Is There Life after Death? - Eckhart Tolle on Reincarnation and Life Energy

If I reincarnate again, it will be a kind of service to humanity. Or an offering. But I mean, who would want to go? Would you want to go through your childhood again? Or some other kind of childhood? My God.

Well, I haven't gone through physical death yet. As the Zen master who was asked about life after death. Said, I don't know. And they said, why don't you know? You're the master. And he said, yeah, but I'm not a death master. But I've gone very deeply to what one could call death. To identification with form. So in a way, I have gone into that realm. From where I can say and know. That ultimately what we see as death. Is the dissolution of form. That the eternal in us. Which I know that firsthand. Cannot be touched by that. So what exactly happens, I would say, depends on whatever state of consciousness you were in. That must be a predominant state of consciousness in this lifetime. If in this lifetime you were continuously identified with form. Your body. Or the psychological form of me. That means consciousness. This expression of consciousness was still in a somewhat dreamlike state. Which is identification with form. And you can easily extrapolate from that. If the tendency of consciousness to identify with form was still there. Which in other ways the awakening had not happened. This tendency will continue. There will be further identification with form. And the process will continue. As the consciousness that is not yet fully awake. Will continue to identify with form again. And then gradually come to a place where awakening happens. Or if there has already been a disidentification from form in this lifetime. Then you can extrapolate from there. That the compulsive urge to identify with form. And to seek another form. Or another cycle of form identification. This compulsion to seek further experiences. Through identifying with form. Then Would either be much weaker or be completely absent. In which case the consciousness that you are. Is no longer bound to this realm. And will not seek to re experience the realm of form. But in either case, you really. I know. I can tell you that all is well. It does not really matter whether this person now needs further experiences of identification. In which case this will happen. Or whether he's already free of this urge. In which case he will move on. And live in a realm. That we can't even conceive of from where we are. Here I get a sense of deep within. In the forms of what that is. But we don't need to talk about it here. All we know is nothing. This is the beginning of a course in miracles. Which is the entire course in miracles. Summarized in two lines Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God. That which is real in him is beyond form. Anybody can know that. When you see a dead body, you realize that this is no longer whom you knew. This is not the being that you knew. This is only a shell. So nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal ultimately exists. This is why sages from all traditions speak of this realm of form as ultimately illusory. It ultimately depends what level you look at. The important thing is all is well beyond the appearance, on the level of form, which is the only level where death exists. It is a transition from one form into another form, or from one form into formlessness. That is what death is, no more than that nothing real dies. Nothing real dies. Which is to say ultimately there is no such thing as death. There only seems to be. It's a transmutation of form. Either form dissolves or seeks some other form, some other identification with form, that.

As you know, Buddhists and some others are striving towards the end of reincarnation. They are striving towards merging with the absolute Buddha nature. And you can find in yourself perhaps people sometimes ask, would you like to reincarnate again or have you had enough? And if you looked into yourself, you may find also that depends how fearful you are of death. Because there's an urge, there's an unconscious urge in humans and it makes part of the personality and the ego the urge for sensory experience, the urge for asserting your form identity and to experience more of the sensory realm. So for some people it would be dreadful not to be able not to reincarnate again because there's a longing for more of that physical sensory experience and the experience of all kinds of things associated with the personal selfhood. And so there's this still the unawakened entity or semi awakened entity that still is drawn towards reincarnation, which means to take form again. And when the urge is not there anymore, you can trust find in yourself. Do I want to reincarnate here again? Well, I certainly have no urge for further sensory experience. If I reincarnate again, it will be a kind of service to humanity or an offering. But I mean, who would want to go? Would you want to go through your childhood again? Or some other kind of childhood? My God. And then I hear some people say, I definitely have had enough of this and I do not want to reincarnate again. And then you say, oh, maybe that human being is very advanced, but then it might be the next day that human being is talking to the bank manager on the phone and gets very upset about something. Now, I thought he or she had said they don't want to reincarnate again, but they are reincarnating again into complete identification with an arising mental emotional reaction. Every time you identify with a thought and emotion completely, you reincarnate, you take form into that. So ultimately, the end of the cycle of reincarnation in Buddhism has to take place in your lifetime. Rather than having an idea that at some point you will reach the end of the cycle of samsara and you will not know. The question is, are you still continuously reincarnating into form, which means losing completely awareness of yourself as awareness, the essence, identity is not lost, but totally covered up. So you don't really know whether or not you are going to reincarnate. You have to observe yourself in daily life to know whether or not you are ready to go beyond the continuous cycle of reincarnation. The question is, how often in the course of one day do you reincarnate?

The first thing to discover experientially is. Is as I've said before, it sounds a little strange, is that you are essentially invisible. You, not only what I can see of you is the body. And sometimes I may be able to see certain things in your mental emotional field. I can. Well, I can hear words that you speak or your facial expressions. I'm talking to everybody, not just to Tina, but I can see facial expressions that kind of give me a hint of what, what you're feeling or thinking. But anybody who was looking for you in the realm of physicality would not find you. And if that's too much, let's just go for a moment to. Let's talk about this perhaps makes sense to anybody who has a dog or a cat at home. When the dog or cat dies, which can be a very sad thing for people and we come to humans later, it might be a little bit easier. Start with the dog or cat. You may realize in that moment when suddenly the dog is dead or the cat is dead, but everything is still there. The fur, the body. There may even be some warmth left in the body and there it is. But that which you essentially loved and related to in the dog or the cat isn't there anymore. So you can still. The touch is still the same, but something essentially is gone and that was always invisible. What you love in the dog is ultimately, although the dog you might like, love the way the dog looks and what it does, but when you relate to the dog you essentially love, although nobody might have Actually expressed it like that consciously. You. You love the consciousness of the dog. That's what you love in the dog. And when you look into the eyes of the dog, what looking back at you is this? There's a consciousness of the dog looking back at you. And when that's gone, the dog is. And same with a human. What you love in a human is the consciousness of the other human. Now you yourself, all that is invisible. Because consciousness is the greatest mystery in the universe that science still has. Thus has no idea what to do with it. Cannot explain consciousness in most cases avoids talking about consciousness. The greatest mystery is the fact that the universe is conscious and that you are conscious. A surgeon looking for you by cutting open your skull and analyzing your brain will not find even a trace of you. Will not even find any of your countless hundreds of thousands or million memories that you have somewhere. What. In what form does a memory survive in you? Is a memory? Is the memory of your. Your first teacher at school. I just mentioned the word. And suddenly an image of the first teacher you had at school comes to you. The memory of your grandmother who passed away. The memory of the bed that you slept in when you were 8 or 10 years old. I just need to mention it. It was somewhere. But where did that live in you? Was that in a molecule on atom 1 atom was your bed? Or what is it? Nobody knows. And nobody can find even the memories that you make up the person that you are.