Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 507: Roger Jackson

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

Roger Jackson, wonderful author of a new book on reincarnation, joins the DTFH! Be sure to check out Roger's new book, Rebirth: A Guide to Mind, Karma, and Cosmos in the Buddhist World, available wherever you get your books! Roger has also authored Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism) and the definitive Mind Seeing Mind: Mahamudra and the Geluk Tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism), also available for purchase! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Sunday - Get 20% Off your custom lawn care plan when you visit GetSunday.com/Duncan

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This is the Duggar Trussell Family Hour podcast. And we have a lovely, lovely podcast for you today. Roger Jackson is here with us. He just wrote a wonderful book on reincarnation. If you've had any sense of curiosity about whether or not you keep flying back into this temporal, hive, repeating different lives over and over and over and over and over and over and over again for millennia,

for infinity, for a beginningless and endless amount of time, then this is the episode for you. And if you haven't wondered that, why haven't you wondered that? It's a real possibility. Fuck, we're going to jump right into it. But first, this. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by my new favorite weed gummy, Loomi Labs.

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You could be part of it by going to patreon.com forward slash DTFH. And now, friends, today's guest is the author of Rebirth, a guide to mind, karma, and cosmos in the Buddhist world. This is a comprehensive analysis of reincarnation from the Buddhist perspective. And it's awesome. It was really nice to talk to an expert on reincarnation

so I could ask him all my weird questions about reincarnation. I've had so many. And it was really cool to hear, at least from the Buddhist perspective, his thoughts on this really weird, really intense subject. Do we come back after we die? And now, everyone, welcome to the DTFH, Roger Jackson. Roger Jackson, thank you so much for coming on the DTFH.

I'm so excited to talk with you today about reincarnation. How are you doing? Fine, thanks. Thanks for the invitation. You have a wonderful new book out, Rebirth, a guide to mind, karma, and cosmos in the Buddhist world. I think this might be, at least in recent history, the most comprehensive book written

on the subject of reincarnation from a Buddhist perspective. This is your third book. What inspired you to choose this as the topic for your newest book? Well, I mean, there's sort of a long story and a shorter story. And the short term story is that I was asked by an editor at Chambala named Casey Kemp

to write an article on takes on rebirth by modern Buddhists for a volume that came out last summer called Secularizing Buddhism. But the longer term issue is that when I first started studying Buddhism seriously in Nepal in 1974, the very first thing that was said at the very first day of this month-long retreat was, mind is beginningless.

And someone growing up in the West who had a more or less scientific take on things, probably a materialist to some degree, I don't know. That was counterintuitive. It certainly wasn't something that I assumed was the case. And I wrestled with it for that whole month-long meditation course and for the rest of what was pretty much

a year of studying in India and Nepal. And eventually, I went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin studying under a Tibetan geshe there, who was also a professor, and ended up writing a dissertation on the classical Indian argument that seeks to prove that reincarnation rebirth is actually the way things work in the universe.

And so it's kind of a longstanding issue for me philosophically and otherwise. And so I've wrestled with it for the better part of 50 years now. And why don't we just start off with the literal, the literal. What is the, and I know, obviously, there's so many different lineages of Buddhism that I'll have wildly different, seemingly different.

Well, it's different ways of articulating what Buddhism is. But if you had to summarize the most traditional Buddhist conceptualization of reincarnation, what would that be? Yeah. I would say that the classic version of this. And actually, although there are many differences from this part of India to that part of India, this school to that school, this part of Asia

to that part of Asia, actually most Buddhists in most places and times, at least before we get to the modern world, except broadly speaking, the following. That the basic human predicament is that we are in a condition that in Sanskrit is called samsara, which is the kind of ongoing, on-flowing series of rebirths or reincarnations that we take and have taken since the beginningless time.

That's why they say that mind is beginningless. There's no beginning to things. And we have every prospect of continuing this process after the end of this life. And we are born, let's say we die from this life, we are likely to be born unless we become fully enlightened. And who knows what the odds of that are. If we have not become fully enlightened, the odds are

we're going to be born somewhere within what the Buddhists describe as the six realms of samsara. And these are from most populated to least populated, moving upward, if you will, the hell realms of various kinds, the hungry ghost realms, the animal realm, the human realm, and then two god realms, a realm of titans, asuras in Sanskrit, or divinities of various sorts. And so we're likely to be born in one of these, of which

actually the human is the place you really want to end up. Because even though it doesn't have the greatest longevity or the greatest pleasure, it's the one in which we can discern what our predicament is most easily. Anyway, assuming we're born into one of those realms, the realm into which we are born and the circumstances within that realm are determined by karma, which, of course, is a Sanskrit word that simply means action.

And in the Buddhist context anyway, karma means intentional actions of one sort or another. Deeds that we have chosen to perform. And karma is weighted in a particular way, such that in very broadly speaking, good deeds lead to good results, whether in this life or some future life, bad deeds lead to bad results, whether in this life or some future life.

I mean, that's the broadest conception of it. And the alternative then, which is what the Buddha, among many religious wanderers in North India 2,500 years ago, was trying to arrive at, was a state of liberation called in Buddhism Nirvana that is beyond the need to be reborn ever again. So that's in a nutshell, that's it. Thank you.

That's a very well said nutshell. Now, I think some people, when they hear the concept of reincarnation, especially people who are afraid of like the Richard Dawkins cosmology, infinite annihilation, they feel like reincarnation is good news. It means, well, at least I get to keep going. So can you explain why does the Buddha

actually kind of see reincarnation as bad news? Yeah, yeah, well, this is a very important point because I think there's a certain esoteric strand in Western religion represented, for instance, by the Theosophical movement and more recent vintage, various people you can read. I mean, I think about Shirley MacLean, people like that who talked about reincarnation.

The assumption that somehow, well, if we're all human beings in this life, wow, and we're middle class or whatever it may be, it's only gonna be better next time, but that's not how karma works, at least according to Buddhist tradition. And I would say most of the traditional Indian schools that developed ideas of reincarnation.

