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orinoco
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A question for reincarnation fans
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Aug 23 01:38 UTC 1995 |
(note--in this item, I will be using "reincarnation" to mean "the belief that,
after death, your soul enters another body, and this other body will be
more pleasant if you have led a good life". I am not sure if other
definitions exist or not)
Ok, suppose I am a murderer, and, as punishment, I am reincarnated as a leech.
How is this punishment? True, for my counciousness to be placed in a leech's
body would be punishment, but a leech's mind is different from mine. My
conciousness wouldn't 'fit' into a leech's brain. So "I" wouldn't really be
a leech--some lower conciousness would.
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| 356 responses total. |
robh
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response 1 of 356:
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Aug 23 01:55 UTC 1995 |
Ah, but what if it *did* fit? What if you spent your next
lifetime as a leech, fully remembering your previous life
as a human? Imagine reminiscing about eating potato chips,
and then being disgusted at the thought that you ate something
that was covered in salt... >8) Of course, if you were a
murderer, being reincarnated as something that survives by
drinking blood might not be appropriate. Maybe a slug?
An aphid? A midge? (What do midges eat, anyway?)
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val
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response 2 of 356:
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Aug 23 13:01 UTC 1995 |
Most adult midges do not eat. As juveniles the probably eat algae or
detritus. <I'm pretty sure>
My ideas about reincarnation differ a bit. I beleive that being
reincarnated is not a punishment, its just another chance to enjoy
life.
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ajax
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response 3 of 356:
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Aug 23 13:59 UTC 1995 |
I thought reincarnation normally meant just that your soul would
be reborn in another body. The "better life if you've been good"
sounds like Christianity meets Buddhism! :-) Though I do recall a
tale (from "The Little Buddha," perhaps?) where a goat told a goat-
sacrificer that he was going to be reincarnated as a goat (it was a
much better tale in its longer form :-).
But taking your definition as a given, perhaps a slug wouldn't be
the worst thing you could be reincarnated as...instead you could be
reborn as a premature malnourished crack-addicted baby in the Bronx,
allowing you a fuller capacity in which to appreciate your suffering.
Or maybe as an elephant or whale born into captivity at a circus or
amusement park, with even bigger brains with which to contemplate
your misery.
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brighn
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response 4 of 356:
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Aug 23 16:43 UTC 1995 |
Not quite Christianity meets Buddhism, Rob, but #0 is mixing reincarnation
with karma.
Reincarnation is simply the belief that lifeforce does not die with the body
but inhabits multiple bodies (usually in series), sometimes for a finite
number of incarnations, sometimes infinite, depending on the belief system.
Karma is the belief that every act you do, positive or negative, creates an
imbalance in the universe which must be equilibriated by an equal or stronger
act of kind (depending again on the belief system) occurring *to* you.
Karma mixed with reincarnation, then, implies that if you've done many bad
things, and don't pay for it in this lifetime, some future incarnation will
have a pretty lousy existence. The issue is not whether or not you *know*
at the time you're being punished. The issue of punishment is, I think, a
fairly JudeoChristian one; in most other systems, Gods don't punish so much
as they seek to regain balance (this is especially true in Eastern systems).
So being a leech or a mosquito, where there is much negative energy heaped
upon you in the form of disgust and hatred by higher life forms, allows the
negative imbalance created by killing someone to be equilibriated.
*curtsey*
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orinoco
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response 5 of 356:
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Aug 23 17:55 UTC 1995 |
Another way of looking at it is this. (getting the conversation back on track)
What determines who you are? When somebody says to me on grex, "Oh, you must
be Daniel", what are they saying? Clearly, they are not saying that the text
they see on their screen is me. What they are saying is that the mind that
thought up the text is my mind.
Is someone who gets an artificial heart or an organ transplant the same
person? Yes, of course they are. The brain, on the other hand, cannot be
removed and replaced by an artificial substitute. My heart or my kidneys
do not determine who I am. It is my mind, and my brain that it resides
in, that determines my identity.
Part of your mind is your memories of past events. Therefore, "who you
are", your personality etc., are determined by your memories.
So, when your soul goes to a new body, it could either take your mind with
it, or not. If your mind, and therefore your memories, come with your
soul, then why can't people remember past lives? And if your mind does
not come with your soul, and instead is destroyed with your physical body,
then "you" are not really getting a new body, because an important part of
your identity is not going into that body.
