Reincarnation is Now a Scientifically Acceptable Phenomenon

last SG · 2010-04-11T02:21:17+00:00

b4 anything, I respect Buddhism and its peace-loving nature.just one question, there seems to be many references/quotations made of several scholars supporti...

wisdomeye SG

I would rather say, I'm not sure. Maybe there's reincarnation, but it might not be that simple as we think it is. The most interesting part is that, there is no one yet to come back from death to tell us exactly what truth is.

In Tibet, people called Delog have come back. They are usually realised people. They die for a few days and they go thru the pure-realms, bardo, hells etc. They come back and teach on karma etc. However, now the question is would u believe their accounts... haha

sinweiy SG

I would like to add something...

Buddhism incidentally does not believe in an eternal self unlike Hinduism and most other religions. It talks about rebirth, but not in the Hindu way.

Indeed. Buddhism also stress about Not Self, which May sort of contradict reincarnation.

Buddhism is also about non-attachment; 法无定法。You cannot say a concept of reincarnation is right, yet u cannot say it's not right. You cannot say a concept of not self is right, yet u cannot say it's not right. Sigh, it's difficult to explain. There's nothing to say. lol....Believe or don't believe is both 谜信(superstition). Yes, don't believe is also 谜信. Only when you sever the 谜, then your 信 believe is Real. :)

-StarDust- SG

Fortunately, you don't have to come back from death to tell others.

Just meditate and you will remember your past lives. Many did.

In fact, you have already 'come back from death' countless times.

Many people saw UFO,Aliens,Ghosts,Bigfoot and loch ness monster ... ... Are they all real ?

Meditation can produce illusions who knows what the practitioner are expiriencing?

You can have many reports of one incident, but It does not prove much.

Plus If someone reads too many buddhism books they might get brainwash and they will believe in rebirth.

geis SG

Indeed. Buddhism also stress about Not Self, which May sort of contradict reincarnation.

indeed :)

as understanding of Buddhism progress, one will open up to the apparent paradoxes. one side of the coin stems from thinking, the other side stems from 'non-thinking'.

your 'sigh' is deeply felt. this is not a sigh of just helplessness, its a sigh of compassion in hope of spreading the dhamma to readers here.

geis SG

Many people saw UFO,Aliens,Ghosts,Bigfoot and loch ness monster ... ... Are they all real ?

Meditation can produce illusions who knows what the practitioner are expiriencing?

You can have many reports of one incident, but It does not prove much.

Plus If someone reads too many buddhism books they might get brainwash and they will believe in rebirth.

hi StarDust

good to see ur opinions here.

without direct experience, most people will come up with the same speculations. its the thinking mind at work. at the same time hope u do realize that the only way to get the answers to your questions is to put these speculations into test by action. only then will one's opinions and queries carry weight.

just as one who wants to really know how milk taste like will have to actually drink some milk, and not by just speculating. also in order to be able to describe and explain the taste of milk correctly, one also must have at least tasted the milk.

-StarDust- SG

hi StarDust

good to see ur opinions here.

Hello thanks for praising me.

Yes most people do not believe. Lastime when there's a funeral near my sec school, people would say there's no karma why are monks chanting sutras for the deceased.

Rebirth cannot be proven, I shall not waste time debating on this.

wisdomeye SG

Indeed. Buddhism also stress about Not Self, which May sort of contradict reincarnation.

Sinweiy,

I think you may be having a bit of conflict between relative truth and ultimate truth. In ultimate truth, there is no time either so i think it is kind of not possible to make comparison between relative and ultimate truth. Reincarnation exists in relative truth. Dun mix up.

Lama Tsongkhapa did say though, once one reaches accurate realisation, ultimate truth (emptiness) and relative truth (interdependent origination) are merged, not conflicting in that realisation.

Any philosophy people out there, pls correct me if i'm wrong.

An Eternal Now SG

Hello thanks for praising me.

Yes most people do not believe. Lastime when there's a funeral near my sec school, people would say there's no karma why are monks chanting sutras for the deceased.

Rebirth cannot be proven, I shall not waste time debating on this.

Rebirth has already been proven. You refuse to accept it due to your close mindedness.

It all comes down to narrow mindedness. There can be countless (and there are indeed, a LOT) of evidence and yet you will not accept it due to your narrow mindedness. But actually all it takes is just 1 piece of evidence to proof a thing: this is good science.

