Why do so many people believe in re-incarnation on this forum?

[Consilience]

1 hour ago, lmfao said:

The re-incarnation belief system is about the self being preserved in a soul and leaving the body. I don't have a reason to believe it and part of this dialogue somewhat mirrors a theist asking an atheist to prove a negative  

It actually isn't about a self being preserved in a soul and leaving the body. It's about the actuality of one's direct experience, which is that experience rises and falls moment by moment by moment. Moreover, this rising and falling exists independently of the physical body which can be verified by 1) observing there is no physical body through extremely high levels of mindfulness, 2) observing the arising and passing of experiences in dream states where there is no body, or 3) taking psychedelics in which all experiential evidence of the body ceases. In any event, experience arises independently of the physical body and there is no separate self.

Reincarnation, therefore, would simply be the continuation of this arising and falling of experience, moment by moment, within a seemingly new set of conditions. Yet even the distinction between sets of conditions that would give rise to the illusion of one self dying and a new self being born through the continuation of some kind of "soul" is itself empty.  

The idea that incarnation is a one and done deal is actually more aligned to the false perception of a separate self, however this relationship is so deeply hard-wired, most will not see it, even those that buy into the idea of reincarnation or those who have seen the illusion of self. 

Edited January 4, 2022 by Consilience

[Forza21]

Trust only in your direct experience. Everything else is just a mental story.  If you focus on "being" hard enough, you will see that "non-existence" has never been the case. You are always present. You are always there. You have never experienced death, birth, or non-existence. It's just a mental story, nothing else.

[Gesundheit2]

15 hours ago, Consilience said:

It actually isn't about a self being preserved in a soul and leaving the body. It's about the actuality of one's direct experience, which is that experience rises and falls moment by moment by moment. Moreover, this rising and falling exists independently of the physical body which can be verified by 1) observing there is no physical body through extremely high levels of mindfulness, 2) observing the arising and passing of experiences in dream states where there is no body, or 3) taking psychedelics in which all experiential evidence of the body ceases. In any event, experience arises independently of the physical body and there is no separate self.

Reincarnation, therefore, would simply be the continuation of this arising and falling of experience, moment by moment, within a seemingly new set of conditions. Yet even the distinction between sets of conditions that would give rise to the illusion of one self dying and a new self being born through the continuation of some kind of "soul" is itself empty.  

The idea that incarnation is a one and done deal is actually more aligned to the false perception of a separate self, however this relationship is so deeply hard-wired, most will not see it, even those that buy into the idea of reincarnation or those who have seen the illusion of self. 

Reminds me of when Leo claimed that telepathy is real while tripping.

Alright then, so prove it, demonstrate telepathy. Read my mind and tell me what I'm thinking in real time.

Oh, well, non-duality, everything is connected, I am you you are me, etc.

[sholomar]

My grandmother was an atheist when she had her near death experience.  She was told it was not her time, she had 4 children to raise (my mother and aunts, uncle)

I remain skeptical but with an open mind. I've read the journey of souls series of books. I mean if you believe in universal consciousness, oneness, non duality, and don't just believe that a trip with DMT is due to chemical reactions in the brain, it's not a logical next step to then believe in the soul and the concept of reincarnation.

Why would a DMT trip be any more valid as far as the truths you would acquire?

Edited January 5, 2022 by sholomar

[Consilience]

4 hours ago, sholomar said:

Why would a DMT trip be any more valid as far as the truths you would acquire?

It’s not the state itself that is anymore valid or not valid. It’s the obliteration of the ego mind’s interpretative mechanisms that allows one to see direct experience in a new way. Yes the content of direct experience is radically augmented on DMT, but specifically, one’s relationship to direct experience also shifts. Such a radical shift in one’s relationship to experience creates the possibility of insight into the nature of experience typically unavailable due to the highly biased, conceptually marred and tangled mess that is the ego mind.
 

From this new space of direct observation (rather than biased ego mind interpretation), whether from a high dose DMT trip or rigorous meditation, insights into the nature of life or death can arise. One may see that nothing is actually dying upon physical death and just as profound, nothing was actually born to give rise to “life.”
 

