Our physical body is a school of learning but what we are supposed to learn from it is not given to us. What we eventually come to learn is that over time our once youthful, strong and healthy body will fail us. In that respect, it is not a suitable refuge—at best temporary. Life in the triple world is not without lots of minefields, in other words.
How do we, generally, approach this problem? Mainly, either ignore it or set it aside, telling ourself we will deal with it later. Or it could be, science will find a way. But so far all that science has offered us is unproven theories presented as settled facts. But a deeper investigation finds these facts to be well constructed fictions.
For those of us who want to be dreamers who wish to live in a fantasy world, our society provides us with many dreams for the right amount of money. Many of these dreams are stupid and childlike, while others are savagely cruel. Our dreams do not help us in the slightest, in fact, they do us great harm by closing us off to truth. In this respect, our dreamworld turns into a veritable prison.
Buddhism cannot help us when we are this far gone. Even death’s offering of oblivion will not be our friend and shelter us for there is nothing about oblivion to preclude rebirth which is a real double edge sword such that we can, over infinite time, learn from our mistakes, or gradually descend into the hells which we have made.
We learn from Buddhism that consciousness (vijñāna), which goes from one life to another—the postmortem survivor—is a kind of possessing spirit that enters the embryo (nāmarūpa) and binds itself to it. Subsequently, it grows and develops into a human being exiting the birth canal in nine months. In Buddhism, this process is the 12-fold chain or the 12-nidāna (cause of existence). This possessing spirit or transmigrating consciousness is thirsting and filled with desire, that is, desire for conditioned things which only cause more unfulfilled desires and rebirths.
As for this body we inhabit it is the five skandhas consisting of physical shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations, and consciousness. But this body is not our self as the Buddha teaches; rather this body is not the self or anātman. And by clinging to it, tenaciously, we over engage with its temporal drives, limitations and sufferings. The trick is to realize our true self or Buddha-nature while we are incarnated. This is the state of nirvana which unlike our body is unconditioned and immaterial and is not subject to death. It is also beyond the reach of consciousness which is always dualizing (vi = in two parts, jñāna = knowing).
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