I believe I remember my birth, or maybe I’m just making that up to make sense of things. But, I believe I remember pouring out of my mother’s womb into an operating room and into the immense loving pride and adoration of my mother and father, wet and gooshy with doctors and nurses in bluish-green frock coats in attendance. I remember the intense pain of being alive–of being alive “again,” and then again of the immense love and pride and reassurance of my parents.

I think I remember that I had gone very close to the Light awhile before that birth and had almost dissolved all my karma in it–that is, I think I remember being a soul between the last life and this one, as in the way the Tibetan Book of the Dead describes reincarnation or as the Hindus do–about passing through the “bardo” states between the last life and this one.

They describe it as the buddhi, or essence, leaving the body through the crown (there’s a good Alex Grey portrait that depicts this cataclysmic process), and the ego leaves straight towards the Light of Eternity, the Ocean of Pure Love-Light, only to realize before it dissolves completely in that Oneness that it still has karma and must therefore return to find a new body to inhabit, forced to play out the drama and ego of all its karma until it has been consumed into that God-light.

I think I got pretty close last time. I certainly came back in a little singed, or perhaps even a little scorched. Something tells me I did. Or then again, maybe I’ve been getting pretty close many times. The meaning of those memories would make a great deal more sense to me when almost 20 years later I would take bodhisattva vows in a zen training center in New York; “I vow to liberate all beings, returning always to liberate.” When I made these vows, I felt that I remembered taking them, many, many times before. I know I must keep coming back, so may I remain humble.