The following method of meditation seems to give one a direct intuition of rebirth. How does it sound to you?
Take the case of a practitioner who performs the meditation on body “as” body. Seeing things clearly, they name the attributes of this body exactly as they are, and they only name what is really there, and do not name what is not there. Now, even though it is not standard for this meditation, this includes the consciousness. (By consciousness I really mean pure awareness, but I’ll stick with consciousness. I am aware of the Buddha’s discussion with Sati.)
One practices thus, seeing again trivially, that Nature’s forces have gone ahead producing this body with all its attributes, never bothering to consult one’s so-called power of will. Consciousness, one finds, was there at the moment of physical birth. How could it be otherwise? This means that consciousness is an irrefutable aspect of the physical attributes found at the very moment of birth. This consciousness was present right when the body was born, this consciousness persists, and this consciousness has not gone away.
Continuing thus, one sees that any human body including the most nearby one is not a special case. This most nearby of all things, this bag of blood and bones, is subject to the same eternal law, the same dukkha, the same aging, the same impermanence, the same ignorance, the same world of being and extinction. This is verifiable by experience. In any case, if it were more or less important than others, it would have no right to make a purely physical claim to that.
Therefore one sees, without making any logical missteps as far as I can tell, that this body with this consciousness surely originated here in the same way as any other material form did. That is, unless one believes that material forms “do not originate.” Do they not? How so? Here, as there, Nature works out the same principle in a uniform way; namely, two items at once: consciousness and a body. It does not really matter what that body is.
This seems to show that it is a certainty that consciousness, being not ours, and yet always being present as a natural force, has the very plain and normal ability to transmigrate to another physical formation regardless of what that formation happens to be. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere else. Further evidence being that our best effort to separate ourselves on the basis of consciousness from the rest of reality is made hopeless and ugly by the imminent everyday knowledge that impermanence really smacks us around if we aren’t careful. So I wonder, should we merely “believe” in rebirth, or should we gain insight of it?
