Fifth of the crazy commentaries on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Annoying Rebirth
I guess in the previous crazy commentaries, it had been very helpful to zoom back into the worlds and concepts of the nineteen-sixties and seventies in Germany.
Back then, the Christian images and ideas of heaven, purgatory and hell were still closer and more natural to Germans. Maybe that is still true in the USA nowadays? In Europe many storytellers, spaced-out psychology professors, comedians and also rock bands kept many of these images alive and still contributed towards their afterlife imagery. In the ceiling paintings of many churches in Europe, we still find depictions of heaven. Floating beings and radiant light beams with luminous colors to give shape to the fantasies and ideas of a divine heaven in which we would find peace after death in close vicinity with the divine. But who nowadays still has the desire and time to study ceiling paintings in churches exept some American tourist maybe? In the psychedelic painting of the sixties of the last century, the depictions of heavens and hells and purgatories then reminded more of the psychedelic visions of Hieronymus Bosch.
But there were also some, new and extraordinarily different movements and variations in connection with heaven, purgatory and hell. The problem with concrete, pictorial representation is that a certain grounding, disenchantment and solidification take place, which naturally reprogram the world of ideas over time, just differently, and thus leads to restrictions and new captivating habitual patterns and fixations. Just as hallucinations on our LSD trips appear small and ridiculous as soon as we try to paint them. Fortunately, the sound systems of metal bands have become very fine and distinctive, so that at least to the optical, one also gets a few acoustic ideas presented – sound images and rhythms that naturally also shape and even go very wide and vast sometimes. On top of it some crazy wording! Song texts? Wow that is real fun and something to think about.
Again and again we reduce real direct experiences with grasping, solidifying, marrying and conquering. We don’t want to be warriors who remain open to the adventurous games of uncertainty and curiosity. And security naturally is always accompanied by fear. My inclined readers will now think: „Uh – now he’s really getting way off again? Where are we?“ And I reply cheekily: „Well, that can happen when you look into heaven.“
But then in the sixties we began to look beyond the Western, Abrahamic horizon: Rebirth! Simply being born again as a human or animal into this same world, or perhaps also on other extraterrestrial planets out there, somewhere in the universe…? Or even worlds in completely different layers of existence and thinking.
You just change bodies? That sounded seductive to us young people at first. We young people didn’t have hemorrhoids yet, backs, gout or even cancer. With the rebirth variant, the topic of dying was even initially reassuringly checked off. We wanted to live! Live loudly! Live intensely. Live eternally. And yes, be quasi immortal. The promise to get born over and over again, that fits in perfectly.
Yet we had just freed ourselves from the fetters and bonds of environment, in family and school, from esoteric heavens and hells: we just had managed to become kind of straight materialists. We had just adopted the idea that dying would be like falling asleep, but without dreams and without ever waking up again. And wasn’t that actually an even much more reassuring idea?
Finding back consciousness after some time as newborns – that sounds really quite crazy and unreal from a materialistic perspective, doesn’t it? One variant was that after death a confusing kind of psychedelic journey would begin (we were naturally familiar with that in the sixties through LSD) and then after a while we would find ourselves as babies in the arms of a strange mother – in the best case lovingly protected and cared for – provided we had good karma, which meant being lucky.
Indians love to fantasize about rebirths. I had the habit in India of leaving the bus in small towns and simply living somewhere in the countryside for a few days – for pilgrimage ideological reasons, however, never longer than three days. Because basically I understood the pilgrimage ideal that I adhered to and tried to follow that way. And in really every Indian city, countless stories of rebirths live in the streets. It was striking that simple people from lower castes – non-nobles, non-saints nor avatars – very often remembered previous births because they seemingly had unusually intense emotional experiences in the last hours of the previous life, such as murder, betrayal or manslaughter or very often passionate love or the first encounter with their guru. Like the immeasurably in-love young man rushing to his beloved because he has just learned that nothing stands in the way of a union and marriage after long back and forth. And he carries the family amulet to lay it at his future wife’s feet, and exactly at this moment he is caught by a rickety truck and hurled into death. Indians love dramatic stories like this. They tell well and are easy to follow. Opera indeed! And then this nobleman is reborn as a child of this same woman, who meanwhile married his brother, and then doesn’t call his mom mommy, but addresses her by her maiden name, Anouschka or Savitri. In India there lived infinitely many such stories, at least until nowadays where every Indian woman has her own cell phone. Before the cell phone, back then there was no television in any Indian household and no cars on the streets yet, and the cows still moved freely even inside of shops sometimes and were respected and revered. One big issue were birthmarks at the same places as the previous incarnation, etc. etc. The rebirths of saints and yogis as extraordinary bright kids – similar to the Tibetan tulku tradition – also exist in abundance in the various Indian religious traditions. And most Hindu rishis, maharishis and saints can refer to their previous incarnations, remember them and tell about them extensively when ever they are in the mood and want to bless the students that way (darshan – blessing in Sanskrit). One very famous guru even considered himself an incarnation of Shakespear? That´ s funny – isn´ t it? We should all take a break at this point and relax. Maybe he was joking and just wanted to give us a break?
