Do you believe in past lives

[StarStruck]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDiThavP3No

 

I believe the body dies, but the soul reincarnates.

[PurpleTree]

I‘m mostly agnostic about it 

[RickyFitts]

I tend to believe it due to the testimony of people whose opinions I respect (the Buddha and Adyashanti both saw their past lives when they became enlightened, for example), and also because of what I've been told about my own past lives by people I consider credible.

But it's only a belief, so I don't see much value in dwelling on it. I'm really only interested in what I know for sure.

[itsadistraction]

5 hours ago, StarStruck said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDiThavP3No

 

I believe the body dies, but the soul reincarnates.

Nevermind past lives, according to Leo, you were never even born into this one. 

[Merkabah Star]

Yes, of course. 

what we have done in our past lives in terms of “spiritual” work does impact just how easily we can awake in this one. 

[Sir Oberon]

The way I see it.  I am here right now.

[StarStruck]

5 hours ago, itsadistraction said:

Nevermind past lives, according to Leo, you were never even born into this one. 

That is the highest paradigm, but paradigms can be nested

[Javfly33]

no

I thought this work wasn't about believing 

Edited October 26, 2023 by Javfly33

[An young being]

13 hours ago, StarStruck said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDiThavP3No

 

I believe the body dies, but the soul reincarnates.

As long as we don't remember them, it doesn't matter personally. But as a belief though, it matters a lot.

[nistake]

Just found this today. I think it pretty much sums it up:

Quote

When you reflect that this world is filled with death, and that your body, too, has to be relinquished, God’s plan seems very cruel. You can’t imagine that He is merciful. But when you look at the process of death with they eye of wisdom, you see that after all it is merely a thought of God passing through a nightmare of change into blissful freedom in Him again. Saint and sinner alike are given freedom at death, to a greater or lesser degree according to merit. In the Lord’s dream astral world- the land to which souls go at death- they enjoy a freedom such as they never knew during their earthly life. So don’t pity the person who is passing through the delusion of death, for in a little while he will be free. Once he gets out of that delusion, he sees that death was not so bad at all. He realises his mortality was only a dream and rejoices that now no fire can burn him, no water can drown him; he is free and safe.

But such is the delusion of desire for material things that, after a time of freedom from the body, he wants to come back to earth. Even though the soul knows that the body is subject to disease and troubles, these delusive desires for earthly experience veil that knowledge and deceive his consciousness. So after a karmically predetermined time in the astral world, he is reborn on earth. When death comes, he goes forth once more from the gross dream of this earth experience to the finer dream of the astral plane, only to be drawn back to this world. And again and again he returns, until he is no longer desirous of an earthly life.

Birth and death are doors through which you pass from one dream to another. All you are doing is going back and forth between this gross dream world and the finer astral dream world; between these two chambers of dream nightmares and dream pleasures. Thus reincarnation is a series of dreams within a dream; man’s individual dreams within the greater dream of God.

Someone is born on earth in France as a powerful king, rules for a time, then dies. He may be reborn in India, and travel in a bullock cart into the forest to meditate. He may next find rebirth in America as a successful businessman; and when he dreams death again, reincarnate perhaps in Tibet, as a devotee of Buddha and spend his life in a lamasery. Therefore hate none and be attached to no nationality, for sometimes you are a Hindu, sometimes a Frenchman, sometimes an Englishman, or an American, or a Tibetan. What is the difference? Each existence is a dream within a dream, is it not? Will you continue helplessly to go through all these delusions and the difficulties they create? Each nation thinks its ways are justified, its customs the best. Are you going to go on with this delusion? I am not. For unless wisdom is supreme, reincarnation is a very troublesome experience. One should avoid forced reincarnation because it is a painful continuation of this dream delusion. For how long will you pass through these changes called life and death? Until you realise fully the dream nature of creation, and awaken in God from its nightmares.

 

[itsadistraction]

What direction is the past? can you point to it?

[Kuba Powiertowski]

@itsadistraction don't think linear, think cyclical. From high entropy to low entropy to high entropy to low entropy etc. For pure entertaining of knowing The (No)Self better in infinite ways The (No)Self can imagine. Pretty simple, yet never to be known completely due to Its infinite nature...🤷

[Breakingthewall]

I would say no, but I say this from my current level of understanding, which may vary, because is extremely low, same that the understanding of any human.

I think that not because you are not having this experience/life, and then you could have others, but because you are this life. When this life ends, you end, so you have never had other lives nor will you have others.

