Always liked this expert from an Alan Watts lecture:
Statement one: After I die, I shall be reborn again as a baby, but I shall forget my former life.
Statement two: After I die, a baby will be born.
Now, I believe that those two statements are saying exactly the same thing, and we know the second one is true. Babies are always being born. Conscious beings of all kind are constantly coming into existence after other die. But, why would I think that the two statements are really the same statement? Because after all, if you die and your memory comes to an end and you forget whom you were, being reborn again is exactly the equivalent of somebody else being born. Because we have no consciousness of our continuity unless we have memory, if the memory goes, then, we just as well might be somebody else. And, although a particular set of memories vanished, death is not the end of consciousness. The vacuum created by the disappearance of a being, by the disappearance of his memory, is simply filled by another being, who is “I”, just as you feel your “I”. The confusion arises when we forget that everybody’s name is “I” and that you can only experience this “I” in the singular. But this singular must go, as it is impermanent. But the patterns and forms are all eternal, because it is forgetting about things that renew its wonder. We all might be anyone else. So long as there is consciousness anywhere, there is “I”. You then, in a way, look out through all “I’s”; perhaps this is the great secret of the virtue of compassion.
What you do is something the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing.
After you are dead the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the same sort of experience as when you were born. What was it like to wake up after having never gone to sleep? In other words, we all know very well that after people die other people are born, and they are all you! Only, you can experience it one at a time. Everybody is “I”; you all know you are “you”. And where so ever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn’t make any difference, you are all of them. And when they come into being, that is you coming into being.
Only, you do not have to remember the past in the same way you do not have think about how you work your thyroid gland. You do not have know how you shine the sun, you just do it! Doesn’t it really astonish you that you are fantastically complex thing and that you are doing all of this and you never had any education in how to do it?
