| Buddhist Monk 2005-12-06, 12:58 am |
| Dependent Origination - Rebirth - Quotations by Zen Master Rama, Dr.
Frederick Lenz
Main Page:
www.ramaquotes.com
Dependent Origination - Rebirth:
www.ramaquotes.com/html/rebirth.html
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Nothing you can do can prevent your death. Nothing you can do can
prevent your rebirth. To step beyond life and death is self-discovery.
The essence of your being reincarnates.
The spirit seeks the spirit just as matter seeks matter.
At the end of this lifetime, you will leave this world. Your awareness
field will stay together in a certain sense and then it will seek to
return to things that are familiar. You will reincarnate.
You will be reborn. You will come from the inner to the outer again.
This process goes on indefinitely.
At the moment of birth you are the product of everything that has
occurred in every lifetime you've had.
When you were born, you were free. Your attention field was not yet
formed. Your attention field is the sum total of your experiences from
other lives.
The essence of your awareness field definitely goes on after death. It
goes through death, it goes into non-physical states for a time, and
then eventually is pulled back and it reincarnates.
Our adult personality is a mirror image of who we were in the last
stage of our life in our previous incarnation.
If you meditate and continue to have fun with yoga and Buddhism, you
will amass knowledge and will move to a higher incarnation. In your
next lifetime you will be much wiser, much happier.
When you die in this life, you might be experiencing pain, but the
structure of your perceptual field will determine your next lifetime.
That structure has been determined by the way you have led this life.
At the time of death, whatever you have focused on the most will
determine your next life.
What you will be in your next life is the sum total of the realizations
that you have had in this lifetime.
The state between birth and death is not sympathetic. It is a flow
system. Whatever your conscious level is, that is how you will
reincarnate.
The disembodied being stays in the same state of mind that it was in
when it was embodied, unless it does something to change that while it
is out of the body.
Good karma leads to rebirth also. The desire for higher states of mind
is a desire. When you are fixated on higher states of mind, you don't
become enlightened.
There are ten thousand states of mind. The culmination of the states
of mind you have gone through will create your next lifetime.
To be afraid of our next life because we don't feel we've done a good
job with this life is not wise. It creates unhappiness now.
If you'd like to have a better incarnation, then have one now. If
that's your attitude, just let go and meditate and try to be as wise
and compassionate, as understanding as you can.
No self-effort in the direction of enlightenment is ever wasted. Even
if you don't become fully enlightened in a given lifetime, you will be
much happier and more aware.
The experience of the next life is too far away to really be concerned
with. It will be an outgrowth of this incarnation and what happens
between birth and death.
Our knowledge, experience, and wisdom can assist us in gaining more
from this life, which will correctly set up our next life.
If you feel some tremendous pressure to do everything perfectly so you
won't have a horrible incarnation in your next life - that type of fear
is unnecessary. Life is not that finicky.
A better lifetime comes from not some karmic scale but from inner
knowledge. Inner knowledge makes you happy. In other words, it is not
as if someone is checking!
Go directly to Nirvana. Don't pass go - or you'll have kids, you'll
grow old together, you'll be born into another realm where you'll
forget that there was even nirvana.
I'm not big on the after-death experience. If you've done a very good
job in your current lifetime, then your next lifetime will be set up
for you.
Sometimes in an incarnation you get a feeling of frustration. It is
not working out the way you want. If you pull your power together and
meditate, no matter what happens to you physically, you will have
gained from this life.
Think of what you love most in this world. This is what you will come
back to in your next life.
A soul mate has some kind of sexual connotation. But in the classical
spiritual definition, a soul mate is someone that you have reincarnated
with many times. Your soul and their soul have a multi-incarnation
attraction.
There is no such thing as completion. These are only stages in an
endless progression. There are no final outcomes or decisions, since
nothing ever stays the same.
The universe is pretty cool. You always exist in one form or another.
You are a wave and you are changing and moving from one level to
another.
- Zen Master Rama
www.ramaquotes.com
Thank you in advance for your religious tolerance.
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