There is no reason for a sound faith to be irrational. A useful faith should not be blind, but should be well aware of its grounds. A sound faith should be able to use scientific investigation to strengthen itself. If, due to an inevitable destiny of soul, an Omnipotent Being will save us no matter what we do, we will not regret having spent a bit of time preparing unnecessarily to save ourselves. But if there is no such Being, or if there are divine Beings more powerful than us who can help us if we are prepared to accept their help, then we will deeply regret for a very long time our failure to prepare ourselves.It should be open enough to the spirit not to lock itself up in the letter. A nourishing, useful, healthful faith should be no obstacle to developing a science of death. In developing such a science, it is necessary for the investigator to consider all previous attempts to do so, especially those traditions with a long development and a copious literature. Of all these, the science of death preserved in the Indio-Tibetan tradition is perhaps the most copious of all.

Given the boundless interconnections of living forms, beginning-less and end-less, and spread throughout an infinity of space, the materialist picture of evolution as natural selection operating purpose­lessly, yet efficiently developing life forms through random mutation from a definite beginning point within a finite theater of planetary environment, needs some revision. First of all, postulated definite beginnings and finite settings are always suspected. The materialist account describes reasonably the material, causal development process, but why should not mind as well as body develop and mutate?

The Buddhist view of all this, the psychobiological evolutionary account known as the “Theory of karma,” is very like the Darwinian idea of evolution. The karma theory describes a great chain being, postulating a relationship between all observed species of beings and a pattern of development of one life form into another humans have been monkeys in the past, and all animals have been single celled animals. The difference in the karma theory is that individuals mutate through different life forms from life to life. A subtle, mental level of life carries patterns developed in one life into the succeeding ones.

Species develop and mutate in relation to their environments, and individuals also develop and mutate from species to species. This karmic evolution can be random, and beings can evolve into lower forms as well as higher ones. Once beings become conscious of the process, however, they can purposely effect their evolution through choices of actions and thoughts. Although their are undeniable differences, the karma theory gives an evolutionary explanation of how beings are the way they are. So we can comfortably translate Karma throughout as “Evolutionary Action”.

Karma means action that causes development and change and so is close to what we mean by evolution. There is no need to retain to retain the Indian word karma. Some translators do so because of the factor of mystification; they feel that nothing in the target language can reproduce the unique meaning of the original term. Some westerns who delve into Eastern thought also keep the term because they are thinking of karma mystically, as a kind of fate. But in Buddhist science, it has nothing to do with fate-it is an impersonal, natural process of cause and effect. Our karma at a given moment of life or death or the between is the overall pattern of causal impulses resulting from former actions connected with our life continuum.

These form a complex that impresses its effects on our bodies action and thoughts. In turn our ongoing actions of body. Speech and mind form new causal impulses, which determine the nature and quality of our lives in the future. This complex can be called our evolutionary momentum. There is an old Tibetan saying Don’t wonder about your former lives; just look carefully at your present body. Don’t wonder about your future lives; just look at your mind at present!” This expresses the sense that our present body has evolved from a long evolution driven by former actions and our future embodiments will be shaped by how we think and what we decide to do in our present actions.

The time of the between, the transition from a death to a new rebirth, is the best time to attempt consciously to effect the causal process of evolution for the better. Our evolutionary momentum is temporarily fluid during the between, so we can gain or loose a lot of possibilities during its crisis.

Post theme taken from Tibetan Book of Natural Liberation