Life is not a struggle to attain purity, it’s a blissful slide into obscurity…
a stripper, a thief, a pimp, a Wal-Mart executive
Reincarnation may well be the world’s most widely held religious belief, and the basic idea is always that beings move up: starting out as ants, say, or smegma mites, by dint of hard work souls move up the ladder of incarnation into higher beings, like sparrows and then lions and then humans until finally they accrue sufficient merit and attain the apotheosis of all possible existence and are suffered to live in a small, Colorado mountain town and given their own weekly radio show. After that, they merge with the Godhead and prepare to start over, because that’s the only move left after you’ve queened your pawn.
But based on my own life experience, everyone who believes in reincarnation has got it completely backwards. That is, beings don’t move up, they move down. For look at me; born at or near the top rung of existence, and with three decades of ascetic religion, meditation, LSD use, and various and sundry other enlightenment experiences under my belt, you’d think that having approached the top of life’s ferris wheel I’d spend my days preparing to leap into Lord Shiva’s sweet embrace, yearning for union with the Divine as a dog yearns for his master, or cat feces. But in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. As I approach mid-life, my thoughts turn more and more to pleasures of the flesh, to good meals, to pleasantly altered states of consciousness, and to delightfully varied sensual encounters. Purity is dull in my experience, and even religious ecstasy is overrated; give me a good cigar, a glass of teenaged Cabernet, and the director’s cut of Blade Runner and I’m about as happy as any being in the cosmos.
And since, like all beings, I am a mirror of God, I’m pretty sure He feels the same way. So I believe that God, when contemplating the immersion of Himself in the fecund chaos of materiality, doesn’t jump in the deep end. Rather, he gets his toes wet by incarnating as a relatively pure being, perhaps a Tibetan lama, or one of those kung fu masters with really bushy eyebrows. And as He gets accustomed to fleshly existence, He more fully embraces the sordid ironies of physicality, and moves down the ladder of life, incarnating as a stripper, a thief, a pimp, a Wal-Mart executive, until no baser form of human existence remains and He becomes the highest form of animal, a domestic cat, and then a horse, an eagle, a tapeworm, a dog, poison ivy, a slime mold until finally God has grokked life itself, all of its glory and obscenity, its bits of brilliant light and its dank, evil corners. And by this journey, God comes to know Himself, for after all, He is the Maker of all-that-is, and this world we live in is His self portrait.
And finally, when God has sunk low enough, He becomes rock and water and air, He sleeps the sleep of matter, and after many long ages, He wakes again and resumes His role as Lord of Creation. And this is why God is holier than the rest of us: He accepts everyone, and everything—no being is separate from His love.
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Hmmm… I guess you’re not much of a dog-lover then…?
And I would have to argue with your assessment of cats as the highest form of animal. I would suggest they are the highest of all life forms.
After so many experiences we can, eventually, find ecstasy in the void. The Oneness.
Because we are taught to not enjoy pleasure, once we find that IT is exquisite, we MUST investigate so that we CAN eventually get to the oneness. If that takes moving ‘down’ from an obvious ‘up’ position then by all means switch positions!
In ‘The Curios Case of Benjamin Button’ The old, tired, angry and forgetful Benjamin is a pure, beautiful, soft baby as he leaves the world, fully transformed. It’s a beauty of a movie.
If Mazlo’s ‘needs scale’ as well as the chakra system is considered, it’s understood that we move up and down as necessary to fulfill the learning needed to take the step up again. That’s all – we’re just all of us ‘all over the map all the time’!
I am hoping to come out near the top though when it all comes out in the wash!