The-Tibetan-Book-of-Living-and-Dying

EVOLUTION, KARMA, AND REBIRTH 93
to their development in other lives? Think of Mozart, composing
minuets at the age of five, and publishing sonatas at
eight. 10
If life after death does exist, you may ask, why is it so difficult
to remember? In the "Myth of Er," Plato suggests an
"explanation" for this lack of memory. Er was a soldier who
was taken for dead in battle, and seems to have had a neardeath
experience. He saw many things while "dead," and was
instructed to return to life in order to tell others what the
after-death state is like. Just before he returned, he saw those
who were being prepared to be bom moving in terrible, stifling
heat through the "Plain of Oblivion," a desert bare of all
trees and plants. "When evening came," Plato tells us, "they
encamped beside the River Unmindfulness, whose water no
vessel can hold. All are requested to drink a certain measure of
this water, and some have not the wisdom to save them from
drinking more. Every man, as he drinks, forgets everything." 11
Er himself was not permitted to drink the water and awoke to
find himself on the funeral pyre, able to remember all that he
had heard and seen.
Is there some universal law that makes it almost impossible
for us to remember where and what we have lived before? Or
is it just the sheer volume, range, and intensity of our experiences
that have erased any memory of past lives? How much
would it help us, I sometimes wonder, if we did remember
them? Couldn't that just confuse us even more?
THE CONTINUITY OF MIND
From the Buddhist point of view, the main argument that
"establishes" rebirth is one based on a profound understanding
of the continuity of mind. Where does consciousness come
from? It cannot arise out of nowhere. A moment of consciousness
cannot be produced without the moment of consciousness
that immediately preceded it. His Holiness the Dalai
Lama explains this complex process in this way:
The basis on which Buddhists accept the concept of rebirth is principally
the continuity of consciousness. Take the material world as an
example: all the elements in our present universe, even down to a
microscopic level, can be traced back, we believe, to an origin, an initial
point where all the elements of the material world are condensed
into what are technically known as "space particles." These particles,
in turn, are the state which is the result of the disintegration of