Rain... and Rebirth

Rain. It started last night, first a drizzle, then a good, heavy shower that lasted unfortunately only a few minutes. I heard it on and off during the night, but nothing really heavy, and this morning I note that the area under the pepper tree in our back patio is not even wet. It can't have rained much--not nearly as much as we need. In this morning's paper, I note that we're barely one fifth of our season normal to date--a fact that bodes a summer of serious drought and a dangerous fire season later in the year.

A wonderful gathering of our sangha yesterday. As I think I have mentioned before, we meet every Sunday morning for an hour's silent sit and an hour of discussion. I got the ball rolling with the question I found myself asking after one of my daily sits just the other day: if we believe in rebirth as one of the basic Buddhist tenets--and I'm sure that I mentioned my own problems with this belief--who gets to decide in what form we return? As a rat? A bat? A monk? An arhat? Who gets to weigh up the merits and demerits we have accumulated during this lifetime as regular human beings, and make that fatal judgment call?

Well, my neighbor at the sit, a fellow Brit who is only briefly here on his annual vacation visit to his brother, responded with an admirably concise and lucid explanation that each one of us makes that decision for him- or herself; that we keep making that decision in our actions throughout our lives, since our actions reflect our intentions. This, after all, is what karma is all about. It is not, as is often too glibly assumed, just another word for fate. It's a belief that our actions have consequences, and that the good ones bring about good results, while the bad ones bring harm to ourselves or to others. By the time we reach the moment of our death we have, through the sum of those actions and the trope of our lives, already decided the nature of our rebirth. And even at the moment of death, as Than Geoff teaches, we may still have decisions to make, should we by that time have developed the mindfulness and the clarity of intention to be able to make them.

Another of our members, a regular, followed up on our guest with an explanation in which contemporary scientific knowledge in effect confirms much of what Buddhism teaches on this subject: that what we think of as the self is no more than an illusion we create for ourselves, and that the only reality in the universe is energy and its constant process of change. The "selves" to which we attach such importance in our lives are as much engaged in this process as anything else, and the moment of death is no different from what has been happening to us from the moment of our birth. "Rebirth," then, is no more than an account of the principle of the universe...

... which led us to "The Secret", about which I knew nothing until I read Maureen Dowd's playfully mocking column in last Saturday's New York Times, spoofing Oprah Winfrey's recent whole-hearted embrace of "The Secret" on her show with the suggestion (Dowd's) that all we need to do to change the disastrous current course of this country is to send out good vibrations to Dick Cheney. I must confess I have difficulty with anything that advertises itself as "the Secret to everything - the secret to unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth: everything you have ever wanted." It sounds as easy to take as a diet pill and is probably, in my jaundiced judgment, as effective. Still, others in our group were more knowledgeable than I, had seen the movie which is causing such a stir, and described it as a non-intellectual's version of "What the Bleep Do We Know."

Well, okay. Ellie is determined that I should keep an open mind, but my skepticism is rampant... My British neighbor and I were agreeing, after the discussion concluded, that such enlightenment as we can achieve in our lifetime is more likely to result from the daily application of hard work than from any magical formula. Maybe it's in those pragmatic British genes...