-Tell us about rebirth, Sensei.
-If you spend some time today, and I urge you to do so, investigating eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness, nose-consciousness, &c. you will discover clearly that no "I" or "mine" inheres in any of this. It's just a wide open energetic expanse in all directions. The Grand Dragon Sky-Going Nature of Zen! If there is no "I" in this now, how can there be an "I" in it in the past or future, which are just ideas and images? One's self-concept changes over life, does it not? What one loves changes. What one wants changes. Even what one believes changes. Everything changes faster than images in a dream. So how can there be a small "I" to get "reborn" anywhere or at any time? No, this so-called "shoga" or small "I" is just a bizarre and foolish imputation on the inherently realized and totally free Mind-nature. It's sustained by nothing but anxious, tortured thinking. Be direct. Drop it now! Wipe out your traces in empty space, and don't look back!
-So you say, Sensei, that there is no real chain of lives, no rebirth?
-When you look at the daytime sky it does not seem that there are any stars. Yet the light of all the stars is present there. It may be that everything, all the content of your past lives, if they ever existed, is present in the great "Now." But once grasping at a small "I" and "mine" is gone, there can be no more karma nor "rebirths," just the "wide open energetic clarity in all directions" that I mentioned earlier. "Here it is!" Note that eye-consciousness, ear-consciousness &c. when investigated deeply enough all turn out to elude labeling. "Consciousness" cannot with absolute confidence even be called consciousness as opposed to non-consciousness! "It is, it is, it is." But what is it really? Don't know! So here is a poem for you:
Pecking at the shell
of the Cosmic Egg --
a Golden Eagle.
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