Rebirth and the Western Buddhist - Khamkoo

Details of Rebirth 71
moment of death. An intermediate being to be reborn as
human will have the form of a child of five or six, naked,
and. with perfect faculties, including either male or female
sex. It can go anywhere instantly, unobstructed by matter.
Karmically endowed with the divine eye, it sees, even
a long way away, its place of birth and its future parents
copulating. If it is male, it feels sexual desire for the
mother and hostility to the father; if female, inversely.
Joining them and imagining itself to be making love with
the parent of opposite sex, it finds itself "born" in the
womb. Beings to be born "from heat and moisture/ such
as insects, are attracted by smells, and those to be born
miraculously by desire for an abode-for example, a
being to be born in the hot hells is tormented by the cold
wind and rain and wants somewhere warm. 131
According to Tsongkhapa, the vision of the parents
copulating is illusory, but once the sexual desire has
arisen the being cannot avoid taking birth there, all it can
see is the genitals thrashing about and this makes it
angry, whereupon it takes birth. Apparently it is necessary
for both emotions, desire and anger, to arise. There
is disagreement on the duration of the intermediate existence,
but the Tibetans have settled on a maximum of
seven weeks, with a change of body after each week.
We now have considerable observational evidence
with which to compare the pandits' assertions, from the
sources described in Chapter Three. It is harder to remember
the experience of birth and before birth than to
remember previous lives-just under half of Wambach's
subjects were able to do so under hypnosis, as against
ninety percentl 32 or ninety-five percent 133 remembering
previous lives, and Mme Desjardins 47 quotes a similar
figure. Even so, Wambach amassed 750 people's reports
of these experiences. 59
Story 134 sums up the spontaneous recollections of the
intermediate existence: