Who's Zebedee?

The last couple of pieces I’ve sent out on rebirth and the places we may end up reborn - I think - deserve a bit more time because they are full of interesting ideas and also lots of practical help. So here goes:

Last night I was thinking about the Twelve Links that I listed in the piece on rebirth. I thought how difficult they are to read and how easily I get bored just a few in and begin to skip towards the end. Is this just me? It’s a pity because the basic observation is very powerful. Out of ignorance suffering arises and unless this is checked in some way it perpetuates itself indefinitely. What could be more depressing then this - and if we want confirmation just look around at what’s happening in our world.

However the Twelve Links are a chain of one thing leading to another and chains can be broken at the weakest link. Here the weakest link is between links seven and eight. Sensing something it is immediately perceived as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral and then this is instantly cloaked in personal likes and dislikes, wanting and not wanting, all the reactions that are unique to me and become sources of suffering. So in one of my instances, thinking of a coffee (pleasant) and instantly wanting one. Those of us who practice mindfulness will immediately see that this is the moment when we recognise we have become distracted and name it ‘thinking’. Mindfulness inserts itself between links seven and eight and breaks them with awareness. So there is a possibility and there is hope.

And there’s a second opportunity at death that is also dependent on our awareness. Hints of this are found in early Buddhism. When the Buddha died he is said to have become fully free from suffering because he no longer had a body - and remember here that he died of dysentery by the side of the road having eaten rotten food given to him by a devotee. Enlightened or not that must have been painful. This utter release at death I also referred to in the piece. The Tibetan’s believe that at the moment of death, the clear light of the awakened mind, intrinsic awareness, blazes up without any hinderances and if in that moment we can stay present, the powerful habitual urge to repeat all our deep seated patterns may be brought to a final end. We may still choose to be reborn for the sake of others, but it’s now a choice, not a compulsion. What’s particularly interesting for me here is that this resonates with contemporary accounts of near-death experiences and also the sense some of us have of an expansion of energy when someone has just died.

Now let’s look at our relationship to this notion of rebirth. If dying is the ultimate first arrow then how we greet it must be the second. Here I believe it’s valuable to just pause a minute and ask ourselves what do we really or actually believe and then the more penetrating question - why do I want or need to believe it? If we can be really honest we may be surprised - after all, death is one of the greatest mysteries and as such has provided fertile ground for our imaginations. Do you really want to come back over and over again? Is what you truly feel that when you are dead you are dead? And this then leads to the insight of ‘Not-self’. Who is it dying anyway?

The Dharma is frequently called the middle way because it treads a path between saying we exist as an unchanging and independent person and that we don’t exist at all. This is called the extremes of eternalism and nihilism. Now the idea about rebirth dances very elegantly between these extremes in what I feel is a very clever and satisfying way. It says we are like a current of water which is continually changing - no particle of the water that makes up the current persists in any way for more than a moment, but at the same time the current does have a momentum that carries it forward as a separate (but also connected) entity within the body of the water as a whole. Like everything else though, the current itself will at some point peter out and at that point it will be identical with the water around it. So here think of liberation at death. Swopping analogies, the Tibetans describe this moment as the ‘child luminosity’ joining the ‘mother luminosity’ and this has been described as the ease and pleasure of a child just hopping onto their mother’s lap. Personal awareness opens into non-dual awareness. So the question really isn’t will I be reborn or not - it’s who is the person who believes or doesn’t believe in this idea? Back to the Magic Roundabout, we know it goes round and round but who’s Zebedee?

NW. 30 April 2026