So I liken it sometimes to a Ferris wheel. You can be up this moment, but just one spin of the wheel in effect, and you're down at the bottom suddenly, and it all depends on karma, on the quality of the actions, particularly the actions that come up, the tendencies that come up at the time of death.

So it's quite crucial. Also, how are you going to enjoy this Ferris wheel, as you put it? If you know that a few cars just below yours, there's somebody getting their head sawed off by a lunatic, and underneath that, someone's starving, and underneath that, someone's on fire, and underneath that, so yeah, great.

You're like in the part of the Ferris wheel that's got air conditioning and a good view, but it's kind of... It ain't necessarily always gonna be so, yep. Right, yeah. And if you're in these pleasurable God realms, for instance, where they say, oh, the bliss there is so far beyond any sexual bliss that human beings can enjoy, that you can't even conceive of how great it is,

but there's these wonderful little descriptions in the literature of how at the end of a very long, very blissful God realm life, suddenly your garland begins to fade a little bit, so you've got a garland of marigolds, and you begin to get body odor, and you begin to suddenly see these little quick visions of where it is you may end up,

because there's always, you know, for every good karma that got us up there, there's plenty of bad karma lurking beneath the surface of us that could come up, particularly if the death is a fearful one, or not in the best of circumstances. No, you start doing those like sad commercials on Fox News, you know what I mean?

You're like, hi, my name's whoever, no one knows who you are anymore, but you used to be a megastar. And I'm taking vitamins, these vitamins, that's what happens. That's right, that's right, that's right. It's that on the cosmic scale, so now, I was reading your essay,

which I, what was it in Shambhala, the essay that I read, or where was that published? Tricycle. Yeah, tricycle did an excerpt from the last chapter, yeah. Okay, now I found it interesting, you brought something up that I didn't even recognize as problematic, that modern takes, or the idea of trying to transform Buddha

into some kind of modern scientist is actually kind of incorrect, or maybe even offensive in the sense that that's not what Buddha was like. When Buddha was teaching, he was not using reincarnation as a metaphor, he meant it. When he was talking about his past incarnations,

he didn't mean that as some kind of teaching tool, it's not real, he meant I fed myself to tigers, which is one of his reincarnations and all the various ones. So can you talk a little bit about that? Well, I mean, I think there's a couple of different things going on here. The most important is you articulated very well,

which is that at least from my perspective, and not everybody would agree with this, there's much debate about many of these issues, but certainly from my reading of the earliest literature we have, most of which is contained in what we call the Pali Canon, which is the sacred texts that are particularly important in the Theravada world of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.

Anyway, if you read texts like that, it seems very hard to escape the conclusion that the whole problem of rebirth and liberation was absolutely central to the Buddha. He just talked again and again and again about how this action leads to that result, not just in this life, but in some future life. And he furthermore says that he himself has observed this,

that he himself has direct experience of the reality of rebirth. And the most famous example of this is in classic, and we should think reasonably early, accounts of the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, when after defeating the forces of Mara, his tempting daughters, his loathsome armies and so forth, he sits under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, India,

and over the course of the three watches of the night, he first is able through intense concentration to have direct vision of all the previous lives that he has had. He can say, oh, well, you know, five lives ago, I was living in Varanasi, and I was such and such a type of person, and five lives before that, I was a rabbit somewhere,

and it goes on and on. So he says, you know, he has seen this with this retrocognitive ability that is a natural byproduct in many Indian meditation systems of intense concentration. And in the second watch of the night then, he uses what's called in Buddhism, the divine eye, we might say it's his clairvoyance,

his ability to gaze about him in the present, and in effect, read the karma of various beings and see how that karma is leading them to this rebirth or that rebirth, depending on the quality of their action. So this is, you know, this is a strong claim to a direct, empirical, if you will, or experiential recognition of the fact that there is rebirth. And these kinds of narratives are central to Buddhism,

and I don't know if we wanna get into people who argue, oh, it was just a metaphor, it was just kind of a sop to popular belief in his time, but I think that the preponderance of the textual evidence, not to mention what tradition tells us having come down over 2,500 years is that he was, he meant this pretty literally. Yes, I think we'll stick with that.

I love thinking about it from not, from a modern perspective, not a secular perspective, but from thinking about what we know now with quantum physics, the possibility of there being a multiverse, the idea of, you know, higher dimensions outside of the understanding of time and space. And also some of the stuff you hear

from the shamanic traditions, the people who drink ayahuasca or how shamans somehow can similarly see this web of connections. So from a modern perspective, it seems like what we are is some kind of super organism that is broken up by these hallucinatory dips into time and space where we merge

with some form of organic matter and then unmerge with that. That's what we call death. But isn't that basically the idea? It's we're some kind of super organism that shares the quality of this beginningless mind. And we've gotten involved with time and space in a way that has given us the perception of duality

and has created sort of amnesic or a generally occurring amnesic condition where most of us can't remember not only our past lives, but like, you know, what we did two days ago. Isn't that what it, isn't that what the, if we're going to look at this as from a,

if it were scientists and we have to look at this, you know, from a perspective of, all right, let's figure out what this organism is, that would be the analysis, right? I think that, yes, I think that would be, let me make two points about this. The first is that it's quite clear

that from a traditional Buddhist perspective, I'll turn to the modern in just a second, but from a traditional Buddhist perspective, there is not something typically like mind at large, of which we are then just sort of a little offshoot that goes through, as you say, these hallucinations. Each of us to use a slightly different metaphor is like this rainbow strand of mind

that has gone beginninglessly through time and taken birth after birth after birth. So there's a kind of pluralism there that I see, and I think many people see in the pre-modern tradition, but we can, you know, that doesn't... How does that work? I'm sorry, let's just stick with a pluralism part and maybe you can help me understand that.

