I started getting interested in comparative religion when I was in my teens - eventually settling on Taoism as being the closest to what I personally believed. I was always keen to get to the far east when I was with Shell, as I thought it would be good to be in a Buddhist country to see for myself how it was practiced. As is the way of all poorly-articulated wishes, I did get a transfer to the far east, but to a Muslim country - and one where they actually took my books on Buddhism out of my luggage. Not that that was anything unusual, as they also took the books on Islam out as well "in case they were wrongly written or the wrong type". I think I´ve mentioned elsewhere how I managed to recover the books as it transpired that my boss´s wife worked in the dept of religious affairs where they were responsible for checking the myriad documents and recording they had intercepted. Luckily she managed to get the books back to me on the condition "that they were immediately re-exported". Yeah, right.
Anyway, the big problem (for me) with Buddhism is reincarnation. Some people might think that it would be good to come back again (especially the loony Yanks with their head frozen in a box), but I have always thought that it would be anything but wonderful. For a start, the essence of Buddhism is that you strive to get to a stage where you are not reincarnated, but that is very very difficult and there are no (well, very few) short cuts. This means, and depending upon the Karma you build up, you keep returning to earth as someone else in order to get your soul moved forward an inch on the eternal motorway to nirvana. It gets worse - you could actually regress and come back as some thing else if you are a complete a*****e. (Not much chance for you then I hear you say). Now coming back as some animals could be perfect (or in my case purrfect) as any of our cats have the proverbial "life of riley". Problem is, you could easily come back as one of the Jezzers (not too bad) or the feral ones around the village (but getting fed), but then down the ladder it could be a rat, spider, roach - what you will.
Now no-one seems to be particularly concerned about linear time-lines in all this. We can´t all be being reborn at a later stage, or the world would be full of saints getting better and a*****s getting worse. There would be many "in-between" as seems to be the case.
My theory, and chief worry, is that time does´t exist in the karmic card game and that you can be reborn in a previous era. All the people who claim to have seen previous lives tend to focus on their having been Attila the Hun or Florence Nightingale - you don´t get many who remember being a smelly peasant - but they all tend to be in the past. Funny no-one comes out saying "in a future life I am a corporate banker" (or whatever else you can imagine as a downgrade).
Anyway, I have this secret fear. I have always worried that I might get reborn as Leonardo da Vinci, but that I just don´t have the answers the job demands. To this end, I have been stoking my brain up with all manner of technical bits and pieces (what G calls useless trivia). It is thus almost a religious duty to watch "How Things Work", "Wheeler Dealers", "One man and his shed" (ok, I made that one up), etc., just in case I get reborn as a supposed genius and inventor (who is really just another retro-rebirth who happens to remember some of the stuff from the future).
I reckon that I´m pretty much at the stage where I could design a helicopter and probably create gunpowder. I could obviously discover America or Australia (on the other hand….) and I could definitely invent golf if I happened to be born in Leith. I might struggle to write Shakespeare, but I could spread a few good ideas to some struggling hacks and take all the credit for what they might develop. Electricity and magnetism are a almost shoe-in (and that without flying a kite in a thunderstorm). The internal combustion engine and carburettors are easy-peasy. I´m reading a book on quantum physics at present, so, whilst I might not quite fit into Einstein this week, I could start to think like Nils Bohr.
The bottom line is that there does´t seem much point in being born again unless you can remember your previous existence and know what you did wrong or right. It´s all a bit unfair if you have to start to find out about improving yourself when you have already started to slip back down the greasy pole even from what you knew in the last existence - and all down to a few mistakes (your honor).
Maybe I should have been a druid.
Comments