I remember doing my first psychedelic trip after 6 years of spiritual practice. I saw how true to the teachings of the eastern traditions beings are continuously born, suffer and die as my zen teacher Meido Roshi says “since beginningless time”. The Buddah said if you take a mountain six miles high, 6 miles wide and 6 miles long and every 100 years a bird flies over it with a silk scarf in its beak and brushes it over the mountain (which would basically do nothing) by the time it would take to wear away the mountain – that’s how long you’ve been on the cycle of incarnation to get to a human birth. The Buddhist’s and Hindu’s talk about vast spans of time such as eons and kalpa’s lasting millions and billions of years, and even of higher God like beings living for tens of thousands of eons, each eon being an enormous amount of time. In the Hindu tradition we talk about one Day of Bhrama (the creator) being equal to 8 billion, 640 million years. And it is said on the causal ocean (pure thought plane) there are billions of Bhramas (of universes) coming in and out of existence!
So what are we in the vast, never ending, never beginning expanse of time, space and what lies beyond. Can we expand our awareness to encompass the realization of this? The realization that there are dimensions without end. When I tried DMT I was put into an astral world in which the laws of physics were completely and utterly different then those on earth. It was purple and blue dancing light, beeping noises, yet it was all consciousness. I was terrified because of my attachment to “Alex” and the fear of being out there alone in the universe with no anchor. Yet… this is where we all are. Our ideas of comfort, of security, of stability are fantasy. This is why Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita says “ I am the sole refuge, the only friend.” because we must seek God or Guru in our hearts to cross this ocean of samsara, of worldly existence.
So, knowing that you have been on this journey for so long can help develop some perspective into what is important and what isn’t. It shows how the things you are so worried about now will mean absolutely nothing 100,1,000 or 1 million years from now. They will seem like a dream. You’ll think “oh yea that was an interesting life, poor me, I was all caught up worried about money, about my job, about the politics going on at that time on that planet”. The Poet Rumi Stated – This is a dream world, only a sleeper considers it real, and then death will come and you will wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.” Well that’s comforting. Immanuel, the spirit who spoke through Pat Rodegast told Ram Dass “death is like taking off a tight shoe.”
How does this work in my life? I have not only been exposed to these teachings and known them to be true in the heart of my being, but I have come to know them through direct realization. Therefore little by little I live my life from a more eternal perspective. It’s not that we come obsessed with the past lives as some do… that has little to offer to our spiritual awakening. We live in the now, but we come to realize there is much more at work than meets the eye. We have played so many roles, the loved ones in our lives including pets have been in our soul families for so long. Just knowing these things seeps into your consciousness and affects changes. There is a set of stories called the Jataka tales in which the Buddha tells stories of his past lives eons ago, he explains who he was in the story and who many of his other disciples or even enemies were at that time. We like to have Buddha statues, or talk about being “zen”, but what did the Buddah actually teach? Buddha means awakened one, or the one who woke up. He woke up and then he told everyone how it is.
I want to leave you by sharing a poem from Rumi that you can contemplate:
“I died as mineral and became a plant,
I died as plant and rose to animal,
I died as animal and I was human,
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die human,
To soar with angels blessed above.
And when I sacrifice my angel soul
I shall become what no mind ever conceived.
As a human, I will die once more,
Reborn, I will with the angels soar.
And when I let my angel body go,
I shall be more than mortal mind can know.”
― Rumi Jalal ad’Din
