Right Understanding, cont.

And while we are on the subject, let us remark, not a little unkindly, that a Death Row Baby B has doubtless been in jail for years before the eve of his execution - that night of vigil and protest for so many opponents of capital punishment. But where were those enlightened people who could have shown him the Way during all the years of his incarcerations? Why are there so many Buddhist priests who protest the death penalty and virtually none who minister to convicts?

The Path contains so many natural obstacles as it is, that it is almost unforgivable that there should be shoveled out in front of the struggling Path-climber so much ill-conceived advice, advice which always seems to favor the criminal to the further detriment of the victim. Merton's assertion that people who possess things of value somehow invite and contribute to the crime of their theft is of the same idiotic genus as the supposition that a woman who is "inordinately" pretty invites and contributes to her own sexual attack. To reduce her desirability she could perhaps disfigure herself. But what should children do to stave off the attentions of a pedophile?

Wearing Buddhist robes does not require a man to abandon the principles either of jurisprudence or of common sense.

We sin and we are sinned against. Repentance is a dreadful burden; but salvation, when it comes, is a spiritual achievement. The pain of being victimized is also a dreadful burden, but forgiveness, when it comes, is a sacrament of release. A victim who truly forgives his transgressor is exalted. He is the lotus that rises up and blooms above the mud.

A few years ago in Northern Ireland, a group of civilians were the victims of a terrorist bombing. A man and his mortally wounded daughter lay beneath the rubble waiting to be rescued. Hours later, when the man was saved, he recounted the event. "She grew steadily weaker," he said. "Then she whispered to me, 'I love you, Dad,' and died. I wept. I prayed. And I forgave them."

This, in case anyone has any doubts, is Enlightenment.

4. Reincarnation

Reincarnation not only presents us with its peculiar mystery, it also confronts us with some serious problems in etiquette.

Since an uncomfortable number of Buddhists believe in the ego's afterlife, we cannot say categorically that Buddhists do not believe in reincarnation. We can say only that some need not, some should not, and some are Tibetans.

There are two sorts of persons who need not believe: those who seek status and those who seek consolation.

We meet the former when, for example, our barber informs us that in a previous existence he was Ghengis Khan. (How should we respond to this?)

And if a single confession of past glory can stun us into confused silence, what do we do when confronted with several people who each claim to be the Egyptian queen, Hatshepsut? How many Queens Hatshepsut were there? And how do we properly address reincarnated royalty? And what about transsexual reincarnations? How are we to refer to such persons? How, for example, should we properly accept our mail if Queen Elizabeth I is inhabiting the body of the postman...? Suppose we are Spanish Catholics...

And what may we reasonably expect in the way of sexual gratification from a woman who informs us, as we nibble her earlobe, that in another time and in another place she was the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada? More than a few faux pas are at stake here.

Possibly because the world was suffering a plethora of Cleopatras and Eleanors of Aquitaine, Leonardo deVincis, Sophocleses, and all the really exciting men and women of history had already been taken by one's former friends, it has become fashionable in recent years to lay claim to less ostentatious (but somehow more... fascinating) former lives.

An illegitimate daughter of a lady in waiting to Eleanor of Aquitaine would live in the same historically detailed circumstances as the Queen but, being born with sinister bend, would likely have been secreted in the shadows of documentable existence, eluding forever snooping researchers. An investment in an anonymous spirit yields much conversational interest while being, as far as the hazards of debunkability are concerned, a very low risk venture.

Sometimes lovers who are particularly simpatico reckon that their love is too great for one lifetime and must have arrived in an already well-developed or prefabricated state. They may conjecture that their affection passed through its nascent phase while occupying the bodies of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Tristan and Isolde, or Mr. and Mrs. Cesare Borgia, depending upon whether the modern transmorgrifees identify with members of the Literary Guild, Young Republicans or Mafia. It is all very complicated.

The other group of persons who need not believe in reincarnation are usually encountered in times of bereavement. They try to extract a measure of comfort from the thought that one day they may be reunited with someone they love very much. A better source of solace is of course provided by an understanding of Buddhist principles.

