After yesterday's musing on the TSU question about lightworkers, I was all set for something mundane today - you know, like cooking or some beach photos or something. I thought I deserved a little rest. Then I dropped into the 
What lessons will you take with you for your potential next life if you die tomorrow?
Ah! Next life! I'm having a tough enough time with this life already! WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME THIS QUESTION OH TRAIN DRIVER!!
There's something kind of timely about this post though, as Friday I was sitting on the beach watching the martins dip down for insects and the waves lick the rocks, and I had this sudden realisation that I might only have twenty odd years left. Sure, I might have 10 minutes left if I go outside and be struck by a hailstone in this tempestuous Spring Victorian weather, but that's a moot point - I'm assuming that things go okay, I might have that much time left. I always 'get' that as an intellectual exercise, but this revelation swept right through my bones. What am I doing? What have I learnt? What have I got to do, yet, to have lived life enough
Perhaps it is because, as many of you know, it's because we've been struggling through my father's cancer and his mortality that I've been having such thoughts. Most of the time I'm quite cool with all of that, because intellectually, I understand I am one with all the living things and all living things must die to be cycled back into the earth. I'm fine with being food for worms, or birds, or dust adrift in an ocean current or on the fine breeze under the wise sunlight.
But what if - what if, I came back? I've never need an afterlife or the promise of one. My scientific, rational self doesn't need a higher purpose - I'm just flesh and blood and when I die, so does my chi, prana, breath, spirit, and I become absorbed in all that is.
Me at the portal to my next life?
I also don't allow myself regret, or try not to. That belongs to a past that only exists in my thoughts. Life is now - deliciously, beautifully now. If I go over past regrets I cause myself unnecessary hurt. To talk about how I wished I had have had another child or not done those 'bad things' that caused me to feel deep shame is not a worthy exercise. I try to live my life being the best I can in every given moment, and sure, sometimes I fail, and I'm not going to live in a treehouse in the Amazon or write a novel (maybe) but I don't feel the pressing need to. I don't see why that matters. That's all just longing and desire.
And I think I've done alright, really. I like being a teacher - it's a noble career and I can help people through my profession. That brings me great joy. And all imagined guilt aside, I think I've been a good and caring lover, mother, daughter, sister - although that's a work in process! I care for the earth, tend to my land, try to kiss the earth lightly with my feet. Dad went through the same painful assessment of his life when faced with dying, and hours of talking brought him to the conclusion he'd lived a good life and done the best he could have, had been a good person and was loved. I mean, what else could you wish for? What else would you want from your next life?
Maybe in a next life, Dad would have made this a perfect headstand for a perfect instagram picture, and I would have captured it. Maybe in the next life I will learn to do a headstand on a rock in the middle of a forest. #nextlifegoals
Would I change any of my life? Probably not - as I've just worked out above, there's no point in thinking that. But the point of this life can be seen, if we suspend any disbelief about reincarnation, as learning our lessons for the next life so we can be better. When you look around at humanity, sometimes that beggars belief - all these years and we're still fucking up? Still haven't learnt our lessons? Oh dear, human beings, oh dear.
Goenke-ji, the bringer of Vipassana to the west, said that if you have found dhamma, you're going to be attracted to that path in the next lifetime and somehow find a way to practice the art of living in sila, or morality, as well as controlling and purifying the mind so that you can live a peaceful and harmonious life. When I look back on my life it hasn't always been peaceful and harmonious, and like many, I've suffered, or ccaused myself to suffer because I never really knew this insight or vipassana, that everything is impermanent and that we're beholden to our minds and desires and cravings and aversions. Dhamma intends to take us out of the misery of lifetime after lifetime, all those cycles of misery.
To really practice Vipassana it'd be great to go into the forest and withdraw totally from society in order to up the ante, as it where, giving you more chance of samadhi. But we have roles as householders, responsibilities in society to keep. That's fine too, and daily meditative practice can help keep us on track so we are best able to serve others. I wish I'd come to it sooner - I had read a lot about Buddhism and other spiritual practices but it wasn't until I actually sat a course that I really understood it on a cellular level. Experience always trumps the intellect. It was after this that my life started to change - not in any outwardly dramatic way, but inwardly.
Bestie in her monk garb in Burma, having taken the 10 precepts whilst she was there
My best friend growing up is a Senior Vipassana teacher - she met her husband on a course in New Zealand, and they live and hold courses at centres in Australia and New Zealand, and when they aren't doing that, they're sitting courses in Burma and India. They've just bought a block of land next to the Vipassana centre in Tasmania and when they die, they'll bequeath it to the centre. I admire their dedication to this wonderful practice, and expect there will be time enough in my life to dedicate myself more to it so I may reinforce the lessons learnt from it and have more chance of taking them into the next life. They've both had tough early lives, but when they realised vipassana, they've truly begun to live.
Entering the forest to meditate, Burma
They say that one of the reasons that you train your mind so is that at the moment of passing, you are perfectly in the breath, and don't take all those patterns into your next life time, all that samskara - those addictive thought processes built up over a lifetime or lifetimes that impede our progress, our happiness.
A spiritual practice like meditation or the yogic eightfold path can help us dissipate our negative samskaras (addictions and damaging habits of mind) and replace them with positive ones - compassion, love, gratitude, selfless service and so on. How much better our lives would be if we understood all of tthis earlier in life.
Thus, if I was to take any lesson into the next lifetime, it would be that one - get myself to dhamma a little faster, get those revelations a lot earlier. Whilst I try not to regret my life, I think about how much better I could have been if I hhad truly understood this stuff earlier.
I don't mind though, not really. I'm happy now, and think I live a good life and am able to serve others, so that counts for something, right?
And - here's a thought - what lessons did I bring into THIS life? Maybe that's for another post.
What lesson do you want to take into your next lifetime?
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