If for all these sort of spectromy rainbow strands of infinite consciousness, what is the separation between my rainbow strand and your rainbow strand? Yeah, that's a great question. It's momentum, I suppose, and it's karma. And that begs the question philosophically in many ways, but Buddhists are quite intent on saying

that my karma and your karma are not the same thing. And that my mind and your mind are not the same quote thing. Otherwise, we'd be getting all these karmic mind melds and that would be problematic in a whole variety of respects. What's the separate, well, what is the... Like, did they come up with the idea of like upon the dissolution of the body, what holds this packet together

and what is the cellular boundary between my packet and my whatever my things and your things? Excellent question. And again, there's no good, obvious, clear answer except the word I used before. There's a kind of momentum that mind has based on the buildup of all this previous karma. In a way, we wanna keep existing as who we are and we do.

So that's what allows for this degree of separation. So even sometimes there's discussions and there's such a thing as like collective karma, right? We're both Americans, okay, at a certain level. You could say that's collective karma, but I don't think collective karma typically really is some super karma above and beyond a whole collection of individual karmas.

You and I had karma from previous lives that, you know, to be born American in this life, but beyond that, we can designate it collective karma, but it's not some thing above and beyond. I see, it just, you know, we get into this place where with it, and what this is one of the many things I love about Buddhism is the invitation to deep examination of these concepts.

And if this is a thing that the Buddha reported, then it should be just as scrutinized as all the other things. Right, and he said that we should scrutinize what he says, so and people certainly do. And this is, you have scrutinized it in this book. So forgive me if I'm, I'm asking you quite, in my own contemplation of it,

these are things that I wonder about. And I must ask you the most mundane critique of reincarnation that I've ever heard someone ask me, and yet maybe the best because I was like, I really have no idea how to answer that. He, my friend Nicky was saying, how does that work with like species going extinct or the dinosaurs, for example,

when the dinosaurs were wiped out, where theoretically, if all life evaporates from this planet, does that mean that there's no more possibility for human incarnation? No, because you have to recognize that for Buddhists, the cosmos is vast, infinite. There are world systems within world systems and world systems beyond world systems.

And if dinosaurs went extinct on this earth, well, if this was the only planet that supported sentient life, that's a problem, but it's not. I mean, not only are there various realms, we don't even see God realms, hell realms. We don't see ghost realms most of the time, but there are other world systems according to Buddhism

in which there are the equivalents of human, the human realm, the God realm, the ghost realm, and so forth. So, you know, poof, a dinosaur dies here when the meteor hits, you know, next day, in quotes, could be often, you know, somewhere near Arcturus. So it's just not a problem. It's just not a problem for Buddhists in that respect.

Because there's, at the time of death, the mind being non-physical is not restricted by time and space, particularly by space, by those kinds of limitations. So you can be, you know, even within the, just on our earth, you know, somebody, for instance, my first teacher, Lama Yeshe, died in California in 1984, and was, his reincarnation, his tulkhu was discovered

to be a Spanish boy, you know, where, well, you know, the geography of that doesn't exactly work out, but clearly, at least in the Tibetan way of reckoning these things, you're not limited by where you died or where you're born. It could have been on some other planet as well, or in some kind of a heaven. So there's many, many options there.

And I am curious, though, is it temporarily, like, is it linear? Like, is there the possibility to reincarnate, like, you know, the Shirley McClain New Age version of it is, you die, there's some kind of spa you go to, you pick your next life, and there's a linear quality to it where, you know, you're gonna always be reincarnating in the future.

Is there anything about maybe the reincarnating outside of time or in the past? I don't think so. I actually think that, at least in the standard model, if you will, of Buddhist reincarnation, it is linear also. I mean, when they told me that first day at that monastery in Nepal that mind is beginningless,

they were thinking in serial terms. So everything leading up to now, and then whatever leads from here on out. Now, if we talk about attaining states of realization, especially if we talk about attaining, you know, fulfilled states like Buddhahood, their temporality, you know, it goes by the board, all sorts of any kind of conceptual constructions

go by the board. But that's outside the standard model that I focused on. Got you. Yeah, yes. Yeah. Does your lawn look like some kind of evil forest creature cast a spell on it? Does they have bear patches or rotten spots

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It gets sunday.com slash Duncan. Thank you, Get Sunday. Yeah. Okay, cool. Thank you for answering all my questions, by the way. Well, actually, can I come back though to the... If you don't mind to... Because I didn't answer...

Not at all. I didn't answer really your original question about modern sort of... Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But you know, modern sort of a kind of new physics way of thinking about it. Right? And it seems to me that there... Yes. What you articulated,

is a view that is held by quite a number of people. The most prominent among Buddhist teachers, I would say, is Alan Wallace, whose reputation you may know and whose work you may know. Sure. A very prolific writer and teacher, as well. He majored in physics at Amherst back in the day.

And, you know, knows a fair amount about these things. And he has... He's very interested in some of these versions of physics that I would describe as probably not being at the center of physics these days. They're more, if you will, at the fringe. That doesn't mean they're wrong and the slightest. It just means that they require,

as you articulated it quite well, sort of complete rethinking of what the universe is and what we are. Yeah. You know, Wallace talks in terms, as I think some of the physicists he's drawing on talk, about, you know, the universe being... Not being so much about matter, or even energy so much as about information.

Yes. And if that's the case, then maybe the universe is, as one physicist put it, a hundred years ago even, maybe the universe is less like a great thing and more like a great thought. Now, if that's the case,

then mind may have the kind of independence and, you know, sort of... oversight, if you will, of the cosmos in ways that most contemporary physicists can't appreciate. But I think it has to be acknowledged also that the majority of contemporary physicists still work off of a physicalist or, if you will, materialist model.

Sure. In which whatever it is we call mind, not saying that it doesn't exist, but that at best we could say that it's a function of or an epiphenomenon of the brain. Yeah. Of matter organized in a particular way. It's my favorite thing with scientists or people like that.

It's an epiphenomenon. It's like, you know, like a car exhaust that happens to produce all culture, love, connection. It's almost like a backfire or something. Matter, backfire, sentience, really an annoying take on it. Okay, so to get... Go ahead, sorry.

No, no, I was just going to say, but it's the majority take. Well, yeah, I mean, yes, it's the majority take, but relative to, I think, the population of this planet we're on, it's actually not the majority majority. It just happens to be a majority of... Fair enough. Fair enough.

