Do you believe in Reincarnation?
 

My older sister is a grounded, smart, goal-oriented person. She always does the right thing even though it may be the hard thing.

She honestly believes that she has lived two other lives.

1) as a pilot in WWII who went down in the pacific; and
2) one as an octoroon or quadroon in NOLA; a 'kept' woman sort to say.

The first time she visited NOLA she told me "All my past lives came rushing back to me," but I did not experience that. (I've had a very good medium say that this was my first time around)


She's so practical and tough (she's getting the equivalent of a PhD in nursing and does pediatrics, which would break my heart in two) yet she truly believes these things about herself.

Do you ever have feelings like you've lived another life or an affinity for something you don't understand but it's there?


eta: she tells me she remembers her plane going down (obviously she was a dude then) and thinking that the reason the plane was going down was b/c (s)he had cheated a lot on his wife.

She tells me the spirits of the deceased have bothered her so much at times she's had to tell them to go away. one was her recently and highly unexpected death of her BIL. She also says my Grandpap, who died in the bathroom of this very house, was here for a long time but when we moved out he got confused and moved on. that would be just like my Grandpap---to take advantage of free rent!

What marvelous bullshit!

um. ok. so I guess that's a no from you, toad.

I was trying to be serious and have a discussion.

guess not.

Well fuuuuck me and my rational system of beliefs, I guess! All shutting down your discussion with three words! Come on now.

I've never had any feelings about previous lives. In the spirit of honest discussion, however, I will tell you that I have on several occasions felt that I knew things in advance that I could not possibly have known.

They are usually stupid and insignificant things: when I was about 10, I eagerly awaited each new issue of MAD magazine. The night before a particular issue was to arrive at our local convenience store, I had a dream about it, and saw vaguely what the cover would look like. I thought about it all the way to the store, amused to see how wrong I would be, but when we got there, sure enough, that's exactly what it looked like. I was so freaked out I didn't say anything, I knew people would think I was nuts. This is the first time I've ever mentioned it at all, in fact.

In another example, I knew what a particular acquaintance was going to name her baby before he was born. We weren't close and this person did not once discuss name choices with me or anyone around me, it's not a common name at all, and in fact I do not like the name, but I just felt certain months in advance that she would choose that name. When I got the email announcement I didn't even get freaked out, because like I said, I had already been certain I was right.

There are rational explanations, of course. For one thing, I know now that I have partial temporal lobe seizures, and one of the symptoms is intense, psychologically-convincing deja vu. I didn't have my first seizure until at least 5 years after the episode with the MAD magazine cover, but it's possible I was having some mild form back then without realizing it. On the other hand, even with the most intense seizures, the feeling is that I "must have" dreamed about it weeks ago in the past. In this case I remember waking up, thinking about the dream, going over the whole dream in my head (in which the magazine cover was an insignificant part,) and thinking about it all the way to the store. It was nothing at all like the experience of a seizure as I now feel them.

As for guessing the name choice, I feel like I am a very good analyst of people and their behavior patterns. It's a little of my spectrum traits coming out: I've been closely watching people since I was very young, trying to figure out why they are the way they are, because so much of human behavior is illogical to me--people almost never act in their best interests! Anyway, I'm good at predicting people's behavior, and isolating things like patterns in taste, so I don't think it's too impossible that I simply recognized that this woman was the kind of person who would be enamored of this particular name. A Sherlock-level analysis combined with a lucky guess--I later heard she was toying between the name she chose and a completely different name I never would have predicted, and supposedly didn't choose until the moment she saw the baby. So things could have gone the other way and I would have probably forgotten all about being wrong. We only remember the times we were right, of course.

I'm touchy-what can I say?

also - only one cup of coffee so far this morning.


I've just been thinking about this stuff- death all around us here in the cellar; trying to make sense, ANY sense, of why were are here.

I know I'm stupid but I keep seeing Autumn get hit. And I want, so badly, so badly, to think she's not really gone. You might feel the same way about Pearl. But you know i'm an unstable, un-sell-able bill of goods. so, yeah, that right off the bat on a sunday morning did kind of throw me.

sorry.

She still exists in your thoughts, in your mind, and in your understanding of the world. This is the wonder of being human.

Think about this for a moment: Time doesn't progress along as a river or one way road, despite the fact that we experience it that way. Everything that ever happened, and everything that is still to happen, are all happening right 'now' somewhere else in that spread of time. To have existed, is to exist somewhen. You are separated from Autumn in that temporal landscape, but that doesn't mean she doesn't exist.


We can still see the light and hear the sounds of the beginnings of the universe and the births and deaths of stars that in our time frame ceased to exist millennia ago. And the light our sun casts out today will be visible on the other side of the galaxy far far into our future.

