' Just let it be '...

Q: Reincarnation is probably my biggest issue with the Buddhist teachings.

A: Buddha, number one, the Buddha, as a matter of fact a big part of his teaching was refuting reincarnation.

Q: I didn't know that.

A: Yeah most don't. In fact alot of Buddhists don't even know that. That was the hallmark of his whole teaching. That is what distinguished him from the religion of the day. He said there is nothing to reincarnate.

Q: How did that message get...

A: Because the Buddha was a really smart guy and the Buddha didn't just get lost in dualism. So dualism is "there is" or "there isn't." That's dualism, right? And what he talked about was rebirth. Now everyone goes rebirth and reincarnation are the same thing. By the way I don't really care what the Buddha said. I only care about the truth. If what he said happened to be true, great. If not, well then. Just cause he says it doesn't lend it in my mind lend it instant credibility. We all have to prove everything true of false for itself. Rebirth is totally different than reincarnation. Rebirth is what you do when you go to sleep at night and you have a dream and boom there you are. And then you sleep for an hour and then boom you have another one. And often time there are what we call karmic links. Right? Chains of conditioning. Your dreams are in many senses manifestations of your conditioning, or the stuff you got to work out or whatever. Every once and awhile they come from a deeper source. That's what's being reincarnated or rebirthed. Right? Not an entity that is being transferred from one dream to the next to the next to the next. It's not the 'me' that's being reborn, if anything its the karmic tendency with no separate self anywhere to be found. And as we all know in our life what has the most potential to keep being reborn? Not even in a spiritual sense. What tends to be reborn? We all know it...drama. Illusion. I love you. I hate you. You did me wrong, da da da da. All this illusory conditioning. This is what we call karma. This keeps being reborn. You think its dead and all of a sudden, it's like those birthday candles you just can't blow out. And so our own ignorance has a tendency to keep rebirthing itself. But that's very different then there is an entity that travels from one to the other.

By the way none of this is important in terms of awakening, enlightenment or any of that stuff. But its important to you so that's why I'm talking about it.

Q: And its a mystery. It's one of the questions all religions talk about. Where we go when this form...

A: Nowhere.

Q: ...expires

A: Nowhere.

Q: Explain to me what you're saying.

A: We go nowhere just like when we are alive, when we're here. We are the light of consciousness. Pure spirit. Right? It's not going anywhere. So the body drops, right, there it is (meaning only consciousness is left)! It is where is was all along. And then it's like if a body comes, okay, a body comes, wonder if the illusion thing is going to happen again. But either way...

Q: So don't get stuck in the illusion.

A: Right. The mind kind of goes 'like where am I going to go?' Subtle forms of mind can keep dreaming and create all sorts of new worlds that don't really exist, to go to. Fundamentally this light of consciousness it's here. The rest is sort of chugging along. It appears, disappears, appears, disappears within the light of consciousness, within spirit.

The more we come to realize that in our hearts, in our very being. The nice thing is it's not that we have a simple transcendent experience of Pure Beingness. That's nice, that's beautiful. We realize we are the deathless. But also it frees up this very fragile human incarnation, it frees it of fear, contradiction. It frees it to actually be able to really experience this miracle of this apparent world.

Q: Just let it be.

A: Let it be. And that's love. What flows out of us when we're just letting things be? That's love, isn't it? The deepest letting be. And you know who's the hardest person you ever let be?

Q: Yourself.

A: That's it. Once you discovered the letting be for there...

Q: That's freedom.

A: The whole world.

Q: Thank you.

A: Thank you very much.



- Adyashanti, from Big Sword Swinging, disc 2