As Ajahn Brahmavamso puts it:

If you had just one person who had been confirmed as medically dead who could describe to the doctors, as soon as they were revived, what had been said, and done during that period of death, wouldn't that be pretty convincing? When I was doing elementary particle physics there was a theory that required for its proof the existence of what was called the 'W' particle. At the cyclotron in Geneva, CERN funded a huge research project, smashing atoms together with an enormous particle accelerator, to try and find one of these 'W' particles. They spent literally hundreds of millions of pounds on this project. They found one, just one 'W' particle. I don't think they have found another since. But once they found one 'W' particle, the researchers involved in that project were given Nobel prizes for physics. They had proved the theory by just finding the one 'W' particle. That's good science. Just one is enough to prove the theory.

When it comes to things we don't like to believe, they call just one experience, one clear factual undeniable experience, an anomaly. Anomaly is a word in science for disconcerting evidence that we can put in the back of a filing cabinet and not look at again, because it's threatens our worldview. It undermines what we want to believe. It is threatening to our dogma. However, an essential part of the scientific method is that theories have to be abandoned in favour of the evidence, in respect of the facts. The point is that the evidence for a mind independent of the brain is there. But once we admit that evidence, and follow the scientific method, then many cherished theories, what we call 'sacred cows' will have to be abandoned.

An Eternal Now SG

Many people saw UFO,Aliens,Ghosts,Bigfoot and loch ness monster ... ... Are they all real ?

Meditation can produce illusions who knows what the practitioner are expiriencing?

You can have many reports of one incident, but It does not prove much.

Plus If someone reads too many buddhism books they might get brainwash and they will believe in rebirth.

Such reports can be traced and proven. Go search Dr Ian Stevensons.

http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/qanda05.htm

Not only is there scientific evidence to support the Buddhist belief in rebirth, it is the only after-life theory that has any evidence to support it. There is not a scrap of evidence to prove the existence of heaven and of course evidence of annihilation at death must be lacking. But during the last 30 years parapsychologists have been studying reports that some people have vivid memories of their former lives. For example, in England, a 5 year-old girl said she could remember her "other mother and father" and she talked vividly about what sounded like the events in the life of another person. Parapsychologists were called in and they asked her hundreds of questions to which she gave answers. She spoke of living in a particular village in what appeared to be Spain, she gave the name of the village, the name of the street she lived in, her neighbors' names and details about her everyday life there. She also fearfully spoke of how she had been struck by a car and died of her injuries two days later. When these details were checked, they were found to be accurate. There was a village in Spain with the name the five-year-old girl had given. There was a house of the type she had described in the street she had named. What is more, it was found that a 23-year-old woman living in the house had been killed in a car accident five years before. Now how is it possible for a five year- old girl living in England and who had never been to Spain to know all these details? And of course, this is not the only case of this type. Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia's Department of Psychology has described dozens of cases of this type in his books. He is an accredited scientist whose 25 year study of people who remember former lives is very strong evidence for the Buddhist teaching of rebirth.

An Eternal Now SG

Oh yes my Taiwanese teacher too. He had near death experience 4 times in this life and talked about his experience.

An Eternal Now SG

Indeed. Buddhism also stress about Not Self, which May sort of contradict reincarnation.

http://awakeningtoreality.blogspot.com/2010/02/emptiness-and-middle-way.html

Rizenfenix

On rebirth:

http://newbuddhist.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4215

Continuing consciousness after death is, in most religions, a matter of revealed truth. In Buddhism, the evidence comes from the contemplative experience of people who are certainly not ordinary but who are sufficiently numerous that what they say about it is worth taking seriously into account. Indeed, such testimonies begin with those of the Buddha himself.

Nevertheless, it’s important to understand that what’s called reincarnation in Buddhism has nothing to do with the transmigration of some ‘entity’ or other. It’s not a process of metempsychosis because there is no ‘soul’. As long as one thinks in terms of entities rather than function and continuity, it’s impossible to understand the Buddhist concept of rebirth. As it’s said, ‘There is no thread passing through the beads of the necklace of rebirths.’ Over successive rebirths, what is maintained is not the identity of a ‘person’, but the conditioning of a stream of consciousness.

Additionally, Buddhism speaks of successive states of existence; in other words, everything isn’t limited to just one lifetime. We’ve experienced other states of existence before our birth in this lifetime, and we’ll experience others after death. This, of course, leads to a fundamental question: is there a nonmaterial consciousness distinct from the body? It would be virtually impossible to talk about reincarnation without first examining the relationship between body and mind. Moreover, since Buddhism denies the existence of any self that could be seen as a separate entity capable of transmigrating from one existence to another by passing from one body to another, one might well wonder what it could be that links those successive states of existence together.

