Past lives

I have been doing a bit of studying about “Taming the Mind and Walking the Bodhisattva Path” (Buddhism).  One of the things that caught my eye is the idea of the “Wrong View”.  The first of these wrong views is that there are no prior and future lifetimes.

I have always had a hard time with the concept of past and future lifetimes.  The concept just doesn’t seem to make any sense to me.  I have always figured that when I die, I am dead – period.  However, this believe started to get a bit shaky when I spent some time with aborigines in northern Australia.  They have a slightly different twist on the subject (which is imbedded in their ideas of the Dreamtime).  They don’t seem to really believe in past and future lives, for the simple reason that they don’t believe in the past and future!  Now this is something I can get a bit more comfortable with.  They believe that the past, present and future are all here all of the time – therefore there is no “past life,” there is just life.

For a number of years this seemed to be somehow closer to what I believe in, but it has been pretty vague and about as nebulous and improbable as the idea of past and future lives.  
However, over the past couple of decades I seem to have been solidifying my belief in one life rather than a lot of multiple lives.  I really mean one life, at least one life on earth.  Maybe there are more lives out there, but I have no information concerning that.  It seems to me that the “earth” is really one life and has been that way for billions of years.  All of the earth, water, the atmosphere, all of the plants and animals and other critters make up parts of this one being.  In some way the sun has to be included because that is the source of the energy that allows this life to be.

The more I contemplate this idea, the more I realize that the idea of past and future lives is pretty self-centered and maybe silly.  It supposes that there are separate lives that come and go over time.  I think that there is just one life that changes and lives over time.  From this point of view, does it make any sense at all that we even die?  I don’t see how that can happen (unless the whole thing manages to die).  Sure I had past “lives,” and will have future “lives” – but really I have been involved in a continuum and will continue to do so.  Yep, it is as sure as anything that my actions will influence what happens in the future, and in that sense it is as sure as anything that they will impact my “future lives,” just as my past actions have impacted my present. 

I don’t think this is what the Buddhists are thinking about when they discuss the idea of past and future lives, but it is getting much closer to what I believe to be the case.  My problem is that the harder I look the more it looks like there are no distinctions between lives and beings.  We are all relatives, and there was never a time or a place where one died and another took over.  It has always been continuous (that is what evolution is all about after all).  Since there was never a beginning or an end, that means that they are all still one.