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brighn
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response 6 of 356:
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Aug 23 22:14 UTC 1995 |
*is confused as to how his post was off track and orinoco's was on*
*shrugs*
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variable
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response 7 of 356:
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Aug 24 07:30 UTC 1995 |
As to the question of the consciousness fitting. Look back to
your original supposition, your soul, *not* your consciousness
would be placed in the new body. The commone mistake is to
equate the two.
Your consciousness (mind) simply acts as an interface through
which your soul (spiritual self) may interact with your body
(physical self). Your mind is to your soul as your modem is
to the internet. A higher level of consciousness, such as we
enjoy over a leech, allows us to manipulate our physical
selves. Should we use that power to create chaos (and take on
negative karma) it may be in the universes best interest to
place our soul in a recepticle with lower consciousness. This
would not only prevent us from creating more chaos, but also
to divest ourselves of that negative karma.
.
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eldrich
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response 8 of 356:
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Aug 24 16:33 UTC 1995 |
Okay, something to think about here:
If your soul is re-used over and over, being placed in a new body each time,
wouldn't overpopulation be impossible, because of the limited amount of souls?
One solution to this would be the spilting or reprodousing of souls. So, this
brings up a number of questions: can souls split in two? Do soul reprodouse?
Think....
<Bob ponders>
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ajax
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response 9 of 356:
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Aug 24 20:20 UTC 1995 |
Maybe there's just a redistribution of souls...like maybe
there's a quadrillion souls total, belonging to people and
mosquitos alike...as human population increases, we just
start using more mosquito souls, not even noticing that there
are a few less mosquitos in the world. In fact, if we are
inheriting mosquito souls, that could explain why society
is always getting more annoying!
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iggy
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response 10 of 356:
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Aug 24 21:02 UTC 1995 |
you could also have overlapping lives.
i dont believe that reincarnation necessarily HAS to go in a
straight linear timeframe.
perhaps your next life might jump several hundred years in the past?
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orinoco
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response 11 of 356:
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Aug 24 21:42 UTC 1995 |
and souls *COULD* reproduce too.
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kami
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response 12 of 356:
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Aug 25 03:24 UTC 1995 |
Wow, Orinoco, nice item you've sarted. Thanks.
Ajax, I believe that a fairly late form of Hindu/Buddhist thinking says that
certain forms are "higher" than others, with, for example, a chicken being
fairly low on the scale, a cow pretty high, and various castes of humans
going up from there to the highest attainable in a physical body. In that
belief system, karma does indeed influence the form in which one is
reborn. I repeat, it's a late and possibly corrupt belief system, not
representative of all Eastern reincarnation views, much less the totality
of those variants.
The way I read you goat story, a guy was about to slaughter a chicken
when it began crying. The guy asked why, and it said; "I was just remembering
last time, when I was the butcher." They talked about this, and it said
to go ahead and finish the job. The butcher again raised his ax, when the
chicken began laughing. The butcher asked why and the chicken said; "I was
remembering when you were the chicken." (I may have it entirely backwards...)
Good Brighn- I hadn't thought of the equilibrium aspect. THat makes sense.
Daniel, about your organs vs. brain issue; a friend of mine, rather younger
than I am, has a pacemaker. He said that since it was implanted, he does
not feel entirely human, and in doing some energy sensing with him, I did
notice that he feels rather disconnected from much of his body from the neck
down (we're working on that). Reactions vary, I suppose.
Variable, your analyis of karmic re-balancing was wonderful! Thanks.
Eldrich, I've never heard of splitting souls. If it happened, my sense is
that the bearers of each part would be tied together and feel incomplete.
Hm, such accounts have been described with twins, come to think of it.
As to reproducing- I don't know. My sense is that the "once born" have
"proto-souls" perhaps, and might find them maturing at a greater rate from
contact with a more "evolved" or experienced soul, but that new souls arise
as needed.
Ajax- the soul of a mosquito; what a lovely insult. <bweg>
Iggy, I've read of past life regression logs which seem to jump around a
bit, although I don't know but what we'd tend to organize such "memories"
linearly for comfort. Dunno. No real reason why it'd have to be linear.