But we're supposed to deny our own personal experience. We're not supposed to see any kind of inkling. I don't think this is the first time this has happened to me or any kind of like experience on psychedelics or under hypnosis or through dreams or through teachers or all the various cultures who are like, no, not only is this real, it's like really bad. You don't understand.

You've only got a second to grab hold of what's going on here. I wanted to ask you personally, have you had any inkling of your past incarnations or any kind of recollection of past lives or any kind of encounter in your own personal experience that would make you think that this is actually more true than the secularist might think it is? No, I have not.

I'm probably too much of an intellectual. I'm not sure what it is. But no, I've had no such experience. I did have a good friend tell me years ago that she was sure I had been a bird in my previous life based not on any psychic vision she had, but just on my physical mannerisms. Oh, that's very nice.

I guess I wasn't sure if it was a compliment or not. But anyway, I think it is a compliment. Yeah, birds are incredible. They're so graceful, beautiful. Now, let's jump to your take on that very thing, which reminds me a little bit of Robert Anton Wilson. Tell me about as if agnosticism. Yeah, I mean, this is for what it's worth.

And if anybody cares, which I'm not sure anybody does, this is kind of the position that I myself have come to over the years. Maybe it's maybe be helpful to just a very quick background to say that in my analysis of modern takes on rebirth, especially modern takes on rebirth in the West and, you know, I suppose within the educated, somewhat intellectual West, it strikes me that there are

something like four different positions that can be taken on rebirth, or for that matter on many aspects of Buddhism. And we might say that almost all religious traditions actually have these four perspectives to some degree in the face of modernity, which we find ourselves for better or for worse, smack in the middle of, unless we're in post-modernity. But anyway, and these run, if you will,

if we take a more conservative view as being, quote, right-wing and a more, quote, liberal view being left-wing, that's just the cliche anyway. So if we start at the right flank, we have what I would call literalism, which is people, and these will include certainly people who have come to the West from Asia or have taught Westerners in Asia, but it can include Westerners as well, who say, you know,

the way the texts describe it is exactly the way it is. And the Buddhists were not, as you said earlier, they're not being metaphorical or symbolic or psychological or existential about any of this stuff. You know, you screw up in this life and there is something going to happen to you. You know, maybe on some level, you can say it's illusory, but not on a level that matters to you right now.

You better be sore afraid. Yeah, it is like that. And the Scriptures, it is no joke. When they describe the hells, it's like you think the Christian hell is scary. Wait till you hear the descriptions of the Buddhist hell. Yeah, we got eight hot ones, we got eight cold ones, we got occasional hells, you name it, hell for a day.

Anyway, so that's the literalist view. Then there's the view that I call neo-traditionalists moving slightly left, but still right of center. And this is the view in which, this is where I put somebody like Alan Wallace or David Loy or other very interesting contemporary Buddhist thinkers. You know, maybe he's holding us the Dalai Lama at times as well, who are trying to find a way to justify

and uphold the traditional view broadly speaking, but maybe not in all its details and are interested in looking, as you originally suggested, at some new ways of conceiving what the universe is like that might allow then for the possibility of something like traditional rebirth. Again, maybe not in all its gory details, but broadly speaking. And then moving left from that,

now slightly to the left of center, though I think this is a pretty big jump in many ways, is what I would call the modernist take, which basically says that even the new physics has yet to be really demonstrated, the traditional arguments really don't work, there are problems aplenty, even when we talk about mystical experience

and therefore no traditional argument or even modern argument really is sufficient unto itself or even if you try to put them all together, it doesn't add up to really convincing proof that there is rebirth and therefore the best we can do is to be kind of agnostic about it and say, well, we really don't know, we're not persuaded, but it might be the case and so we think about things

as meaningfully as we can as skeptical people in a skeptical age. Namely, we do think about say something like the realms of rebirth described traditionally in Buddhism as being more like descriptions say on one level of different states of mind that we go through in the course of a single day or a single lifetime, or we can think about it as describing the different social and other conditions that people live in right now.

We can certainly see on this earth at this moment, people who are in hell realms, people who are in ghost realms of some sort or another without our having to believe necessarily that there's anything that transcends this particular life we have and then so the last view then and that tries to take rebirth seriously and work with it and if you will reinterpret it

along more symbolic psychological existential lines and the last view furthest to the left is what I call the secularist view, which says all these are traditional Asian ideas. We got to toss them out. We've just got to recreate Buddhism in an entirely modern vein. So my own place within that is more or less at the modernist point.

We may in fact disagree on some things regarding various kinds of proof or demonstrations or arguments for it, but just speaking personally, I have not found either individually or collectively that they quite add up to substantial evidence, but again, the universe is passingly strange. I don't know what the case really may be and I hope that most people are modest enough

to admit that they don't know how things are. And so I just, you know, from my own standpoint, I behave and I try to think and behave as if these were the case. I don't know that they're the case. Right. And so that's why I call it a kind of as if agnosticism. The agnosticism is my not knowing. The as if is participating in Buddhist thought,

Buddhist life, Buddhist ritual, lighting incense, chanting, visualizing, whatever it may be, but without the certainty that traditionalists sometimes have that, oh yeah, what you're representing here is exactly the way things are in the cosmos. Why is that certainty such a bummer? What do you mean by bummer? I mean a bummer to attend it or a bummer when people have it.

It's a bummer when they have it. Why? Why do you think that's such a bummer when you encounter it? You just get this, it makes you feel, ugh. Right. Well, I mean, I think we, the compassionate answer would be that people, I mean, we're all mortal beings. You know, as Camu famously said,

I'll change the language and make it less sexist. People die and they're not happy. They're not happy about the fact that they die. Most of their lives, there is some degree of unhappiness. So all of us, we don't know what our predicament is in the cosmos. We don't know who we are basically. And we are beings that are anxious and we seek meaning. We want to know who we are, where we sit within some cosmic scheme.

