Life is like the time between a leaf falling from a branch and it hitting the ground

I'm not a perfect devout Buddhist who believes in every tenant but I know this is where I should post this, because this is where it comes from (and from listening to Alan Watts).

A leaf detaches, flips, flies, and crashes into other leaves along its great descent. It lives, it gets stuck, it gets free again, it gets wet, but ultimately, all leaves hit the ground. Though once they're there, something magical happens. It may be over a season, it may be over a few, but eventually that leaf will become rich soil, the type its mother tree once sprang it from, and it will experience a new life of fertilizing the trees around it, and possibly even fertilizing the one it came from. From there, the leaf will live a whole new life, possibly another life as a free leaf again.

What if our souls inhabit every piece and part of our body? Once the life from our bodies is inanimate, and its physical form dispersed throughout the world or cosmos, if one is cremated, or buried in a wooden casket, we get to live another life again. Our soul enchanted remains turn to dirt and the dirt turns into energy for the plants. From there we can become anything, the offspring of an bird, bee, or bear once eaten.

What if our bodies get stuck? Buried in a cave or entombed in a pyramid forever? Well they're not going to be stuck forever on Earth because even Earth has a clock that's ticking down. The sun will one day eat the Earth and it'll will go through the stages of a star's life until finally blinking out along with the rest of the stars in the universe. If one believes in the theory of the 'big crunch' the idea is that the universe will all once again come together through gravity to form a dense point in space building up until it explodes into another big bang, then all the lives that have ever been lived have the possibility of being lived again.

The only question left to ask is, will they be the same?

submitted by /u/WeAreElectricity
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from Buddhism https://ift.tt/2Pk5bZf