An often told story about the Buddha concerns a young mother who had become deranged by grief over the death of her child. Refusing to surrender the child's body for cremation, she implored the Buddha to administer a reviving medicine. He agreed on condition she fetch a necessary ingredient: mustard seeds obtained from households in which there had been no deaths. After a futile search the mother understood. She regained her composure and released her sad burden.

We must note that the Buddha did not offer platitudinous anodynes or placebos. He held out no hope of happy playgrounds in the sky nor of another child's body waiting in the wings to receive the departed spirit. He asked only that she understand that death comes to all and is a fact which the living must accept.

Naturally, it is difficult to criticize such believers. Prudence demands that we be circumspect in our zeal to instruct others. Dispensing wisdom to the grief-stricken is best left to the wise who, by definition, know when to beat the Dharma Drum and when to muffle it.

The people who should not believe in reincarnation are those whose lives are governed by greed and pride and who employ the theory to further or to defend their vain ambitions.

Confirmed in their ignorant surmise that present agony is divine retribution for past iniquity, these people regard the poor not only as deserving of poverty but as being fortunate to have been reborn as human beings. (After all, they could have been reborn as animals.) These believers then preen about their own good fortunes, offering themselves as models of virtue to all who desire to be reborn so splendiferously. Such beliefs seldom lend themselves to correction unless, of course, providence intervenes with an appropriate disaster.

Perhaps the largest group of believers who should discard their views on reincarnation are those gullible folks who attach themselves to spirit channels or mediums.

Under hypnosis or even trance that is self-induced, some people have the marvelous ability to pool whatever technical or historical information they have about a person, culture, place or subject of any kind and create from all the bits of data a specific personality or intuitive but folksy 'expertise.' This exercise in constructive imagination requires an extraordinary degree of suggestibility, nevertheless every once in a while someone emerges with the necessary talent.

The ability to recall a past life under hypnosis or self-induced trance is related to glossolalia, the 'speaking in tongues' frequently associated with Christianity. People in the midst of a profoundly emotional religious experience may burst out singing or speaking in strange syllables. Occasionally, a person so entranced may record messages in the unknown idiom. But despite the most enthusiastic attempts at translation, these writings have always proven to be nonsensical.

Because of the potential for mischief these spirit channelings present, let us examine some of the concocted ghosts who lurk in the human mind and are manifested in the spooky world of showroom religion.

In the last hundred years there have been two particularly well documented cases of past life regression which deserve notice.

At the turn of the century, a famous French psychic, Catherine Elise Muller (known as Helene Smith), stunned Europe by her ability to recall her past lives as an Indian princess, Simandini, as Queen Marie Antoinette of France, and as the Virgin Mary, among others.

Helene Smith had also been a frequent tourist to Mars and was easily able to converse with contemporary friends who formerly were natives of that planet.

Possessed of a high degree of entranced literacy, she recorded in detail the Martian alphabet and wrote many messages in that language. The French, who had long regarded their language as the best in the world, were delighted to discover that in its grammar and syntax French was the best in two worlds. For Martian, they observed, was structured identically to French, Mlle. Smith's native language.

Further, for the benefit of Parisian couturiers, she sketched the current fashions on Mars. Unisex styling wfashions on Mars. Unisex styling was in vogue; everyone wore blousey pants and a long, decorated shirt that was cinched at the waist.

Smith as the 'incarnating medium' or 'channel' of Marie Antoinette also wrote letters and it troubled none of the believers that her handwriting in no way resembled the Queen's documented hand. Neither was anyone disturbed by Marie Antoinette's references to telephones, steamships, and so on.

Smith soon met Theodore Flournoy, professor of psychology at the University of Geneva, who assiduously chronicled her trances.

Flournoy concluded that all of her personalities and their utterances were products of her own mind; although, having determined that she clearly was not feigning the trances, he never doubted her sincerity.

Despite the fact that she had identified Flournoy as her loving husband in her previous life as the Princess Simandini, she became so angry with him for his refusal to acknowledge her reincarnated personae, that she divorced him, in a manner of speaking, and never spoke to him again.

She retreated more and more into her imaginary worlds and by the end of her life was living full-time in the character of the Virgin Mary.

