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Main Index
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who is a man, when he remembers, he remembers himself as a woman in his past life. If he goes deeper he again remembers himself as a man.
At first I was puzzled, because it is not mentioned anywhere. But then I could see the point that every woman is desiring to be a man. She thinks, "I am confined in the home, and the man is enjoying everything." And every man thinks, once in a while, "The beauty, the mystery of a woman ..." So it is very natural that you are creating your other form already without doing it consciously. If you are man you will be born as woman. And this is a vicious circle, because when you die, you die unconsciously; when you are born you are born unconsciously. So you don't know from where you are coming, or what was the reason for your taking this form.
The whole foundation of meditation is to make you so alert that you can see the forming of seeds and desires and drop them. If you can die without a seed ...
If you die in a half-hearted way, not totally, with something incomplete, with something you wanted to do and death has come in between -- then you cannot expect to disappear into the universal. Then the flame will take another home, according to your desires, your reincarnations.
Meditation simply means to drop, slowly slowly, all your desires. And when death comes, celebrate it; celebrate it because everything is complete and you are ready. This readiness and completeness will give you the ultimate freedom of formlessness. That formlessness is nirvana.
All these buddhas, like Dogen, are pointing towards that formlessness. First, he is talking about relativity:
WHEN WE LOOK BACK AT THE SHORE FROM OUR BOAT, WE MISTAKENLY FEEL AS IF THE SHORE WERE MOVING. BUT WHEN WE LOOK AT OUR BOAT WITH CARE, WE FIND THAT IT IS OUR BOAT THAT IS ACTUALLY MOVING. SIMILARLY, WHEN WE SEE ALL THINGS WITH THE DELUDED IDEA THAT OUR BODY AND MIND ARE SEPARATE FROM EACH OTHER, WE MISTAKENLY THINK INNATE MIND AND NATURE ARE ETERNAL. BUT WHEN WE REALIZE THAT OUR BODY AND MIND ARE INSEPARABLE, WE SEE CLEARLY THAT ALL THINGS ARE NOT SUBSTANTIAL.
The body has a substantiality. When someone dies all the elements of the
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