How rebirth can happen without a soul? Because we call this a process, not a thing.
We think attachment is only to our money or to our body and other stuff. No, that’s the easy things to understand you’re going to have to let go of. But imagine attaching to other stuff which has always been there: what defines you, what you think you are. Your consciousness, your will.
It can never be captured. All those wonderful experiences of your life, they can never just be revisited. You always like to go back there, but they’re gone just like the snowfall in the river.
Your thoughts are like an onion: when you peel it, it makes you cry. And you keep peeling it and peeling and peeling it, and there’s nothing in the center! It’s just all leaves, which can create a lot of pain in your eyes. And the best part of it—even the word “onion:” an onion, it goes on and on with an “I” in the middle. That’s so lovely! And that’s what your thoughts do. They go on and on because there’s an “I” in there somewhere; there’s a me. And that’s a lovely way to stop your thoughts. If you ever had a bit of non-self—it’s not my thoughts, it’s not my life, none of my business. It’s so easy for thoughts to stop when you take the center out of them: me.
The reason why you’re not enlightened is because you haven’t understood the Four Noble Truths. You haven’t understood them fully and properly. Yeah, a lot of life is suffering. But there’s some parts of this life and world which you quarantine. So yeah, everything else is suffering, but this bit isn’t. And this is the problem why people aren’t enlightened. They reserve a little bit of the universe—what I call the ultimate retirement home—where you can live happily ever after, once you’re enlightened. And there’s people like that, you know? They want to go to “heaven.”
Buddhism isn’t one of those “heaven” religions! It’s totally different. There is no happy ever after. Wherever you go, you’ll have happiness and suffering. You can’t have one without the other. You can’t have night without day. You can’t have youth without old age. You cannot have pleasure without suffering. In fact, all happiness ever is, is a pause between two moments of suffering. All suffering is, is a pause between moments of happiness. No more. Check it out.
So the only way there can be real peace, real happiness, is the ending of all this. Stopping. That’s where you understand what suffering truly is. Suffering is not having hay fever, or having a sore tummy, or not getting the food you like when you have lunch in a few minutes. Suffering is not, sort of, being argued with, or it’s not saying, “I don’t agree with this.” That’s not real suffering. The real suffering is being. Now I’m giving it to you full on: to be is to suffer. “To be or not to be, that is the question”—it’s not a question. The Buddha answered it a long time ago. Think about it: do you want to continue being? If you do, you’ll have to endure suffering. To be is to suffer. It’s called bhava-tanha, “the craving to be”—the last and most powerful of cravings. You’d rather be and suffer, than not be at all.
There’s something about this teaching which gets right inside of you, irrespective of all your logical arguments against it. In spite of all the fact that I don’t like this, I want to be. In spite of all of that, it has the taste of freedom. It smells of truth, even though you don’t like it. And that’s the problem for you. Once you hear it—I’m sorry, it’s too late. You shouldn’t’ve come here. It gets inside of you and you can’t get rid of it. That is why you will become enlightened. You will struggle and squirm, you will reject and say, “No, not me.” I’m sorry, it’s not up to you anymore.