I was a tiger in a past life.

There is always an initial confusion when attempting to understand a new fragment of truth. I misinterpret ideas, I draw conclusions that are misguided, I falter in shallowness while chasing the deeper concept. It is a lucid process that takes time, patience and open mindedness. In the end, if you follow through, there is knowledge (known truth that revolutionizes the mind).
I have just read Thich Nhat Hanh's writing on the teachings of Buddha. It is a powerful book, filled with ideas and truths that challenge my ignorance.
A particular part of text has taken root in my mind and will not let go. It is the truth about existence; the truth of life, death and the motion between those notions.

When you look at this sheet of paper, you think it belongs to the realm of being. there was a time that it came into existence, a moment in the factory it became a sheet of paper. but before the sheet of paper was born, was it nothing? can nothing become something? Before it was recognizable as a sheet of paper, it must have been something else - a tree, a branch, sunshine, clouds the earth. In its former life, the sheet of paper was all these things.

Thich Nhat Hanh

This is the remarkable truth, that everything is interconnected. There is nothing that exists, which has not been or will become something else. All energy has existed for all of time, so the ideas of death and of birth are simply concepts - not actual events. In truth, nothing dies, it simply becomes something else, it changes shape and consciousness - that is all. No longer is there fear of death, it is simply a process that we must all pass through to become the next shape.

The truths that apply to the paper, also apply to me. When I was born, I didn't just SUDDENLY exist from nothing - I had been growing from nutrients my mother was ingesting, from leaves she ate, from the meat of animals. I am not just a human, I am earth itself. I am a being created from the existence of thousands of beings before me. I am a cloud, I am rain, I am dirt, I am the energy of a rainbow, I am a roman emperor, I am a rose petal, I am a song, I am a tiger. The very energy that existed before me, has become me, and it is mine to use while I am conscious. When I die, I do not cease to exist, I merely transform into another form of energy. It is a perpetual, never-ending cycle of motion.
I am a wave in the ocean, a wave that is forever attached. I have my brief moment of swell, and then, in a second of astounding beauty, I become part of the ocean again.
Not lost. Reborn.


I was a tiger in a past life.


(Andrew Tipton)