More recently, but as well-documented, is the case of Bridey Murphy which captivated the U.S. during the l950s. Morey Bernstein, a businessman and amateur hypnotist, used a trance regression technique on a friend of his, Virginia Tighe. Asked to go farther and farther back into her own life, Tighe suddenly began to speak strangely, confiding finally that she was eight years old, that the year was l806, and that her name was Bridey Murphy of Cork, Ireland. During subsequent sessions, Bridey dictated her autobiography.

Born in l798, the daughter of Duncan Murphy, a barrister, and his wife, Kathleen, Bridey lived in Ireland until she died in l864. She said that when she was 20 she married, in St. Theresa's Church, Mr. Sean McCarthy who took her to Belfast where he taught law at Queen's University. They had no children. After long and happy lives, she and her husband were buried in Belfast.

But despite her long residency in Ireland, she could not name a single mountain in the Emerald Isle nor even estimate the distance between Cork and Belfast. Researchers could not find any record of such a child or such a barrister or such a law teacher at Queen's University, or even such a Church as St. Theresa's. In short, though she had died less than a hundred years before and was not one of the anonymous poor, there were no documents anywhere that could substantiate a single line of her autobiography.

The case began to recede into blessed obscurity after a newspaper reported that while Virginia Tighe was growing up in Chicago, she had a close neighbor by the name of Bridie Murphy Corkell. Tighe admitted readily that she knew the lady and had been in her home several times; but she insisted that she knew her only as Mrs. Corkell.

Despite the volumes written to explore and explain such instances of glossolalia, spirit writing and reincarnated spirit channelings, an astonishing number of otherwise intelligent people will rally around victims of this psychological displacement, encouraging their delusions and, in more than a few cases, making them profitable. Channels can become cult figures if they have altruistic pretensions and are inclined to sermonize on such subjects as universal love and brotherhood, healthful living, the worldwide elimination of poverty, the raising of consciousness and the lowering of crime, etc.

But the course these religions take is seldom one that demonstrates the slightest concern for anyone outside the cult. We find no Mother Teresas among them. They may labor long and hard but their purpose is always to enrich and to glorify their leader.

When family members and friends outside the body become alarmed by this slide into fanatical hero-worship and begin to express their concern or attempt to expose the fraud, cult members frequently descend into a stubborn, 'them-versus-us' seige-mentality, an incipient form of shadow-dominated paranoia.

Buddhists who know that God is not Siddhartha Gautama are less likely to believe that He is a preacher from Korea, a guru from Antelopian India or an evangelist from a Guyanian jungle enclave. But whenever Buddhists concur in the possibility of reincarnation, they unwittingly lend credence to the claims of such persons. As we have previously mentioned, there are many Jain and Hindu inspired 'Buddhist' scriptures that buttress such vaulting imaginations.

But even at that, all Buddhist texts, including those most influenced by Jainism and Brahmanic Hinduism, clearly state that we are automatically freed from 'the rounds of birth and death' the moment we enter Nirvana. This is precisely what we should expect since the world of Nirvana is indisputably the real world. In the real world there is only the Buddha Nature. No egos exist in it. No one else inhabits it. It is the one life that we all live... here, now and eternally.

Reincarnation, then, is a belief which only people in Samsara can possibly entertain. In the world of illusion you can be born and die as often as you like.

Tibetan Buddhists are in a class by themselves. Neither viciousness nor vanity informs their belief in reincarnation. It is so fundamental, so intrinsic to their Way, that it is difficult to imagine their religion without it. When dying, Tibetans do not go gently into that good night. They enter the tumultuous Bardo between two worlds and, if they are sufficiently prepared (adept at some arduous meditational techniques) quickly re-emerge in a new body. Sometimes it takes an entire lifetime just to prepare for the next.

5. Karma

Karma is the network of events from which and into which our existence is woven. Karma - never to be considered as divine retribution whether as punishment or as reward - may be thought of as fate providing that what is meant does not imply predestination.

Most people incorrectly regard karma is a kind of ledger sheet on which The Great Bookkeeper In The Sky posts, as so many debits and credits, our good and bad deeds. According to this view, at our deaths or sooner if need be, the ledger sheet is tallied and depending upon virtue's surfeit or lack thereof, we are rewarded or punished. In this life or the next, we find ourselves in altered circumstance. To entertain this silly notion, we must believe that all of the victims of a certain disaster were equally deserving of punishment or we must assume that when an epidemic strikes all of the people who contract the disease are guilty of something - the ones who die are more guilty than the ones who are merely deformed or debilitated by it. Likewise, all people who are born handsome are, or have been, better than people who were born ugly. And people born handsome and rich are the best people of all.