“Life” is nothing but an enormous, interconnected flow of experience; to believe this flow is somehow contingent upon the physical body is a misperception of direct experience originating from the faulty perceptions of ego mind. This ego mind being highly biased due to the fear of death and pain, addictions to pleasure of various kinds, and essentially addicted to the web of conceptual activity giving rise to suffering. The extent of this conceptual bias is unimaginably enormous, often not taken seriously until one has it ripped away either through psychedelics or high level meditation. 
 

Once the biased conceptual activity is released, one begins to observe direct experience more objectively. Through such objectivity, the actuality of what models of reincarnation point towards become increasingly clear. To reiterate, this objective observation is not about changing the content of one’s experience (“how is a DMT trip more valid?” is a misunderstanding of the true value of DMT trips), but the context in which experience is experienced. Such recontextualizations provided by DMT are completely independent of the contents of DMT. Until such objective observation of direct experience is seen, it is unlikely reincarnation will make sense, even conceptually. The real treasure, as it has always been, is the experience, or the truth. 

Edited January 5, 2022 by Consilience

[Consilience]

5 hours ago, Gesundheit2 said:

Reminds me of when Leo claimed that telepathy is real while tripping.

Alright then, so prove it, demonstrate telepathy. Read my mind and tell me what I'm thinking in real time.

Oh, well, non-duality, everything is connected, I am you you are me, etc.

Tbh man Im not sure what this has to do with my post. 

I wonder if you’d believe me if I said Ive experienced telepathy on an absurdly high dose mushroom trip…  

[roopepa]

5 hours ago, Gesundheit2 said:

Alright then, so prove it, demonstrate telepathy. Read my mind and tell me what I'm thinking in real time.

Take a moment to think if you would actually want that. Think about how radically it would change your life and thought patterns if Consilience would actually demonstrate that here and now.

What comes to telepathy, reincarnation and such... It's a total game changer. When you actually remember your past life, just as you remember your childhood right now, and when you actually glimpse psychic phenomena directly, beyond any doubt, it's not a joke. It's real. Not some debate subject on the internet.

[Breakingthewall]

23 hours ago, Bazooka Jesus said:

Death is nothing other than change of form btw, so you are actually dying and being reborn every single nanosecond of your (apparent) life.

Exactly. how important is reincarnation? One of the most important things that you realize with spirituality is to live in the present, to realize that the past is dead, it does not really exist. You are what you are today, nothing more, nothing less. what you were yesterday is imaginary, ego, what you were in your childhood, even more so. what were you in another life? delirium. only now you are, only now exists

Edited January 5, 2022 by Breakingthewall

[Carl-Richard]

On 4.1.2022 at 8:43 PM, Bazooka Jesus said:

Death is nothing other than change of form btw, so you are actually dying and being reborn every single nanosecond of your (apparent) life.

The thing that is reincarnated is the illusory identification with form (self-identity). You reincarnate every time you think a self-referential thought. That is why enlightenment is the end of reincarnation. You realize that both past life memories and current life memories are illusory.

[Khan 0]

7 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

You realize that both past life memories and current life memories are illusory.

Definitely. Including so called now life is illusory too. 

[Bazooka Jesus]

@Breakingthewall

Very true.

17 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

The thing that is reincarnated is the illusory identification with form (self-identity). You reincarnate every time you think a self-referential thought. That is why enlightenment is the end of reincarnation. You realize that both past life memories and current life memories are illusory.

Wow, that is a great way to put it. Thanks for the illumination! 

[Gesundheit2]

2 hours ago, Consilience said:

I wonder if you’d believe me if I said Ive experienced telepathy on an absurdly high dose mushroom trip…  

Why would I not believe you? I just don't think what you experienced was properly interpreted.

But of course, non-duality, everything is connected, I am you you are me, etc.

[VeganAwake]

The persistent illusion of self wants to live forever.

And the cosmic joke is there already isn't anyone alive to go on reincarnating.

[RedLine]

On 4/1/2022 at 10:50 PM, Forza21 said:

Trust only in your direct experience. Everything else is just a mental story.  If you focus on "being" hard enough, you will see that "non-existence" has never been the case. You are always present. You are always there. You have never experienced death, birth, or non-existence. It's just a mental story, nothing else.

