There is no escaping the cycle of life & death.

Enlightenment or निर्वाण (nirvāna) is often taken to mean the end of the cycle of life & death. It is not.

Conscious Choice

The essence of spiritual work is to bring conscious choice wherever there are reflexive reactions occurring in your life.

Does my hand reflexively reach for the phone every few minutes? Can I bring a moment of pause before succumbing to that reaction? Can I notice what’s arising in me when I reach for my phone?

Sutra 57 in Vigyan Bhairav Tantra¹ says–

In moments of extreme desire,
Be undisturbed.

When making love to a beloved, are you reflexively following a conditioned script? Can you pause and feel the depths of lust in your being & be with it instead of reacting to it? What emerges if you don’t react to it?

The upwards spiritual spiral goes from reflexive doing to reflexive not doing to conscious choice. This 3 step cycle is often encountered in spiritual work. To an outside observer, steps 3 and 1 are almost indistinguishable.

In the moment of pause where the conscious choice emerges, there occurs a simultaneous surrender to the flow of life. Conscious choice is not what you think it is. In the moment of pause, you are not thinking and analyzing to decide what action to take. In this heavily disembodied intellectual age, do not make the folly of confusing conscious choice for analyzed, thought-out choice with a pro-con list. Egad!

Paradoxically, when you have full conscious control over your choices, you are also fully surrendered to the flow.

Rebirth

The ultimate reflexive action to be conquered & surrendered to is reflexive rebirth after death.

When you die, your soul separates from your physical body in a moment of agony that can’t be imagined let alone put into words. You turn into a Bardo being that then floats around in anguish till it encounters a copulating couple & flows in for its next birth. Another attempt at lightening the karmic load that prompts the reflexive rebirth. Thereby the cycle continues.

Imagine the level of spiritual fortitude it’d take to bring conscious choice to this moment!

Once all the reactive sankhārās are cleansed from your karmic baggage, you gain this particular conscious choice.

So what do you do then as an Enlightened being at death?

Your heart wide open² and being fully committed to collective liberation, knowing that individual liberation cannot be separated from collective liberation, you consciously choose to come back. To rediscover the path to liberation from suffering in a new age and share it with other beings. To the best of my grasping of Buddhist wisdom, this is what I've understood.

So then, there’s no “escape” to the life & death cycle. If you have such a desire, consider where it comes from. Is it a spiritually rebranded version of your desire to not live because the pain in your life feels overwhelming? Is it because you’ve lived such a numbed out life that a taste of the transcendent mystical experience where you feel something makes you thirsty for feeling more?

There is only this life. There is only this moment. And there is transcendent beauty all around you from the lotus growing in the mud to the emptied plastic water bottle you are about to trash.

Beauty to be inhaled. To be fully felt. The sweet fullness of joy & the sweet fullness of grief. Forever flowing in a magical cycle.