I mean, that's what many people, many scholars nowadays simply describe. And I would agree with this. Religion is a sort of meaning making mechanism. It's a way in which people can find meaning for their lives by establishing a cosmology and ethics, mythology, doctrines and so forth and feeling themselves fitting securely within that. Right. You know, in a Christian, I mean, no, I've had Buddhist friends die

and we're assured by a llama. He went to the Pure Land of Amitabha. Okay. Maybe maybe there's such a thing. Maybe there isn't. We don't know. We feel better about it. Christians will say, oh, you know, she went to a better place

or she's in the arms of Jesus now. You know, we can we can kind of laugh at that. We can laugh at the we can be uncomfortable with the certainty. But but I think we have to appreciate why people think this way, feel this way. It's part of trying to feel at home in the universe. That was a very, very compassionate analysis of that. Camus not so compassionate. I believe he called it philosophical suicide, didn't he?

The idea that we to fill that insecure aching. What what happens after this? What happened to my mom? My dad, what's going to happen to my wife? My kids. We invent something to act as a kind of like balm in a sense to assuage that. And I, you know, again, I think that all of that points to a real misunderstanding of how fucked we are.

If reincarnation is real in the sense that no, no break, no break. You know, and I think that to me, this is the, even if it's the human birth that you're lucky enough to get. One terrifying thing to me about, you know, my own life and looking at how unconscious I have been and how easy it is to just sort of walk around like some kind of zombie. And then you start meditating. If you're lucky you come upon Buddhism or some teacher or something real. And maybe you get a little flicker, a little flicker of something more.

And to me, that's really scary because how the, the idea that you die and then you get to be a little baby and you get to be with your mama and you have all these childhood things and you've got a young body again. You get to run around assuming you get to be human. And you, and you remember all that to me creates a more comfortable version of reincarnation. But if it's more akin to like when you have, when you're sick and you're falling asleep and going into a weird dream and waking up for a second like, what the fuck? What am I?

And then going back asleep and then waking up and going back asleep, waking up and doing that forever, forever, never ending, never ending. Like some kind of unit thing that just keeps sort of waking up and falling back asleep. That is awful. That is awful. Yeah. This is why Groundhog Day is the favorite movie of many Buddhists. Yes.

Yes. And I think some people, that helps people first. I think that that, that goes into the place where reincarnation is real underneath all the secularism or whatever your particular cosmology is. That's why when people watch it, they get a particular woozy feeling. Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely.

Yeah. And I think that there's, yeah. I mean, the analogy to sort of trying to go to sleep and waking up and going to sleep again, that, that's actually a kind of metaphor or analogy that's used in, in the tradition to some degree, particularly when you, you know, in the Tibetan tradition, as I think you know, it's widely accepted that between death and rebirth, there is a period of up to 39 days called the bardo in Tibetan, the intermediate state in which there are both terrifying visions, premonitions or prefigurings of what your next life would, will be, but

also possibilities for some kind of liberation. And this is why the famous so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is read in many contexts in Tibetan culture to a person who has died. And the idea being, they might be able to hearken to what is being said about recognizing that all these terrifying visions are just the, the clear nature of your own mind. And, you know, you can be liberated right now in the bardo. But, but again, the, the analogy to it being like a kind of endless nightmare is certainly an apt one.

Roger, how do we know this isn't the bardo? Everyone going around here thinks they're in the human realm. Everyone going around here thinks they're humans. Is there anything in your study of Buddhism that points to the possibility that part of going into those 49 days in the bardo is that you think that you are living in a real world and a human when actually this is that series of visions mentioned in the bardo, Thadda. Yeah. Well, I think it can work both ways.

I think you, I suspect that beings in the bardo do not fully recognize that they are in the bardo. Yeah. It's perhaps akin to what we sometimes think ghosts might experience. But, but actually, I mean, there's a cheap and easy answer to your question, which is that there are in a number of Tibetan traditions anyway, the notion that everything is a bardo. There are six bardos and the one between death and the next rebirth is only one of these six and we're, we're actually in the bardo of, you know, the human realm right now or whatever

realm it is we happen to be in. I'm assuming most of your listeners are in the human realm, but I don't honestly know. There's actually a lot of hummingbirds really love my podcast. Well, that's okay. They have tiny little earbuds. I could, I could understand that. So, so yeah. Okay.

Well, so this is the bardo. It's just not the, the bar, the intermediary bardo. This, what do they call it? The bardo of becoming or something? Is that what we're in right now? Yeah. We are exactly. This is the bardo of becoming.

And yeah, I think that's right. Anyway, there are everything, every experience we have throughout samsara is in some form of bardo, which is actually a wonderfully symbolic way of talking about how we're always in transit somewhere else. We're always intermediate. Even if it's between one moment and the next, there's a bardo there from one moment of my mind to the next moment of my, of my mind. Yes.

And, and, and that's why I think that's, isn't that where we enter into these modern interpretations of reincarnation? Or at least like the, the, like bringing, because I'm just listening to Jack Cornfield's book, audio book, bringing the, bringing the Dharma home, I think is what it's called. And he was saying, quoting the Buddha, I believe it was a quote of the Buddha saying, teach Buddhism in the vernacular of the people wherever you happen to be, which explains why there are so many versions of Buddhism out there. And so in the vernacular, the vernacular of the West or modernity or whatever you want

to call it, there's a natural and a very important skepticism when it comes to reincarnation. So one way to begin the conversation is you, just what you said, right? You are re, every time you wake up in the morning. This is a form of reincarnation, isn't it? It's a, you're entering into a new life. And in fact, this is the problem with the bardo becoming, isn't it? Like we don't really, we can only become, there's no past. There's no future.

We're actually constantly reincarnating right now. Is that a correct interpretation of it? Well, yes, it is. I mean, to the degree that kind of a radical idea of momentariness is central to the way Buddhists conceive both mind and matter. Yes. You know, it's rebirth every second. But, but of course there are, if you will, micro and macro versions of that.