But in answer to your question: I do not believe in reincarnation in the way you mean in the OP.

But energy doesn't die it is only transformed or transferred. In that sense we are all 'reincarnated'.

I don't believe in reincarnation with conservation of personality or memory, but I think that conservation of personality/memory is possible across time and states of existence. I agree that energy is conserved. I also agree with the multidimensional concept of time, that 'when' is not restricted to a line in two dimensions. I think we experience things at an intersection, such that something we do 'now' can also be happening, really happening, at that precise moment elsewhere and elsewhen. I also think it's possible for existence to go on outside of time; that time itself is a construct of the universe rather than an objective immutable condition. This is a central idea in Orthodox theology (not that anyone wants to hear about that here, just saying ... these ideas about time are concepts found in a number of different philosophies and theologies).

No to reincarnation, but even Patton strongly believed in it. I have begun to believe you live this life and that's it.

Yes, but it's a stupid end, isn't it? You're here, you learn or don't; you die.

what a waste.

It seems like a stupid god to do such a thing as create consciousness only to distinguish it like a fucking match.

Maybe the light at the end of the tunnel is another vagina, but so what?

Only if you waste it. If you sit around waiting for a do-over in another life, then it's a waste. But that's not god's fault, it's yours.

Trill,

There seems to me to be two kinds of people in the world. Those who rely soley on their sense of intellect. They rely on their 5 senses and what they can observe with their 5 senses. Intellect and science refute all other belief systems and the rest of the population of the world, poor souls, are living in various worlds of delusion and fantasy.

The rest of humanity believe in other things. That there is more then our 5 senses and our intellectual ability to reduce what we see with our 5 senses to the only complete understanding of our world and existence. They believe we have more then 5 senses, for instance.

Both believe that what they believe is based on evidence, and investigation and most importantly their experience. It is very difficult to bring the two sets of people together for a sane conversation about matters such as reincarnation. Though a valiant effort on your part I think this topic is doomed to become an argument.

There are also two types of people, those who like Elton John and those who don't. This may lead to a more productive talk over your morning coffee with Cellar Dwellers. Oh, and though I have no experience with reincarnation, I would not discount the occurrence or possibility. My experience leads me to know that this universe is much more than a cipher rushing no where, and that we are more than $75.00 worth of chemicals.

I don't know that Trilby is necessarily thinking of waiting for a do-over so much as wanting an assurance that we exist beyond the chemical and electrical impulses that make up physical brain activity. The extinction of personality seems to be the issue (correct me if I'm wrong here, Trilby). In that sense, reincarnation doesn't meet the need - it requires extinction of personality in favor of a different personality, memory, and learning experience, ending up with a conglomeration of multiple experiences that don't add to anything coherent (since people don't normally recall 'past lives').

So, do self-awareness and personality survive, even though probably in a somewhat different form or type of existence? Or are we just bags of chemicals and synaptic transmissions that eventually short out? Do our physical processes - the electricity etc. - constitute our entire being and thus we're just carbon-based machines that can be shut down and decommissioned? Or do our physical processes merely let our pre-existing selves function within the physical constraints of this world?

If we're just bags of chemicals with an inevitable decommission date and no further existence, I understand Trilby's question: why bother? It truly shouldn't matter what we do in our short time of awareness. Whether we destroy the planet or each other, or not, is immaterial. There is no morality, no sense of 'ought to' for machines.

Do we continue in some non-physical or differently-physical way after/before/outside the time our physical body breaks down here? This will probably degenerate into argument, as regular joe says. It's not something we have enough empirical evidence for or against to be able to debate logically.

Nirvāṇa is the soteriological goal within the Indian religions, Hinduism,[7][8] Jainism,[9] Buddhism,[8][10] and Sikhism.[11] It is synonymous with the concept of liberation (moksha) which refers to release from a state of suffering after an often lengthy period of committed spiritual practice. The concept of nirvāṇa comes from the Yogic traditions of the Sramanas whose origins go back to at least the earliest centuries of the first millennium BCE.[12] The Pali Canon contains the earliest written detailed discussion of nirvāṇa and the concept has thus become most associated with the teaching of the historical Buddha. It was later adopted in the Bhagavad Gita of the Mahabharata. In general terms nirvāṇa is a state of transcendence (Pali: lokuttara) involving the subjective experience of release from a prior state of bondage. This is the result of a natural re-ordering of the mind and body via means of yogic discipline or sadhana. According to the particular tradition, with the experience of nirvāṇa the mind (Buddhism) or soul (Jainism) or spirit (Hinduism) has ended its identity with material phenomena and experiences a sense of great peace and a unique form of awareness or intelligence that is called bodhi in Buddhism, Kevala Jnana in Jainism, kaivalya (Asamprajnata Samadhi) in Yoga.