Belief in this kind of karma is said to be beneficial to those who suffer because it helps them to accept their misfortune with grace and dignity and to strive, despite their discomforts, to lead more righteous lives. It is also believed to provide incentive to the fortunate to continue behaving in the same meritorious manner. There is no end to the nonsense.

Since Karma is, in fact, an entire network, no single event can be isolated or surgically excised from the myriad of causal elements which precede and entangle it. Each event is a nexus, a connecting knot that is composed of threads that lead out of other knots. When we are children we understand this perfectly. A mother says to her little boy, "I want you to behave yourself and be particularly good when we visit Aunt Jane." "Why?" he asks. "Because Aunt Jane dislikes children." "Why?" "Because children make her nervous." "Why?" "I think it's because they remind her that she has no children of her own." "Why doesn't she have children of her own?" "Because the doctor says she can't have any." "Why?" (ad infinitum)

A child perceives that in existence there are no closed systems, no spontaneously generated occasions. All events are links in a cause/effect concatenation, a network of events. They are both factors and products. Adults, however, try to tear apart the net, to isolate a knot and then deem that knot supportive of all those which appeared to radiate from it. Life does not work this way. In a network, all parts are interconnected.

We have all heard 'For want of a nail the shoe was lost.' A horse has been improperly shod, there being a nail missing from one shoe. The horse is ridden by a messenger who has critical information for a battlefield commander. Armed with this intelligence, the commander will be victorious. Without it, he will lose. The shoe that lacks a nail falls off and since the horse is unable to continue, the information does not get to the commander and the battle is lost.

This concatenation of causes and effects is what is meant by karma. It does no good to speculate, 'Ah, but even if the horse had been properly shod, something else might have intervened to prevent delivery of the message.' Probables and possibles have nothing to do with karma. The reason the blacksmith failed to shoe the horse properly may have been that he was killed before he could finish... or he was drunk... or he was exhausted... or he was out of nails... or his customer was in a hurry and said the job was good enough as it was. There is a cause antecedent to the effect of the missing nail; and that cause is itself an effect of some other cause. The network is truly infinite.

And in attempting to decide for whom this battlefield karma was good or bad, we foolishly waste even more time.

Let us consider an event...the crash of an airliner. Mr. Doe is on his way to the airport when his wallet is stolen. The plane leaves without him. He isolates this event and judges it to be singularly bad. While he rants about his rotten luck and curses the thief, he learns that the airliner has crashed. Now he judges the theft to be good and he blesses the thief. A few days later he learns that he has a fatal disease which will cause him great pain and will also ruin him financially, leaving his dear wife destitute. He also learns that the families of the crash victims will receive huge settlements. Now he curses the thief for if the thief had not stolen his wallet, he would have been on the airliner and would have been spared a long, agonizing death and his dear wife would have been financially secure. But while he lies in torment his wife runs off with his best friend. Now he blesses the thief for having stolen the wallet which made him miss the plane which kept his wife from becoming rich and spending the money enjoying herself with his perfidious friend.

Insofar as these events concern our existence in the world of Samsara, we simply have no way of judging what is good karma and what is bad.

If we are lucky, we are led by the chain of events to Nirvana. At some point we are receptive to an inspiring force. Our ears are opened at the particular time the calling bell is struck. We hear and follow. If we are not lucky, we die without ever having heard the call.

We know we have truly been saved when we are so overjoyed by salvation that we can review all of our misfortunes and understand that had any one of these events not happened exactly as it had, we might not have arrived at salvation's shore.

In other words, to be truly saved is to accept without rancor all that has happened in our lives. Of course, we regret the wrongs we have done. But salvation enables us finally to understand our own crimes even as we understand the crimes of others and to forgive ourselves even as we forgive others. This is a rare victory... which is why those who are saved are counted among life's ultimate winners and those who are not are too numerous to count.

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