One could possibly understand it better by considering it as a continuum, a stream of consciousness that continues to flow without there being any fixed or autonomous entity running through it… Rather it could be likened to a river without a boat, or to a lamp flame that lights a second lamp, which in-turn lights a third lamp, and so on and so forth; the flame at the end of the process is neither the same flame as at the outset, nor a completely different one…

geis SG

Sinweiy,

Lama Tsongkhapa did say though, once one reaches accurate realisation, ultimate truth (emptiness) and relative truth (interdependent origination) are merged, not conflicting in that realisation.

Any philosophy people out there, pls correct me if i'm wrong.

hmm how i read sinweiy's post is that sinweiy is pointing out the difficulty in reconciling conventional and ultimate knowledge.

dunno if that's what is meant..

wisdomeye SG

Oh yes my Taiwanese teacher too. He had near death experience 4 times in this life and talked about his experience.

the realised ones can go all six realms at free will... piece of cake for them. And also, i heard Khunu lama can go to bardo in and out at free will, not really need to die. But delog have to die... their one purpose is to teach about the sufferings of samsara and karma so they go thru all six realms. When they come back and teach, their teaching is backed by actual experience, for eg, when they talk about the hell or preta realms, they will really cry and feel great sadness. and they also carry messages back from the dead ones in hell who request their live relatives to commission/perform prayers to save them from lower realms. due to the details in the message, they have great credibility, cos no-one else but the deceased cld know such details.

wisdomeye SG

hmm how i read sinweiy's post is that sinweiy is pointing out the difficulty in reconciling conventional and ultimate knowledge.

dunno if that's what is meant..

yes geis, that's what i mean, dun try to reconcile. at this point, keep them apart during analysis. or else juz confusion.

geis SG

yes geis, that's what i mean, dun try to reconcile. at this point, keep them apart during analysis. or else juz confusion.

ah ok :)

geis SG

ah ok :)

maybe anyone can add on.

from experience its perhaps a necessary route that one will attempt to reconcile, leading to the difficulties in doing so. then this will lead to one trying to apply 'ultimate knowledge' into our conventional lives. again forming some feeling of 'carefreeness' but at the same time also some confusions.

then with deeper understandings, there's no longer any need to merge, reconcile or separate them any more.

just 1 cents worth from my limited experience.

wisdomeye SG

maybe anyone can add on.

from experience its perhaps a necessary route that one will attempt to reconcile, leading to the difficulties in doing so. then this will lead to one trying to apply 'ultimate knowledge' into our conventional lives. again forming some of 'carefreeness' but at the same time also some confusions.

then with deeper understandings, there's no longer any need to merge, reconcile or separate them any more.

just 1 cents worth from my limited experience.

hi geis, i agree with you. I'm not referring to what u r referring. I'm talking about analysis... like for eg. whether reincarnation exists or not...

IMO, if no realisation of emptiness, can't be carefree, or fearless. head-level understanding is just pushing to be, but not really. When death comes, still like ordinary person...

An Eternal Now SG

Sorry just realised I quoted wrongly, my post by Rizenfenix was aimed at sinweiy's post. Updated.

sinweiy SG

hmm how i read sinweiy's post is that sinweiy is pointing out the difficulty in reconciling conventional and ultimate knowledge.

dunno if that's what is meant..

yes, you read it right. nobody is mixing (non not mixing) anything. it just depend on the angle one's perspective.

like the analogy of some blinds people touching an elephant. the one touching the truck would differ from the one touching the ear etc. but actually there's one elephant.

Nay, not conflicting to me. :)

didn't say Reincarnation does not exist either.

Lama Tsongkhapa did say though, once one reaches accurate realisation, ultimate truth (emptiness) and relative truth (interdependent origination) are merged, not conflicting in that realisation.

'merged' as in mixed together, but u said don't mix? :)

no la, that's what i meant when one sever the 谜 , you get the accurate realisation.

i just think if i fix my mind on one concept, then i had fallen away from the actual Dharma. then if i said i enter neither thinking nor not thinking, then i'm yet again fallen away from the actual dharma...if know what i mean...

All and all, i'm refering to Middle way that's all. And That's Mahayana. Mahayana often say one thing and the second sentence that follow would sort of contradict the first sentence. :)

An Eternal Now SG

Thats very interesting.. thanks for sharing.

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