a view on karma, birth and rebirth

what happens if i go to sleep and i never wake up?

ask a kid, three, four, maybe seven, before the world has domesticated them, and most of them say "nothing," or "i don't know,", or keep looking at you. the few who go magical, a place you float up to, a next life with wings, are usually just handing back something a screen or a grownup gave them. the plain answer is the common one

so here's the strange part, we're wisest about this as kids and we get dumber as we grow up. wisdom here isn't something you earn, it's something you stop covering up. a kid hasn't been given the comfort stories yet, so they say the true thing flat, no more senses, no more me, that's it. then we get older, get scared, and spend the rest of our lives decorating over it

the stories are all comfort. heaven, a next body, a soul that carries your name forward. they're the me protecting itself, it would rather build a sequel than watch the lights go out

we feel small and separate because we're looking out through one pair of eyes, but that's just the seat we're sitting in. step back far enough and there's one consciousness wearing every face, and you are everyone else already. not this exact life copied into other people, the same awareness living a zillion other lives, most of them nothing like this one, all of them still you

this is old ground, hinduism and buddhism both built it. they call the cycle samsara, the wheel, you live, you die, you come back, and you keep going around. karma is the engine of it, every action leaves a trace, and the traces you carry decide the shape of the next turn. birth and rebirth aren't a one-off gift from a god, they're a process running on its own logic, and the whole goal is eventually to wake up enough to step off the wheel

hinduism keeps a self inside it, the atman, the part of you that leaves one body and walks into the next, dragging its karma along. but at its deepest reading it says that self was never really your own private thing. it's brahman, the single reality everything is made of, forgetting itself for a while behind a face. you go around and around until you see that you were always the one thing, and seeing it is how you get free

buddhism does something sharper, it takes the self out entirely. no permanent soul rides across, only a process, a stream that lights the next thing the way one candle lights another, where the new flame is neither the same flame nor a stranger. you're a bundle of parts that won't sit still, and underneath it everything is momentary, flickering up and vanishing instant by instant, so in a sense you're already reborn a million times inside one lifetime, long before the body quits

here's where i think people lose the thread. they keep themselves at the center. they hear rebirth and picture this exact me standing in a line of past selves and future ones, paying down a debt with my name on it. but read either tradition closely and that me is already gone. hinduism says it was always the one thing behind every mask. buddhism says there was never a fixed self there to hold a tab in the first place. the popular version smuggles the separate ego back in and hands it a ledger, and that's the misread, everything alive in both of them was pointing the other way

once that separate me goes, a private karma can't hold either. if i'm everyone, there's no quiet tab from lives i can't remember, i'm carrying everyone's at once, the people sitting right next to me included. and the universe still has its clock running, so there's no finish line where someone tallies what you owe. the ledger and the clerk were both invented

then there's the part you can actually live in, because nobody runs their day from "i am everything." you run it from the now, and the now is where birth and rebirth really happen, the flicker buddhism was pointing at. every instant you blink out and back, on and off, like a wave with a rhythm too fast to notice. each time you come back it's a small fresh birth into this moment, the only thing you ever really hold in your hands. that's you dying and reincarnating, over and over, and karma lives right here, in one question, keep doing what you're doing, or change it

so the move is to relax. do what fits the life you're actually in, and go with your own flow instead of fighting it, that's about the only thing that ever counts as going wrong

there's a second way to tell it, closer to the body. the stuff you're made of comes apart and becomes the next thing in time, and carries a little of your information forward into it. both of these, the flicker and the handoff, live inside time, they're the story you get when you stay human and don't step outside it

step outside time and it gets simpler. with time on, you become a lot of things at once, the whole universe mutating, transforming, expanding or contracting, whatever it's actually doing right now. with time off, there's no next thing to become, just the whole of it going in and out, in and out, and you were one of the times it was on. the kid had it from the start, you not being there to miss it was never a hole in the world, it's just how big you actually are