Lord Larehip

Oh, but there is one last question, isn't there? What about god? Is there a god? Quite simply, I don't know but I had no reason to resort to one.

Then how does this mechanism of reincarnation work? I don't know but there is no reason to assume it is anything other than a natural and automatic process.

But what about the end of the universe? How do we deal with that if there must be reincarnation but no place to reincarnate into?

Now we enter the Twilight Zone.

If the universe come to a crashing end, it doesn't matter because consciousness is eternal. What is eternity? Time beyond measure. Indeed, eternity isn't really time because time by definition is finite, an interval--it is measurable whereas eternity cannot be measured. Our consciousness is eternal but its workings are not because we cannot experience eternity directly. Everything dwindles to zero eventually, everything decays, everything dies.

So how would we experience eternity in our finite state? Quite simply, we cannot reach the end. In the totality of our existence, even if we live billions of lifetimes, at the end of the universe we can only go back, Jack, and do it again. We would just live that same succession of lives over again with no idea that we are doing so. Each time feels like the first time, the only time. But, gee, couldn't that mean the universe has already ended and we are just re-living lives we've already been through a millions times? Yes, it could. Absolutely, it could.

But let's look at just this life you are living right now. What happens to it? You know you're going to die someday. And even though consciousness is eternal, the person you are now will cease to be. It will be as though this person never lived. Doesn't that contradict this whole argument? Yes, it might. One solution is that the total conscious entity that is going through all these births and deaths contains the "record" of this life and has access to it so that the conscious being you are now is not lost at death but is, in fact, retained. But even if that is so what happens to this you that you are right now, does it just go dormant? No.

Just as you must re-live all your various incarnations at the end of the universe, you must simply re-live this one life over and over again but each time will feel like the one and only time. And the same is true for all the other lives you have lived and will live. In fact, it isn't really proper to speak of them as a succession of lives. We are living them all right now--over and over and over again. Cogs in cogs.

For an eternal consciousness, a succession incarnations doesn't make sense. That implies time, a sequence, which eternity has no need for. An eternal consciousness just lives all its incarnations at once, over and over and over endlessly. So even if the universe ends, we wouldn't know it because it wouldn't matter.

Is there no way off this insane karmic merry-go-round, this samsara???

Perhaps. Ask yourself what then is reality if lives and worlds repeat regardless of whether there even is a universe left?? It is a dream of the total conscious entity that you really are. And you and everyone and everything are just bit players and props in that dream. You and everyone are all part of the dreamer just as everything and everyone is just some part of you in one of your dreams. That means we are really one consciousness--asleep. And perhaps someday, the dreamer will awaken and we will all be called home, just as all the characters in one of your dreams is called home when you awaken. Cogs in cogs.

We know that a dream can be real but whoever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist, of course, but how…in what way? As we believe, as flesh-and-blood human beings? Or are we just parts of someone’s feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it and then ask yourself, do you live here in this country, in this world? Or do you live instead in the Twilight Zone? --Rod Serling from the Twilight Zone episode Shadow Play.

What if a demon were to creep after you one night, in your loneliest loneliness, and say, 'This life which you live must be lived by you once again and innumerable times more; and every pain and joy and thought and sigh must come again to you, all in the same sequence. The eternal hourglass will again and again be turned and you with it, dust of the dust!' Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse that demon? Or would you answer, 'Never have I heard anything more divine'?--Friedrich Nietzsche