We're undergoing micro versions of that even as we speak. Mind moment, mind moment, mind moment related somehow to body moment, body moment, body moment, but there will come a point for each of us, for everybody where you know, one, the last micro moment of this life will result in the first micro moment of the intermediate state or some future life, but that's a macro change then. And the Buddhists will want to insist, a traditional Buddhist will want to insist on that. You know, it's mind, mind, mind. Does that micro moment, it's everything.

Yeah. That micro moment, it's everything, right? The idea is you don't get that micro moment. That is the, that's where you're going to land in your next life. That micro moment, that's the slot machine of reincarnation. And so if that micro moment is angry, scared, miserable, resentful, vengeful, then that will determine where you're at. That's the GPS coordinates of your next life.

Right. You're going to collect two dollars even. Yeah. Yeah. And this is why it's so important within Buddhist tradition as in many contemplative traditions, certainly of Asian vintage to have, if possible, a peaceful and to the degree we could ever control, a controlled death. And this is why, you know, ideally one approaches death with a contemplative standpoint.

One feels at peace with what one has been and done. And one tries to place one's mind into the most positive and peaceful state one possibly can. Now, that's, that's, you know, it's weird stuff, right? It's, it's hard to, hard to, hard to control for many people, maybe for anybody, for all we know. But this, this is, you know, this is cosmologically, as it were, karmically, the reason that for Buddhists, it's so important to try to have a peaceful death.

And this is why so many meditations, particularly in the Tibetan tradition anyway, are geared towards actually almost pre-enacting your own death process, because the Tibetans talk about and have analyzed all these different subtle physical and mental and other sorts of changes that we undergo as we die. And if we can become familiar with those ahead of time, then when it actually happens to us, maybe we can say, ah, you know, whether we're even saying things at that point, but at some level we'll recognize, ah, you know, the clear light is coming. And I, I can use this to gain liberation.

So in that sense, life becomes a kind of dress rehearsal for death. I mean, obviously you do many other things. That's not all life is, but, but with death in mind, you, you undertake certain kinds of meditation that, that should help familiarize you with what's going to happen to you at the time of death. Right. And that isn't weird at all. We are most certain.

I mean, whatever you believe on reincarnation, if you don't think you're going to die, you know, well, congratulations. That must be a really weird way to be, but we were certainly mortal. And this is sort of like, you know, the, those, ah, the military vehicles got all the soldiers in them flying over. They're going to have to parachute out. You're going to have to parachute out. You better know how to use the parachute.

You better understand where you're going because no matter what, and though it sucks about this is you don't know when you're getting kicked out of the plane. That's the, that's the other issue is like, it could happen at any second where you get called up or where you have to jump. And so you need to be ready for that so that you don't go down screaming. Right. That, that's the idea. And you know, I don't know, by the way, I get confused about it, but my, you know, I

get, do you have any kids? Yeah. That's fun. Did your kids ever say anything when they were young or you that made you think, whoa, where'd you get that from? Oh yeah, kids say that all the time. I didn't necessarily conclude that any, any odd things he said were a past life memory. But and I remember, I just tell you a story when he was very young, we took him, I think

it was less than two, maybe we took him to be blessed by his holiness, the Dalai Lama. And there was part of me that as we approached his holiness with our son, you know, kind of held out, he was going to say, wait a minute, let me see that child. And he was going to recognize him as a, as a tool coup. And actually, I don't think that's probably something you really want. There's, it's been a complicated thing socially and otherwise when Westerners do get recognized, but such a thing did not happen. That is so funny.

We all think that as parents secretly that our children are reincarnated masters. Yes. This is a, yeah, the Buddhist version of, oh, I've got a special, you know, really, I've got a genius child, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, my son said, by the way, that's beautiful that you gave that to your child.

That's incredible. That's incredible. My son said, offhandedly, I was bumped by a car and my body stopped working. That was a very, very, very long time ago. It was just like, what did you say? What? Yeah. Yeah.

What to make of all this. I mean, I, you know, this is among the strangenesses in the universe for sure. And you know, there's one of the things I talk about a little bit in the book, but others have talked about it in much greater detail is the research of a scholar at the University of Virginia, no longer living named Ian Stevenson, who really closely investigated what he called cases suggestive of reincarnation, where children would report what seemed to be past life experiences of some sort. And he really dug into these.

He approached it with a skeptical eye. And he, you know, I think most of them he kind of was able to dismiss based on suggestion and, you know, cultural or parental influences. But he did say towards the end of his career that there were, there was a certain number, very small, but it's a certain number that he just couldn't, he couldn't figure out what was going on there. Now, that doesn't guarantee anything, but, but again, at least to concede once more how strange the cosmos is, and that, you know, maybe there is something to something like

that. But I've never. Well, I mean, isn't it a luxurious conceptualization of reality, which is you die, and that's it. Wow. Yeah. Not like you of all your sentience or whatever it is, this exhaust, this car exhaust running off of your like neural, neural computer, it stops and you're fine. And that's it.

You're as fine as fine could be pure, perfect, eternal, no, nothing to worry about. Doesn't matter what you did. What'd you do? Did you club a bunch of baby seals? Were you do, do you do things that made Dahmer seem like an amateur? Doesn't matter upon death. Everything is completely wiped out. Wiped out.

Yeah. I think I, I think I saw Bob Thurman mention that if you want a state of mind that we're dumping oil in the ocean or, you know, living in a way that completely destroys other people, doesn't like make you feel even slightly guilty, then that's you're going to need that version of reality to pull it off guilt free. Right. Right. But on the other hand, to insist that a particular cosmology, a particular vision of the way

things work, say the Buddhist rebirth karma model of things has to be the case. Because without it, we won't have any ethics is just, it's to me, not a good argument. It's not a good argument philosophically speaking. I, I, I agree that it can help motivate people if they, if they believe that. And that's why, frankly, many of these ideas I think developed was as a kind of bulwark for basic human ethics. But it may be to, you know, I think there's always the existentialist lurking in me at some deep level.

