On reincarnation, karma and soap bubbles

Everyone was born physically with a body. This can be likened to the formation of a soap bubble, a thin and tenuous membrane enclosing a lot of air molecules. Previously the air molecules within the bubble were part of the rest of the air, not separate from it. Now, they appear to be separate, but they are of the same essence as the rest of the air. Generally people identify with the membrane, they think “I am the body” or “I am John”. Therefore they also fear death, and rightly so from that point of view – the nature of the soap bubble is very transient, at some point it will burst and be gone.

However, if you look within the bubble, all of the content is air molecules. When the bubble bursts, nothing will happen to the air molecules – except that they will now disperse rapidly into the great volume of air.

In this analogy, the air molecules represent the experiences, concepts, convictions, belief patterns and so on which make up one individual. When the individual dies, these units – for want of a better word – return as a host of patterns to the infinite ocean of Consciousness from whence they were enclosed. They again become available for incorporation into other beings. So the individual who dies will not be reborn as a new version of that individual. Rather, all these individual units will return, enriched, to the pool from which new soap bubbles, new beings, are created. Seen thus, the conventional ideas of individual reincarnation and personal karma are incorrect. New births and the evolution of concepts and belief patterns do happen in general; but it is not personal. Rather it is all part of one gloriously huge and all-interacting evolution of Consciousness itself. Therefore personal Karma does not exist.

[Truncated – the book contains 4 more paragraphs.]