To remember the previous incarnation used to be part of being holy in India. In the past I personally had the idea that a spirit is born into a body, and that therefore the mental dispositions come from the previous incarnation, but precisely the physical weaknesses and strengths come from the dispositions of the new parents. Behind that was again my scientific-materialistic upbringing. For example scars in the former astral body radiated onto the new body-body? But not only I but many educated Indians also loved rational and almost scientific explanations in these contexts. Also in India the belief in science took over rapidly in the sixties already. Then already a really “smart” Indian would belief in science because of the impressive results of science.
Then the Karmapa died in 1981 in America. The Karmapa is a particularly powerful and important lineage holder and head of one of the five most important transmission lineages of secret teachings in Tibetan Buddhism. He had fled Tibet in 1959 and had then made a very deep impression in particular on the first Western followers of Tibetan Buddhism. When his 17th reincarnation was then discovered in Tibet, it was particularly striking to the Western students – who had even produced a very elaborate movie about it – how obviously the small Tibetan boy, the future 17th Karmapa, physically resembled the previous 16th Karmapa. A similarity was really unmistakable. But then I would have preferred not to emphasize this all that much back then, because I thought that this similarity could much more likely indicate that the holy men who had discovered the boy – Tai Situ Rinpoche in this case – had been deceived by this external physical similarity. I am not a student of the Karmapa and to me it did not make much of a difference whether he actualy was the right one or not. And I always found such discussions somewhat embarrassing and silly anyway, but I wasn’t aware back then that such a child, such a tulku, as soon as he was enthroned, possessed, inherited enormous wealth and great power, and he took over responsibility and decision-making authority for many monasteries and meditation centers throughout the world. So it’s also about worldly power and responsibility and also about very much gold, art treasures, buildings and money. I now have no doubt whatsoever that this 17th Karmapa really is actually the reincarnation of the 16th Karmapa, for many reasons and personal experiences, but that’s not what I’m concerned with here, but what I am concerned about is that once more I unconsciously tried to fathom the magical world with the glasses of the materialistic worldview. I am reasonably certain that this Karmapa also has dispositions of his biological parents, so something like tendency to high blood pressure or similar. But in such a holy tulku, completely different forces and far-reaching circumstances burn, viewed from a magical perspective.
At first glance, the Buddhist descriptions of heaven, hell and purgatory may seem very similar to the Abrahamic ones. Because there we have them too: heaven, hell and the demonic purgatory, the realm of the pretas, but on closer inspection, the two systems have little in common. I would say that clear differences exist, for example, in the area of meaning, purpose and application.
In the Buddhist heaven, in the realm of goddesses and gods, there is no creator or creatress, but many different divine beings – and by that I don’t mean angels, because angels have serving functions. One doesn’t speak of heaven either, but within the framework of the six realms there is the realm of goddesses. What is meant are one hundred percent narcissistic beings, like supermodels, oligarchs, nobles, bursting with wealth, power, recognition, luxury, beauty and health, harmony and fragrance, so beings who – without being aware of it at all – consider themselves immortal, and important, very special, and who are able to enjoy without restraint. These goddesses are emotionless and cool, calculating and completely without compassion. They are beautiful without ever having to undergo surgical procedures.
At this point even inclined readers in particular of the German version, may think: „Oh, my dear, now you’re really overdoing it with the feminization of everything and everyone?“ Okay, granted, but by now we’ve gotten used to it, haven’t we? And besides, I have discovered even Buddhist nuns – including Western ones – in this realm of goddesses. Perhaps this realm of goddesses is indeed dominated by masculinity, but there also are real female goddesses? Well, in the iconography, men sit on the thrones again..? Well, it is hart to say. Just let us keep an eye on it. Maybe I need to explain this to the readers of the English version: In German for grammatical reasons you have to decide whenever you write about people, if they are male or female. But in groups there are sometimes as well females as males. So against old traditions in my crazy comments I always choosed the female grammatical terms, to make Germans think about it and feel the difference. But I am no feminist at all!