Unfortunately, well, you know, that, that it just may be that we are, that there is no foundation for ethics, that it is a human construction and that we do the do the best to make rules as we may almost make them up as we go along here, you know, swapping around in the human realm. And, and that's maybe the best we can hope for. I think that's what somebody like Camus came to, you know, that you, there was no absolute foundation for ethics, but we, we worked it out as best we could. We tried to commit ourselves to others as well as to our own selfish ends and, you know,

and granted, there's no justification even for that on a bedrock philosophical ground. It's just, we, again, we, we muddle along. It's sort of the old line from Samuel Beckett, you know, I can't go on. I must go on. I can't go on. I must go on. I must go on. That's where we, we must go on.

Yeah, it's, it's. That's what I say every time I take acid about six hours in. Now, the, the, let me go to sleep. Okay. But in this case, though, just, and I, you know, I, I do agree with you. I didn't mean to insinuate that secularists can't be ethical or that they need some kind of ghost story to not like blow up their neighbor's house or something like that. I get that argument.

But I think from this perspective, ethics goes from being a made up thing to a form of navigation, doesn't it? It's like ethics is a cosmic navigation system that is not here. In other words, like, is it unethical to jump into a swimming pool filled with alligators? Is it ethical to do that? It doesn't matter. You're going to get eaten by alligators.

If you jump into a swimming pool of hungry alligators, there's nothing other than don't jump in that. That's not an ethical choice. You don't, unless you want to get eaten by alligators, in which case be my guest, this is, so you know, this is not, this is more saying like, look, you are free. You are autonomous and you can, based on this point going forward, not only reincarnate in this life is a less selfish, less neurotic, less freaked out person, but continue to reincarnate if you want to in ways that aren't going to be entirely horrifically

miserable. It's not ethics. It's navigation, right? It's a navigation, a model of navigation. Yeah. Yeah. And I think your point about, in effect, you know, it goes back to our talking about being, every moment being a bardo as it will, or there's a bardo between

moments, every moment, you know, as T.S. Eliot once put it, every moment is a new and shocking valuation of all we have done and been. We have the option, according to Buddhism, in this very moment to opt for a more positive way of being and thinking and acting and speaking. So it's right there. It's not, you can't say, oh, man, my karma is so heavy. You know, it's weighing me down.

Granted, karma has its effects and it makes some people's circumstances harder and other people's circumstances easier if we accept the traditional definitions. But the gospel, if you will, the good news in Buddhism is right here and now we can opt for a better way of being, thinking, speaking, acting. And it's entirely up to us. And whether or not. Is that intention? Yes, I'm sorry.

You were saying whether. No, I'm just going to say whether or not there's, excuse me, free will on some grand scale or not, because this is a tricky question when it comes to Buddhism that we don't necessarily want or need to get into. But but effectively, we are free to to to act in the moment in appropriate ways, ways that, again, maybe there's no foundation for any of this. But but as you said, we it's a negotiation onward, you know, and we're social beings and we negotiate onward, not just with ourselves.

Even if we're in retreat a lot, there's still other beings that we're interacting with, affecting and being affected by. So it's it's an ongoing, ongoing process. And, you know, maybe it's arbitrary. You I in my case, my sort of as if I I try to think and act and behave and speak as if, you know, the Buddhist way of talking about things was right. And it, you know, I can say it has brought meaning to my life. And I know a lot of people whose lives it has brought meaning.

And maybe that's all we can say. And, you know, presumably people, if they are paying attention to Buddhism are trying to be kinder, softer, gentler people. Overall, there's definitely circumstances in which you've got to be hard and tough. But discerning which those are is never an easy matter. I mean, ethics is murky in many cases, as we all know. But but, you know, it sort of works for me. Maybe that's just a pragmatic answer to it.

And maybe maybe a pragmatic approach is all that most people end up really taking in the end, I don't know. I think it's a beautiful take on things. I think it's useful, too. I think some people just they don't they don't have the the desire or time or they just don't want to deal with being someone who believes in reincarnation. I mean, there's a lot of stigma attached to it. It's like, why do you believe in reincarnation?

What are you going home to polish your crystals? What do you really believe in reincarnation? Come on, wake up. It's all death. So I think the agnostic take on things is also a very logical take on things because, you know, so OK, so you die and it's infinite obliteration. As as Richard Dawkins says, death is the anesthesia that takes away the pain of life. You know, if that's right, if that's what it is, yeah,

in your last that last moment, are you going to think like, damn, but I was too generous? Fuck, I didn't have to be so generous and kind. I'm just going to die forever. Boy, that sucks when I was giving food to people who are hungry. And yeah, why did I try to not be such a selfish jerk? No matter what, it's the it's the best bet. You know, I think I think it's the best bet.

But I am a true believer in it. I've done. I mean, I've seen not my past lives, but I've seen like. I can't explain it, but I saw it. Not my like, oh, I was Julius Caesar. Right. I saw some kind of cluster. Embarrassingly massive cluster of egg like things that represented all my past lives. And there was so many of them because I've been doing it because I'm so

terrible at not doing this. And like it was it was it was an it was a true embarrassment, you know, and in the sense that I would. But now that I have kids, you know, I I don't want to transcend. You know what I mean? Like I don't think I want to get off the wheel. Right. Well, of course, that's part of the whole idea behind the Bodhisattva ideal of Mahayana Buddhism, great vehicle Buddhism,

which is that, well, yes, you are striving to become a fully enlightened Buddha. You vow along the way to help as many beings in as many circumstances as you possibly can. So in that sense, maybe it's a slight shift of ultimate emphasis from what you find in the earlier texts and traditions. We're getting off the, you know, as a Jack Kerouac has this great line from Mexico City Blues, this may not be an exact quote, but it's something like I want to be off this slaving meat wheel dead in heaven.

