Rebirth

Rebirth is a fascinating phenomenon. Science does not yet have the knowledge to confirm it, but evidence gathered from all over the world is enough to show that rebirth is real. A small child on the Golan Heights near the Syrian border remembered a past life and accurately accused the person who had killed them with an axe in that previous life. The child pointed to where the body was buried and identified the killer by face, and the killer confessed. The difficulty is that not everyone remembers their past lives, so the arguing never ends.

Not everyone has flown on a plane, but that is no reason to deny that something so heavy can fly. We should not judge everything from our own subjective perspective. We do not remember our past lives, and there are reasons for that. Not remembering is no ground for denying rebirth. Rebirth firms up our understanding of morality, and people need to accept it in order to raise their own morals. The Buddha spoke at length about rebirth. Jesus spoke of it. Hindu masters accept it. Evidence from around the world points to it. Only today's physics is not yet enough to see it.

Because rebirth is real, we have a basis for trusting that the universe is fair.

Each person is born different from the rest in many ways: beautiful or plain, strong or frail, clever or slow, rich or poor. If we call that chance, it is only because we have no way to explain it. If we say it is the will of some god, we insult that god, because who would play so cruelly with a human fate? If we say it is genes, we still cannot explain the striking differences between people who share genes within a family.

Set aside all the other explanations and one remains that makes sense: the law of cause and effect. The person you are in this life is the karmic result of how you lived in the last. Countless thoughts and actions from earlier lives made the countless traits and circumstances of this one. People sow and people reap. This cause and effect is fair. It is not a belief or a religion. It is a science, one at the scale of the universe that Earth's science has not yet reached.

Whoever understands the law of cause and effect is ahead of their time and pushes the world forward with them. The world needs many people who understand it in order to reach a new level of morality. Everyone, from the very high, such as leaders, scholars, professors and monks, to the very low, such as criminals in prison, needs to understand the law to help build the world's morality. The slower we are to understand cause, effect and rebirth, the slower the world moves.

And by the same law, whoever works to spread the principle of cause and effect gains a great good for themselves.