Possibility of reincarnation
- Thread starter Floydical
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I don't believe in Reincarnation, but if it existed would it mean the total number of souls in the world is constant? or are some souls selectively destroyed while others are created? The human population keeps increasing, meaning there are new souls and some other complexities that will arise if reincarnation were to be true.
The discovery channel documentary might be what I was recalling. The cases about the boys who believed they were reincarnates of their grandfather is quite similar to what I remember. I don't recall the second case, where the boy suffered a heart complication that aligned with his grandfather's fatal heart injury, that one is quite intriguing indeed. I mean memories are one thing, but for a possible reincarnate to carry over complications of a gunshot wound to a new body? Quite the scary idea going on there.
I thought about this and, as you say, it makes for quite the complication. I'd lean toward the number of souls being constant and there are so many in fact, that there are simply not enough bodies to contain all of them. If the theory that souls reside in animals as well is true, than the number of souls out there is downright staggering. So perhaps there are 50 billion souls out there or so. Lets say there are 25 billion humans/ animals with souls out there (I'm just making up numbers) than there would another 25 billion that are either in our plane of existence and not in a body, or elsewhere. The elsewhere might be heaven or hell or something different. The ones in our plane of existence not already in a body are 'ghosts' as we refer to spiritual beings as.
Again, quite the complicated matter but I would find it hard to believe souls can actually be created, but maybe a power like God could in fact do something as seemingly impossible as that.
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Basically another Naruto but without ninjas.
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OT: No idea what program that is but it sounds like it'd be on Ancient Aliens
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Reincarnation?
Well, one alternative could be to preserve your consciousness.
Maybe in the future we'll be able to transfer our consciousness from one body to another.
-Memories (long and short term) are primarily stored in the
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.-The brain is a bundle of nerves and receptors transmitting, receiving, and reacting to chemical messages
What if we could display or present these chemical impulses into a simulation?
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Mangafacts
There is a lot to learn about consciousness.
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If you think about it, the brain named itself.
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A part of me would say they just always existed. I have no way of knowing how one might be created simply because I cannot fathom nor contemplate how such a task would be accomplished. That's why I said perhaps God or a Godlike being could do it, but I have literally know idea myself.
Getting to a point here where its bordering on religion now.
Stories like this are particularly common in regions of the world, like India, where the Hindu belief in reincarnation is much more common. There are even cases of families attempting to identify who a loved one was reincarnated as and bestowing a sort of dowry payment to support them.
Whether or not this is what is really going on - or just a product of mass psychology is, of course, next to impossible to scientifically determine at this point.
Since stories like this are less common among regions of the world where belief in reincarnation is not especially strong, I am more of the opinion that the stories are more dramatic than they are convincing. That said, it's possible that many western nations don't have a strong belief in reincarnation because they are not noting the experiences that would point them in that direction.
It bothers me when a lot of Christians try to put down the idea of reincarnation. Reincarnation was an accepted possibility within Jewish beliefs -
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- or, rather, the idea that individuals could be reborn again into the world.Further, the 'scriptural' argument against it is relatively weak:
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- as belief in the possibility of reincarnation was relatively prevalent prior to the expansion of Christianity into western Europe.As for the idea of hell...
Hell is not a place reserved to the afterlife. Neither is heaven. It is a state of being. There are people around you, right now, who are in hell. The "open secret" is that Heaven and Hell transcend the mortal existence just as our soul does.
Of course - the other "open secret" is that people can be saved from Hell, just as others can fall from Heaven. The notion that our mortal life represents a -phase- of existence as opposed to a trial period for eternal judgment is far more in line with the type of world we observe around us, which is systemic and functions largely mechanically.
God doesn't need to invoke mystical powers to make it rain. The process of evaporation and condensation takes care of that - entropy. God created a system that is largely self-sufficient and self-maintained, requiring little on the part of divine intervention. For our souls to transition through various phases and to perhaps return to re-encounter previous phases is not far-fetched when we are talking theological concepts and presupposing the soul.
