Last Christmas my wife Missy got me an amazing gift. She bought me the entire audio catalog of the lectures of the philosopher Alan Watts.
I've been slowly digesting it for the better part of a year now. It's immense, over 4 GB of data. It's literally seven entire 24 hour days or so of audio.
It's a profound gift.
As I was driving to work today, I was listening to some of it. In this particular lecture that you see playing on my phone above, Watts was discussing the Buddhist view of reincarnation and the universe.
It's brilliant stuff. He was saying how reincarnation is not some spooky magical thing.
It's not that there's some weird ephemeral soul which leaves your body and then is milled by the universe, processed, and poured into some other living thing.
It's actually much simpler than that. You are the universe. As am I.
Anywhere, and everywhere, that life is aware of itself, it's the universe. Just the same way as the molecules in your hand are connected to be a hand, yet are also separate molecules, is the same way that we reincarnate.
You are the entire universe, expressed in the place and time where it and we are you.
I am too. What else could I be?
All we need to live forever is just to change the way we understand the living that we're doing right now.
I'm profoundly grateful to my wife for giving me this gift.