A while ago, my mom was reading a mystery, which pointed out it one part that
appearantly Hindu's believe a person only has 13 days of rest before
Reincarnation.  Since this "knowledge" was gained from a fictious work, can
anyone affirm or deny this?

17 responses total.

Sounds like a pure fiction, or at best a limited belief. The appropriate
article in the Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience goes into some
detail, but doesn't mention a specific time. Most of us who believe in it
don't like to be too specific about details like this. The Encyclopedia says
it appears in the Upanishads and the Gita, but my copies don't have indexes
so I didn't locate these references.

Actually, I did have a Buddhist friend in college who mentioned
that it was "about two weeks" between one's death and rebirth,
according to his beliefs.  The author may have been getting
his religions confused.  >8)

Interesting.

i've heard 49 days spent in the "bardo" before rebirth.

        THe rent's really hellish, too, because they have a monopoly.

i would NEVER play monopoly in the bardo..
chutes & ladders is more appropriate.

Hmm, what I'd read suggested that the time between death and rebirth was
variable, but that the soul chooses a child of about two weeks gestation...
Then again, it was on a web page and I have no idea how reliable the
information was.

When I visited my mother and father in the Summerland a few months ago, they
were enjoying themselves together, dancing in 1920s style and probably doing
all the things they never had time for when they were raising a family. It'd
been three or four years since the time they died, which meant that they'd
been there a good deal more than a couple of weeks. It seems to me, from what
little I know of faerie lore, that time in the other worlds is completely
different from mundane time. You've entered another dimension, and you can't
count the time as we do here on earth.

Speaking of such things, this might not be the right place to ask but, could
someone please describe the Summerland?  This is partially for mundane
knowledge and partly because I want to mold the Multiverse for when I am
running AD&D's PlaneScape.

        The degree ov overlap between AD&D and religious belief in certain of
thee pagan circles has always frightened me.  TOPY is much saner. :)

I think when they designed PlaneScape religious overlap was extactly what they
were looking for, and for the most part, did a good job on.  After all, when
mortals are walking around in afterlives, you want to make it as true to the
legends as possible right?  (and in PlaneScape's PC manner, trying as hard
as possible not to offend anyone).  What is TOPY?

        It is the task of the dis-incarnate souls to dine the length of their
time 'away' from the world of flesh. By the way, 'Souls' may incarnate in the
past (as viewed from the 'present') as well as in the 'future'.

Interseting, but I'm not quite sure it answers my question.

I find the idea of a fixed period of time between incarnations to be amusing --
a form of live-ism that we, the living, find comforting. That said, the Tibn
Book of the Dead has the most 'authoratative' claim to setting a fixed period
of time.

   there's a fair bit of difference among traditions.  some say it's
around two weeks, some say it's a hundred days.  my personal belief,
reinforced by some work i've done in tracing my own past lives, is that
it's as long as your soul needs to recover from whatever happened when
it was last carnate.  the break i seem to have taken between one
past life which was particularly traumatic and the next, which was less
so, was about 1500 terrestrial years.

Sounds about right...

This may be the best example of YMMV...in this soul's case it's about 15 years.

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