Likewise - the judgment of who is in heaven, who is in hell, etc need not be any more arbitrary in function than the water cycle or the ocean tides. All of these cycles impact our lives and we end up planning events and our choices around them.
Of course, when you get into spiritual beliefs, the spirits are notoriously contradictory when not silent and it's not like we can send a drone through to take a peek.
Yet.
Source?
Must be some rare case. No one actively seeks out where their family members are reborn nor it's possible. Since according to the idea itself- next birth can be anything. Any life form on any planet even.
Anyone showing up at the door with such a claim is seen with skepticism- even by those who theoretically may believe the idea.
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It doesn't matter much which program it was as they always tend to make it so that topics like these look like that they are very believable. They selectively chose what they want to see and what not. You can be certain it's not even remotely evidence. It simply is less interesting to make a program where they keep pointing out how unlikely and flawed all of this is than to make one where they imply how it could be possible. It's the principle of whether the glass is half full or empty. It's more interesting for the watchers to have the first approach and not the latter.
For example how odd does a child's behavior have to be to consider it strange and to be able to connect it to another person? I mean is it possible that from the 7 billion people in the world they find the exact person to whom this supposed habits belonged to? I don't even need to see the program for that, they probably made it appear like their search was nearly laid out perfectly, but in reality the situation would have been very differently. I mean how trustworthy are the words of a child that just learned to speak and walk?
The human brain hates coincidences, it always wants to see structures and patterns, but that doesn't mean they are there. The setting of this program alone is remotely of being trustworthy. So you can be sure it's not hard evidence and very easily to dispute.
There however are indeed many stories about people who seem to have knowledge of previous lives. I don't disclose that, but you really shouldn't be that easily taken by a program that was from start to finish edited by the creators with specific intentions in mind.
What surprised me here though is that everyone automatically assumes reincarnation is a matter of a metaphysical soul, no one seems to have taken into consideration that this might be a simple biological occurrence void of any kind of spiritual intervention. There are also many stories of people who had an organ transplant and then suddenly changed. They adopted habits and mannerisms of the original owner of the organ that were sometimes even completely contradictory to their normal behavior and we are talking here about adults, not young children. This gave rise to the idea that the human body is some kind of a USB stick that stores information of the individual and thus can be transferred to other people. This also solves the problem of the increasing number of people with the soul-approach. Of course it would still need to be explained as how info from one person ends up in the body of another, but then again in the end stories about this are very rare and often very fishy. So it would be regardless of the process, if it happens, it would only occur in specific conditions.
My main interest in this biological approach, is that from a historical point of view this info would be priceless. The human species suddenly becomes a biological databank of all info produced by mankind and can be checked as we see fit. Only a fraction of the world's history has survived and now we suddenly could get access to potentially everything.
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In this belief system- A soul is never destroyed. It merely changes the container or moves on to the next birth/form. Existence of souls is not limited to humans either. Every living being has a soul.
There are many different schools about the nature of the soul but the most common and general idea says there is only one Brahmana ( the self, supreme soul or Param Atama) and we all are that. We all are just part of it and the realization to this fact is Mokasha ( freedom from the cycle of rebirth). When a soul gets mokasha it gets liberated from the cycle of Samsara.
Whether if everyone gets moksha the cycle of rebirth and existence of Samsara will permanently cease? No because the number of living beings (jeevas) is infinite in number. Even if infinite number of jeevas attain moksha, there will be infinite number remaining. And therefore the cycle of creation/ dissolution will never cease permanently.
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I'd have to dig the section out of the book I read a few years ago, and I might be remembering some of it incorrectly. There are some excerpts online:
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" Dr. Rawat is telling me that the case we are investigating is fairly typical. The child, Aishwary, began talking about people from a previous existence when he was around three. Ninety-five percent of the children in Stevenson's cases began talking about a previous existence between the ages of two and four, and started to forget about it all by age five.
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Aishwary is thought by his family to be the reincarnation of a factory worker named Veerpal, several villages distant, who accidentally electrocuted himself not long before Aishwary was born. Dr. Rawat opens his briefcase and takes out an envelope of snapshots from last month, when he began this investigation.