That is a falacy that I see a lot here.

You trust you direct experience, ok, but once you "process" your direct experience you are already creating a mental story. And that is created using language and social conditioning, language is socially constructed. The present itself is a mental story. The idea of "you have never experienced death, birth, or non-existence" is a mental story. The idea of mental story vs non mental story is a mental story itself. You see?

 

All this spiritual ideas are not direct experience but a new ideology that comes to replace your previous materialistic ideology or whatever. You don´t see a enlighten buddist master speak like that at least it is for practice teaching reasons, their worldview is like a regular person, direct experience does not change that, just spiritual ideas does. For example Leigh Brasington is a buddhist master that has get the higher achievements in spiritually and his worldview is basically what they call in this forum scientific materialism, they will tell you he did not take enought 5 meo dmt, for me that is bs.

Edited January 6, 2022 by RedLine

[lmfao]

@RedLine It's not so much a fallacy as it is moot and overwhelming in degree of being stated. I'm more attuned to the matrix of spirituality and being averse to that than I am attuned to the particulars of what a person is saying. Maybe in isolation I can agree with what a person is saying, but in context I think it's retarded and needs to be avoided. (I don't know or care about Forza in this instance, this is commentary on the pattern)

[Guru Peter Jordanson]

This is a good question.

Somehow someday this belief in reincarnation entered my mind without me even noticing that it happened. Never did i even contemplate and just uncousciously accepted it as a fact. 

There is this occult idea that when we hear a Truth then this will glue itself into ones own mind until it is accepted. 

At some level it might be a Truth but we are still all one in the end.

[lmfao]

Here's a thought experiment for you guys on death. Consider Cryonics.
Have you ever seen in science fiction movies how humans will freeze themselves and then unfreeze to come back to life? [It's not possible in real life rn, suppose it was.]

Freeze someone for 100 years, then they're resurrected. Change the number to 1 million years. How many years would the person have to be frozen for you to say "they were dead", given that we can revive them?
(Number-lines are infinite, so you can increase the number without end) 

Death/Life has been treated pretty binarily by us, and we don't have a concept to speak effectively on this distinction, where someone can flip between the two. 


Another thing this thought experiment might do is question the sort of fallacious thinking that will lead someone to believe in re-incarnation imo. Because here, we can flip-flap the line of death (by scientific advancement).

If someone can be frozen for 1 trillion years and then revived, are you going to believe that only that person wasn't re-incarnated during their death period? Does their soul magically leave their body and then return 1 trillion years later?

Will you say that the universe magically knows they aren't dead according to our arbitrary definitions, and will re-incarnate the "actually dead" people but not the frozen people? No, such a line of defence is patently absurd just from looking at it. Frozen people are just as dead as anyone else as far as the universe is concerned. 


Was the frozen person dead at all? Being frozen is the same as deep sleeping here. Whether you make the literal time 1 or 1 trillion, it's the same interval to someone dead/unconscious/asleep. The interval won't exist because they have no time. After we die, will we find ourselves in another dream in 0 time?

If I start another dream, but then this old dead body gets resuscitated, it's kind of a mind fuck. The only conclusion to such a thing would be is that it's not "me" in any sense I know who will dream again.

Edited February 14, 2022 by lmfao

[Carl-Richard]

@lmfao Nobody reincarnates. What is thought of as reincarnation is when memories stretch beyond the current physical body. You are not your body or your memories, thus you didn't reincarnate into this body or any past bodies.

[lmfao]

@Carl-Richard The thought experiment does a much better job though at pushing an openness towards death than what you've wrote 

6 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

What is thought of as reincarnation is when memories stretch beyond the current physical body.

Yeah. Sounds like trivial accounting work (being done) for an explanation, that we tell the people obsessed with re-incarnation and spiritual shit about global consciousness 

[actuallyenlightened]

I remember ~6 past lives and the concept of reincarnation is quite useful. There appears to be continuity in the experiences that I have and lessons learned. It also integrates well with spiral dynamics

That being said I'd still say that it's no more real than physicality itself