world as a continuing part of the training.

So why do I expect no resonance to Tibet when I go? I don't think any one way or another for sure, but possibly my resonant reactions to the lands of Japan and Arizona were the result of an emotional attachment to those places in past lives. Whereas in Tibet, first of all as a monk, the practice of non-attachment is foremost. And maybe there just wasn't an emotional response to the land.

Under the theory of reincarnation, I doubt Japan and the southwestern U.S. desert were the only places I've been reborn, but rather countless places all over the world. But it would make sense to me that in the human sentient experience that karmic resonance, despite being the only thing that carries over from lifetime to lifetime, still fades or gets conditioned differently in another given lifetime. Maybe Japan and the desert were recent, Tibet a bit further back. Just throwing ideas at the wall.

I use the wording "human sentient experience" specifically because I'm striving to get out of this "human chauvinist" view of the universe, that somehow the universe was made for our journey and that we are somehow special and universal and will always be around. Even when our world dies, we believe we will have found ways to venture out into the universe and continue on in some super-inflated form of "manifest destiny".

It just doesn't make sense. When I mention spiritual or metaphysical theories and hypotheses that can't be proven and really can't be argued either, I often fall back on saying these things just make sense to me. Humanity continuing on in perpetuity just doesn't make any sense. It seems an absolute impossibility despite the idealism of some our great modern astronomers and cosmologists for whom I have a great deal of respect.

For me, we're on this human/spiritual journey, and we go through the cycle/circle of reincarnation and some people eventually got it in their existence that existence isn't all there is to it and strove towards something beyond it, and once achieving going beyond it, called it "enlightenment". It was something discovered by several seekers in different cultures. In Buddhism, it became the main point. In Christianity, its expression in the Gnostic Gospels was labeled heresy and stamped out and replaced by a hierarchy of  thought and spiritual control modeled on the Roman Empire and succeeded it. In Islam it became the marginal sect of Sufism.

But enlightenment wasn't created for the human sentient experience. I think it's just some natural, primordial state of energy that transcends the human experience in ways we can't normally conceive or perceive. It's something that "powerful". "Powerful", of course, being a subjective human interpretation, and is nothing about what it is.

Enlightenment doesn't care if we're enlightened or not. The universe doesn't care whether we're enlightened or not. Some people just happened to stumble upon it and tried to teach it to others.

So for me it's important to approach these concepts assuming that being human isn't necessarily part of the equation. It's convenient for us since it's the form we've taken on this planet, but it didn't necessarily need to happen. Let's presume the dinosaurs never knew of enlightenment and they ruled this planet for some 180 million years. Or let's say humanity as a species attains enlightenment, it's not going to stop us from becoming wiped out if a 10-mile asteroid hits the Earth.

I guess this is basic Buddhism – nothing whatsoever should be attached to. Including our concept of the human form. (or especially our concept of the human form).