"Here is the boy Aishwary at the birthday party of his 'son.'" Aishwary is four in the photograph. His "son" has just turned ten. Just in case the age business isn't sufficiently topsy-turvy, the elastic strap on the "son's" birthday hat has been inexplicably outfitted with a long, white beard. This morning, while leafing through a file of Dr. Rawat's correspondences, I came across a letter that included the line: "I am so glad you were able to marry your daughter." I am reasonably, but not entirely, sure that the correspondent meant "marry off."
"Now, here is the boy with Rani."
Rani is the dead factory worker's widow. She is twenty-six years old. In the photo, the boy stares fondly — lustfully, one might almost say, were one to spend too much time in India with reincarnation researchers — at his alleged past-life wife. This strikes me as the most improbable, chimerical thing I've ever seen, and then I look out the car window, where an elephant plods down a busy Delhi motorway. "
Mary Roach writes some excellent stuff.
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" In India, everywhere you look, someone is calmly comporting themselves in a manner that we in the States would consider a terrible risk, a beseeching of death with signal flares and megaphone. Women in saris perch sidesaddle, unhelmeted, on the backs of freeway-fast Vespas. Bicyclists weave through clots of city traffic, breathing leaded diesel fumes. Passengers sit atop truck cabs and hang off the sides like those acrobat troupes that pile onto a single bicycle. Trucks overladen with bulbous muffin-top loads threaten to topple and bury nearby motorists under illegal tonnages of cauliflower and potatoes. (Accident Prone Area, the signs say, as though the area itself were somehow responsible for the carnage.) People don't seem to approach life with the same terrified, risk-aversive tenacity that we do. I'm beginning to understand why, religious doctrine aside, the concept of reincarnation might be so popular here. Rural India seems like a place where life is taken away too easily -- accidents, childhood diseases, poverty, pollution, murder. If you'll be back for another go, why get too worked up about the leaving? "
I could have been confusing that marriage comment with a form of dowry payment in my memory. Regardless, I know that she painted the picture of it being far more common in India for people to treat reincarnation as a fact of life and even as a vehicle for tying families together.
My younger brother came back from his Vacation on a Caribbean island where Some of our family members live. My ex-freemasonic grandparents gave my bro a stack of new age books and reincarnation is present in Every book. Interesting stuff to read. But Yeah, no way to verify reincarnation scientifically. Meh
The conclusion you drew from the letter is fantastic. ...:| I don't think it had anything to do with the reincarnation case itself, if at all. There is no context as to who sent it to whom or any other detail. Instead she was making fun of the grammar of the letter writer. It said " marry your daughter" instead of " marry off " - a common mistake when people make literal translations and choose the wrong phrase.
While the part about not wearing helmet and seeing an elephant on the road is not surprising most of the quote is just a typical Western( here but also people in general) approach to things they don't understand or don't believe in and adding a stupid cause effect theory for the extra gimmick. People often believe in reincarnation to some extent but not the way you imply or she might have implied.
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Keep in mind those are excerpts. There was more to that part of the story where it went into how families were tracking each other down.
The letter, itself, is part of a file that was being worked on by a doctor who was researching reincarnation claims/phenomena in the region who was, as I understand, native to India.
Also, that is just how Mary Roach writes. It doesn't matter what she's writing. Whether she is covering NASA or the taboo research into *** - she writes with her tongue in her cheek a lot. It's nothing unique to her coverage of foreign places.
Then there must be a story why they were tracking down. Most probably the one claiming to be the reincarnated one contacted them first otherwise they wouldn't even know where to look. You are far more likely to meet people looking for their deads with a planchette or getting a psychic rather than a person looking for next rebirth anyway.
The letter still remains completely out of context.- who wrote to whom and whose daughter it was or any other detail of the kind. But if someone really saw a girl as her/his daughter or got friendly enough with the family and helped in her getting married it's hardly a big deal. People do that even for strangers at times.
And OK.
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