From a Buddhist perspective, these goddesses and gods must actually have earned their status themselves at some point. For example, when positive, happy, selfless, also coincidental, profitable deeds or well-used talents or blessings accumulated together with favorable timing, connections and coincidences. The goddesses thus enjoy at the expense of their extremely good karma, at the expense of the merits they once acquired themselves in the past. Incidentally, this happens very rarely, so that the realm of goddesses is quite empty. There are only a few hundred real ones. Karma is unpredictable obviously also in this case when we realize that it’s actually no blessing to be a goddess. But there must have been qualities like goodness, love and healthy self-satisfaction earlier or extreme intelligence, otherwise one doesn’t get high in the realm of gods and goddesses. But we should all be aware of how horrible it is up there and lonely.
One level lower are the jealous, rivalry, fallen goddesses. That’s funny, because here makeup, wigs, perfume, dentures, liposuction and medications and so on come into play. Dissatisfaction! In the realm of goddesses such things aren’t needed, but in the realm of the „jealous,“ comparing goddesses all the more. Constantly discovering new flaws in oneself leads to envy and hatred, and thus these demi-goddesses make it very difficult for themselves. They keep creating new enemy images and weapons actualy for no reason.
The third realm is the world of humans, of warriors or also of cowards. Contradiction and absurdity are perhaps the main qualities in the realm of humans: humor. Being born in this realm is considered by far the most favorable. This realm is therefore considered the most desirable for a favorable rebirth because actually only in the realm of humans does the possibility for complete liberation from suffering and thus enlightenment offer itself. By enlightenment is not meant understanding or comprehending, even if there is no way there without intelligence and diligence, but the complete transcendence of the ego and that means „not knowing.“ There is nobody at home.
The goddesses are aware of no pain. They also lack nothing. So there are also no reasons to doubt or question or even be funny. There is no room for fatalism or cynicism. But precisely in the absurd, surreal, multidimensional worlds it is possible to open up, grow and even awaken. Humans suffer. They feel pain. They are emotional. They are vulnerable. But they also learn to change, to adopt completely new perspectives, to change and grow and to see multidimensionally with a third eye. Warriors feel compassion and can radiate goodness and love. That is extremely wonderful. And there are the incomprehensible expanses of physicality, illnesses, sexuality, separation of genders, confrontation between masculine and feminine. There are emotions, relationships and the most diverse magic and varieties connected with them. Here you can actually meet a guru and learn to open up by means of tantras, explanations and exercises. In the best case a warrior changes in every moment and thereby shines and radiates immeasurable goodness into open vastness.
And then there is the realm of animals, whose main difference from the realm of humans consists in constant anxiety and fear and humorlessness. Animals have become so accustomed to fundamental fear that they themselves know nothing about it. All animals are flight animals. As a human, one can recognize fear in oneself and one can learn to deal with it and even let it go, but animals are blind with fear and have resigned themselves to it too much and got accustomed to it. Once you’re stuck in fear, you live like an animal.
The realm of hungry ghosts, the pretas, doesn’t differ so much from purgatory, except that one is not there due to Abrahamic guilt, so for example because one violated divine commands or rules, but simply due to karmic laws and cruelties. Karma is not necessarily logical and also not necessarily cool and factual, because these too are values from Abrahamic thinking. I would claim here that karma is supra-factual, or even absurdly factual and also multidimensionally complex. Directly: there’s no room for anything in between. (My interested readers may simply look at my completely nonsensical texts on the Seven Karma Vortexes. There’s quite a bit to be found on these topics there.)
So – and now we’re finally in hell. Mick Jagger dances tango with pain, licks his microphone with a gigantic red tongue and sings: Sympathy for the Devil. Pitch black and bright red, twisted horns and ecstatic convulsions! Blood and tears. These games and ideas aren’t really so important, but what’s special about hell is eternity! There’s no going back! That is tough! There’s no emergency exit! There’s only hopelessness. Eternal captivity. Completely hopeless screams for salvation! Hopeless infinity.
Jump off!!? Get away from here!!
These six realms form a wheel in iconography.
Almost unwillingly I must even defuse the eternity of hell somewhat. Because in all six realms – so also in hell – the blessing of dharma (of Buddhism) is to be found somewhere in some way, since compassion has been so profoundly cultivated by the Buddhist warriors and bodhisattvas over the millennia – or rather made visible again – that there are traces of it even in hell. In iconography we find, for example, always also in hell a manifestation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, Chenrezi who brings hope as well as in all the other five areas.
Please look closely!