“Beyond-a-doubt certain” in this case (the ‘plan’ behind the Universe) means you’ve opted for a belief, a yes or a no…is there a creator? Yes(belief)…is there a creator? No (belief). Believing in what we can’t know seems to not only divide us but ultimately sets us at each other’s throats.
How do we know what we can and can’t know? One person might say “There is no way to know if rebirth is real” and another “I know rebirth is real, because I have experienced it.”
We often talk about facts here, but all of these ‘facts’ can be seen as (persistent) illusions.
We know rebirth is real because the self constantly arises.
Whether this is the constant repetition of confusion is another question.
I meant rebirth as survival of consciousness after physical death and rebirth as a new body.
Consciousness is available to all the new humans - are you referring to kooky stories about people who think that they are the reincarnation of dead personalities from the past?
I don’t think this really concerns most of humanity - although I do enjoy those kind of stories.
Yes those kooky stories! I always felt they were just that: fairy tales. The eastern spin on hell and heaven. But, then, unexpectedly, surprisingly, something someone said, a Buddhist, opened me to the possibility of the survival of consciousness beyond death.
Do you mean that there is no change at the death of the body? The confusion of the self as a discreet/distinct entity, to whom awareness/consciousness belongs, continues?
Is this a good thing? Does it help with regards to understanding/freedom from the self/known?
And (bonus skeptical question) is there any way to determine that there was continuation of the personality during the absence of a body, rather than say : post hoc rationalisation by a functioning brain (eg. filling in the gaps)?
Just the notion that some form of the consciousness ‘associated with’ a particular person survives.
Is this a good thing? Does it help with regards to understanding/freedom from the self/known?
Above my pay grade! Maybe there’s an AI that knows the answer?
And (bonus skeptical question) is there any way to determine that there was continuation of the personality during the absence of a body, rather than say : post hoc rationalisation by a functioning brain (eg. filling in the gaps)?
What do I get if I win: an all-expenses-paid trip to Kiev?
Again, way beyond my expertise. Perhaps there’s a tulku who can help?
Mr. Skeptic here again : Damage to certain areas of the brain (so much less of an incident than cessation of the whole body) can completely change someone’s whole personality, beliefs, memories.
So if the Dalaï lama becomes a WWE wrestling star due to brain trauma, whose consciousness continues after death?
You think there might be a kind of ‘essence’ of consciousness, a constellation of fundamental qualities and habits and memories, wheels within wheels that continue wheeling après death?
I don’t know what you mean, I don’t know how habits and memories function without a brain.
I’d say that everything dependant on this brain stops happening when the brain stops making them happen.
Are you open to the possibility that the mind is not wholly dependent on the brain?
I will consider evidence and arguments for whatever.
However, at the moment everything indicates that our thought, imagination, memory, will, perception, pain, belief, desire, emotion etc is dependant on the brain. Is this what you mean by “mind”? (unfortunately it is the mind that gives us the impression that reality is as it seems to be ie. catch 22)
If I was forced to take a stand as a believist of some sort, I’d go with “dependantism” : everything is dependant on everything else.
Is there any way in which a thought-feeling-belief-image-emotion continues to exist when the thinker-feeler-believer-imaginer-emoter has flown the coop? How about tendencies, conditioning, mental energies?
We can say that society and the world and the beliefs continue to exist though the people that made them up have died. I remember my dead relatives.
We can also say that the feeler never was, only the feelings. Only the tendancies never a tendancer.
Might there exist vortexes of consciousness-energy, like little tornadoes or whirlpools, that keep swirling around after their ‘host,’ a brain-mind-body, is no more? Kind of like tulpas.
I don’t know - One guy told me that he was just chillin’ out in samadhi on the porch one evening when this figure appeared before him, a kind of memory of the place, at first dressed in prehistoric tarzan type clothes, then medieval gear, then renaissance etc - even weirder stuff happening on the outskirts of Alpha centauri I reckon.
But whats your point? Are we just shootin’ the breeze?
Shootin’ the breeze is pretty much always my point! I share and see if it resonates with anyone. If it does I try to build something with the resonee. If not, I change the subject or take my leave.
Is the self I-dentity a tulpa? Or perhaps an egregore, a tulpa brought into existence by the world.
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Jung:
“We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves. We blame everything under the sun for our own mistakes and shortcomings. All else are at fault but never we ourselves. The man who will shoulder his own responsibilities, take the blame for his own error, is a man indeed. … Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow then he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in removing an infinitesimal part at least of the unsolved social problems of our day.”
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