Now, after all of that, *I* don't necessarily buy into the karma-meets-
rebirth notion just like so. I think there is much to be learned from
each form, and a person might *choose* (at some level) to spend time as
a group organism; part of a herd of cattle or school of fish, or as a lone
carnivore, as a handicapped kid who dies young or as the opposite gender
from last time, in order to correct an imbalance of spirit, to rest, or
whatever. I think real sociopathy has to come from somewhere- a deep
mistake or imbalance or some ill that was done to oneself getting passed
on down the line, and it might best be corrected by living a life as a
victim or as flotsam to be buffetted by the streams of life-energy. I
dont' know. But I don't think it's as simple as putting humans at the
top of the chain.
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amoco
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response 13 of 356:
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Aug 25 22:31 UTC 1995 |
Very nice item. You've gone and made thezone the action-packed fun conf it
never was but we can pretend it was. On a slighty different topic, I bade (is
that a word?) Dan to come to the very next item, which you can look at, or,
more over, pass over . Because it be c\kinda boring.
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jazz
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response 14 of 356:
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Aug 26 00:40 UTC 1995 |
I've struggled with the concept of reincarnation several times in the
last few months ... I've seen enough to feel that neither the Christian
notion of an afterlife in "another place", nor the athiest notion of soul
contained within six pounds of flesh in a quarter-inch thick wall, is
entirely correct. Though I've yet to see anything to support reincarnation,
either, I like the feel of the idea.
Orson Scott Card, in his _Xenocide_ trilogy, raised some interesting
theories (although partially pseudoscientific) about the nature of souls.
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cyberpnk
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response 15 of 356:
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Aug 26 17:42 UTC 1995 |
Generally, you're reborn into the same type of body you left. <cats are cats,
people are people, etc...>, and the One creates more souls all the time,
so there are people who have been around a few times and then there are
'new sould'.
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jazz
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response 16 of 356:
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Aug 27 03:39 UTC 1995 |
One idea that I've found that doesn't conflict with my (admittedly
layman) understanding of neurology and psychology nor my philosophy, is
that the soul is almost completely different than the human personlity and
person, perhaps even non-linear in time. That's an idea that I find somehow
beautiful.
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kami
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response 17 of 356:
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Aug 28 04:16 UTC 1995 |
yup.
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variable
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response 18 of 356:
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Aug 28 23:21 UTC 1995 |
Very good. Please note that all I am about to write is from my own
philosphy.
The soul is not subejct to time. The body is. The physical self
exists in the physical plane, which is organized by way of a number
of rules. Time is one such rule. Our mind percieves this rule and
translates it to the soul. The soul can relate future events and
past events back through the mind, but only if the mind has been
trained to let the flow back the other way. Otherwise the mind ends
up in a feedback loop with the physical self, ignoring the data from
the soul. This si the state of the commone man, and it is one
that we must help others recognize so that they may develope
their ability to communicate with the soul.
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kami
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response 19 of 356:
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Aug 29 01:58 UTC 1995 |
Shaival, I liked your statement right up until the last line. That is,
while I'd be glad of any such "help [to] recognize...", it doesn't
necessarily follow that everyone would welcome or even tolerate such
"help". It's so easy to drift over the line from willingness to share
in the journey to proceletyzing or patronizing or good ol' mind fuck.
I think we almost have to guard more against those trends than we have
to work at enlightening others. Yes?
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starwolf
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response 20 of 356:
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Aug 29 20:01 UTC 1995 |
I always assumed reincarnation into a *human* body....?
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variable
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response 21 of 356:
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Aug 30 18:41 UTC 1995 |
Kami,
Agreed. That last line should have read "we must make ourselves
available to help others recognize this state." Words have little power
if the action witnessed is contradictory.
It is foolish to attempt to offer a jump start to those who are resigned
to pushing their car home...
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orinoco
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response 22 of 356:
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Aug 30 19:41 UTC 1995 |
good point variable...
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kami
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response 23 of 356:
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Aug 31 02:46 UTC 1995 |
Nicely said. I like analogies.
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starwolf
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response 24 of 356:
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Sep 12 15:26 UTC 1995 |
I hate it when people say what I planned to say before I get the chance...oh
well...I'll live (maybe)
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