What were we reborn for?

🕊️ Impact #1: Rebirth, the meaning of existence, and the purpose of this one short human life.

About twenty minutes into meditation, a vivid scene appeared: a burning red-orange sunset stretching over an ocean horizon. Without warning, I burst into tears. I couldn’t stop. I cried out loud.

In the scene, my head slowly turned away from the ocean toward land—toward a motherland I had not seen before but somehow recognized. The African continent. A feeling of leaving home. Leaving family. Leaving my mother. Leaving everything.

I don’t know where that image came from.
I don’t know what story it belonged to.
But it arrived fully formed—like a dream I stepped into without permission.

There was no explanation, no map, no text, no conversation in the scene I saw and was in. And yet, in that moment, both the observing ‘me’ and the character inside the scene understood everything: the context, the logic behind the tears.

And this wasn’t the first time. My meditation journey has given me scenes like this more than once. Probably, scattered pieces of my past lives. Otherwise, I don’t have a word or clue to validate this logic or connection.

So, do I believe in rebirth?

Yes.

Do I live by it? Or shape my life around it?
No, I don’t intend to.

I keep my feet on the ground. I pay attention to the present. I try to live in the present. But I must admit—studying Theravada Buddhism made me rethink reincarnation, rebirth, and the karmic cycle in a different way.

The Human Realm as a Rare Opportunity

In the suttas, there is a famous metaphor:

“The chance of being born as a human is as rare as a blind turtle rising from the ocean once every hundred years and accidentally placing its head through a floating wooden yoke.”

If we are here in human form, with consciousness and intention, something extraordinarily rare has occurred.

In Theravada texts, the human realm is described almost like a picnic—brief, precious, temporary. Our “home,” the sutta says, is actually the lower realms*. We come out for a short visit, taste the sunlight, and then return.

Whether we take that literally or symbolically doesn’t matter.
What matters is that this life is unbelievably precious. We must acknowledge that first.

But sutta is sutta. Story is story. And reality is still reality: I am breathing here with a to-do list, bills to pay, aging that I cannot escape, illness that comes and goes, emotions rising and falling like weather.

This is samsara—not as a dramatic cosmic cycle, but as a daily lived experience.

So I use rebirth more as a metaphor. A storytelling lens. A way to understand certain instinctive, unreasonable connections that logic cannot explain but intuition strongly recognizes—like the way we interpret a dream that feels more real than memory.

And yet, I always return to presence.
Presence is where intention stabilizes.
Presence is where attention decides direction.