Tibetan Book of the Dead

 I wonder if some ancient Hindu mathematician (knowing what wonderful and advanced mathematicians India had back then) came to the same conclusion as Poincare and Nietzsche would millennia later, namely that if the Universe is finite, then there are ultimately only a finite number of repeatable combinations...and therefore we have done all this before...and will do all this again...repeatedly, ad infinitum, into eternity.

This is what's called the Unbearable Heaviness of Being, this burden that everything we've done, are doing, and will do--all of our mistakes, successes, joys, downfalls, pains, sufferings, births and deaths--has already happened before, and we are destined (some would say doomed) to do so again.

I wonder if this ancient mathematician's calculations is what resulted in the Hindu belief that we are trapped in an endless cycle of reincarnations and rebirths (a belief as distinctly Indian in origin as Ethical Monotheism is Middle-Eastern).  For so certain is the Hindu belief in reincarnation you see, that the Buddhists are trying to escape the cycle of rebirths--that is, to escape the Unbearable Heaviness of Being.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or, "The Great Liberation upon Hearing in the Intermediate State," as it apparently should most properly be translated), is concerned specifically with ending the cycle of rebirths, and contains poems, rituals, and guidance for the dying subject, in how to successfully navigate the moment of death so as to enter Nirvana, the great emptiness, the final death.  

I found the book to be strangely...filling.  Not for its esoteric theology per se (I am sure that my thorough ignorance of most Buddhist practice left me not grasping half of the references therein), but rather in its assumptions that we are able to leave the great weight of existential meaning that bears down on each of us.  Modern man, of course, is afflicted with (as the Milan Kundera novel is entitled) the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the assumption that all that is happening is happening only once, and then never again, and what occurs once might as well never have happened at all.  It is made manifest in the physicist's growing and sober suspicion that the Universe will not reshuffle a la Poincare, but will instead just peter out and fade away.  

That is, in the East, the great quest is to attain Nirvana; in the West, it's to avoid it.  It takes the Buddhist great energy of soul to reach the state the Westerner fears he will come upon inexorably.  

So which is it?  The Unbearable Heaviness or The Unbearable Lightness?  Doubtless we've written ourselves into a false binary here, and there is something else, something further, that we are not considering.  For both the the Heaviness and the Lightness begin with the presumption of a finite Universe.  Have you played with the Hubble Deep Field on Google Sky?  We still have not seen the edge thereof.  Might both these categories prove insufficient if the Universe turns out to be...infinite?