What remains is the vastness of existence, and that is not you. It would be logical to think that the limitless vastness would begin another cycle within the eternal cycles of the cosmos, but that is something it has already done infinite times, and this is somehow equivalent to never having done it. The infinite erases the finite, makes it so insignificant that it is nothing. Divide you by infinity and the result is zero

[at_anchor]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

I think that not because you are not having this experience/life, and then you could have others, but because you are this life. When this life ends, you end, so you have never had other lives nor will you have others.

What remains is the vastness of existence, and that is not you. It would be logical to think that the limitless vastness would begin another cycle within the eternal cycles of the cosmos, but that is something it has already done infinite times, and this is somehow equivalent to never having done it. The infinite erases the finite, makes it so insignificant that it is nothing. Divide you by infinity and the result is zero

I agree 

[Kuba Powiertowski]

Once a full openess is restored, experience of existence is even multi dimensional and sphericaI. Yes, bla bla bla...., It's beyond limitations of a tool of human mind and its subtool - human language. Therfore all pre-experience discussions about concepts of solipsism or reincarnation are somehow... pointless. And even after, it's still pointless😄. You are creator of your beliefs, assumptions, worldviews, your reality.

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

You never had any past lives, because all life is occurring right now, it just doesn't seem that way. You're looking at the world through the perception of time, but time is of no meaning in any absolute sense. All lives are occurring within this moment. Think about it like a movie reel. As the movie is playing, there appears to be a sense of motion, it appears to flow through time. At one moment there is one image, at the next moment there in another image. But when you stop the movie and look at the entire reel, you'll notice that all the frames already exist right next to each other. The movie simply switches between these frames very quickly that it appears to be moving. Life is similar. All lives exist as frames right next to each other, being lived simultaneously, at least from the perspective of the absolute. The absolute is the guy in the back of the cinema who puts the movie reels into the beamer thingy. The ego (you) are the person in the theater. You lack the big picture view of the entire movie reel. So you could say that there are no past or future lives. There is only life itself.

That's only one perspective. Another perspective is that there could be a reality, with individual life forms that have the capacity to be reincarnated. I don't see a reason for why infinity shouldn't be capable of such a thing. However, there is a difference between infinity having the capacity to imagine such a reality, and this being said reality.

Edited October 26, 2023 by DefinitelyNotARobot

[blackchair]

I have such a fixation on movies, i must have been failed actor who killed himself!

[Javfly33]

 

4 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

I would say no, but I say this from my current level of understanding, which may vary, because is extremely low, same that the understanding of any human.

I think that not because you are not having this experience/life, and then you could have others, but because you are this life. When this life ends, you end, so you have never had other lives nor will you have others.

What remains is the vastness of existence, and that is not you. It would be logical to think that the limitless vastness would begin another cycle within the eternal cycles of the cosmos, but that is something it has already done infinite times, and this is somehow equivalent to never having done it. The infinite erases the finite, makes it so insignificant that it is nothing. Divide you by infinity and the result is zero

 

3 hours ago, at_anchor said:

I agree 

What you mean when you say you are 'this life'? 

@Breakingthewall

[BlueOak]

Events are cyclic throughout multiple lives.

We are patterns that repeat. 

[Breakingthewall]

14 hours ago, Javfly33 said:

 

 

What you mean when you say you are 'this life'? 

@Breakingthewall

I mean that the one who could have another life is the self. The self is created by the configuration of reality, in which there exists what is outside the self and what belongs to the self, which is the body. If the body disappears, the self disappears, and whoever can have future or past lives and moves in a timeline is the self, without self there is the unlimited vastness of existence, without center. This infinite vastness is not someone who can have another experience after this, since there is no after, it is another dimension.

I really don't understand how it works, but if I accept my insights with psychedelics as valid, I would say that it works like this: infinite reality manifests itself in infinite cycles of simultaneous existence, which arise spontaneously as a consequence of the absence of limits, these infinite cycles are ordered and overlap perfectly, the creation and destruction of the infinite cosmos is like one breath of reality, within infinite breaths. The length of your life spans the entirety of a cycle, the same as the length of anything else, like a galaxy or a universe, since times are relative. When the cycle of your life is extinguished, the cosmos will be extinguished, and another infinite breath will begin, with different shapes and colors. The point is that the self, the sensation of being someone or something that perceives things and is the center of existence, is impermanent, it disappears with the disappearance of experience, the infinite remains without form and without center, and this has no other life later, but it is everything, but at the same time it is nothing, it is not someone specific, it is simply the absence of limits, that really is you if you remove the self, the sensation of a center who perceives and thinks.

but all this is a story seen briefly and perhaps the reality is completely different

Edited October 27, 2023 by Breakingthewall