And that's that's sort of the the that's a kind of modern way of talking about the notion of completely transcending samsara. I mean, what the Bodhisattva is no longer fooled by samsara. The Bodhisattva does not it's not attached to things in the way that ordinary people are. And yet the Bodhisattva chooses to work within samsara to, you know, there's the famous example of the Bodhisattva Vimalakirti, the Vimalakirti Sutra, which Bob Thurman actually has translated wonderfully,

which is probably the funniest Buddha Sutra ever written, among other things. And I I recommend it to everybody. But Vimalakirti is a lay person in the town of Vaishali in North India, who goes into the gambling halls, the political clubs, even even the whorehouses to to to sort of work with people at their own level. And that's what a Bodhisattva does. Now, it sounds great and it sounds altruistic. It's not that easy being a Bodhisattva,

because you you can say to yourself, OK, I'm going to go to the whorehouse and I'm going to be a Bodhisattva in the whorehouse. And next thing you know, you're not really being the Bodhisattva in the whorehouse. So it's it's it's not as easy as it sounds or or quite as ideal, as many people think it is. There's a lot of a lot of tracks built into it. Roger, we call it a sex worker house now. Secondly, now I'm changing.

It's OK. It's that's what Vimalakirti called it. All right. And by the way, you know, the assumption that the Bodhisattva is the one going into the whorehouse and not the one working at the whorehouse, that could happen, too. Couldn't these Bodhisattvas can show up everywhere? Anywhere camouflaged into any karma, not just in this realm, but in the hell realms, too. Yep, yep, yep.

And even Bodhisattvas, the Vimalakirti sutra tells us, can even appear as Mara, the evil one, the one who tries to tempt us away from the proper path. Yes, that's that's that's cool. I love that, which, of course, makes the question of judging others very tricky. Right. Yeah, that's right. Right. Because you don't know you might be hanging out with Vimalakirti. You might whatever that thing is that's really infuriating you.

That might be a being so dedicated to waking you up that they have assumed this form that is not the funnest form, whatever it is, your antagonist, something that's just there to be the the fly in your karmic soup. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, there's a famous, again, one of the great Indian Buddhist texts, The Way of the Bodhisattva by Shanti Deva has a whole chapter on the perfection of patience, much of which is given over to celebration of his appreciation for his enemies,

because they're the ones who cause him to perfect patience. So yeah, there's a there's a story from Tibet about the great reformer Atisha, who was there in the 11th century and helped to kind of bring Buddhism back after some dark centuries. And he used to keep a he had a cook that traveled with him, who was so foul tempered. And, you know, from Atisha's point of view, this was the perfect person to be consorting with because it helped him to stay even keeled. Yeah, you know, I have you heard I heard Pima Chodron talk about that

in her book about the God, what the mind training. Do you know this Gurdjieff story about this? I'm not sure I do. You know what Gurdjieff is? Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Yeah, I know who Gurdjieff was. Supposedly. So Gurdjieff would have he was a mystic for those of you who haven't heard of him. And he would have his students do things that didn't make any sense

to try to break them out of their habitual way of looking at the world. So I think he was having his students like cut pieces of grass out and move them to another place and just put them back just to completely insane, meaningless activity. And one of the students at some point was like, I'm out of here. I'm not doing this. This is stupid. And everyone's happy because this was the most annoying of his students.

They're cheering as he drives off in his car. One of the students goes in and tells Gurdjieff, oh, he left. We got him out of here. And his face goes pale. He jumps in his car, drives after this person, comes back a few days later with the person in tow. So apparently one of his attendants is saying to him, why did you bring him back?

We hate him. He's horrible. And Gurdjieff said, I have to tell you something. I pay him to be here. I love it. Oh, that's priceless, priceless. Yeah, yeah. OK, so let me ask you, this is the last question for you.

If you can choose your next birth. I'm saying you can't transcend yet. We need you here to write more books. But if you could choose, if you could choose your next birth. Where would it be? What would it be? Who would you be? Oh, well, God, you know, I don't think it would be a bird in spite of what

what may have been a previous life, according to my friend. I would I would choose to be born human to be born in a situation where I could, you know, both practice the Dharma and be of maximum benefit to as many beings as I possibly could. I'm not sure that's a continuation of what I'm doing now. I don't think it is. I'm doing that at a very tiny, tiny level right now. But that would be the ideal to be to be back here in some way

and do it all even better, I guess, something like that. Consider it done. I'll make it happen. OK. I'm just getting someone has the power. Yeah, I'll make a phone call. Right, Roger. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you for your time. I really, really am so grateful to you for this. You are so brilliant. And you are helping us here by writing these books more than you realize. It's a very Bodhisattva thing that you just said to think you're not having an impact. You certainly are. And you certainly have just had an impact on me with this wonderful conversation.

Can you let people know they want to connect with you where they can find you? The best place for them to order your book or any any other thing? Well, the best place to order. Yeah, the best place to order the book would be from Shambhala.com. That's S-H-A-M-B-H-A-L-A. Yes, S-H-A-M-B-H-A-L-A. Shambhala Publishers in Boulder. And it's called Rebirth, a guide to mind karma and cosmos in the Buddhist world.

And if anybody wants to connect with me personally, just to discuss some issue, the best way is to email me. And my email address is rjaxson at Carlton, C-A-R-L-E-T-O-N.edu. Carlton is the college in Minnesota. I taught at for 30 years or so. So that's that's the best way. Yeah. Thank you so much. I probably need to find.

Thank you. Yeah, no, I really enjoyed this. Just really enjoyed this one. Wonderful questions and really stimulating and difficult. And that's the way it ought to be. Roger, thank you. I this is you really have helped untangle a lot of tangles. I had regarding the topic and I really hope you all will order his book,

Rebirth, a guide to mind karma and cosmos in the Buddhist world. All the links you need to find it are going to be at DuncanTrussell.com. It is such a good comprehensive book. And as you can see, it really manages to articulate a lot of these ideas without being preachy or judgmental. It's just about Buddhism and reincarnation. And I'm so, so happy to have had a chance to talk to you. Thank you so much, Roger.

Thank you. I've enjoyed this thoroughly. Take care. Take care. That was Roger Jackson, everybody. All the links you need to find his book will be at DuncanTrussell.com. Much thanks to all our sponsors. Come see me at Phoenix this weekend. I love you all so much.

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