Korean Job Discussion Forums

[pangaea]

This subject fascinates me. I have had several dreams about being other people in an obviously different time. In some of them I have been another race/and or gender and in one of them I died. I'm a natural born skeptic, so reincarnation is not something I have jumped on and accepted as true just because I've had a few dreams. I have no intention of having a hypnotic regression to find out that I am the reincarnation of Nefertiti. It does interest me, though, and I would like to hear other thoughts on the subject.

[Koveras]

There are two notions here which should be distinguished. Reincarnation means the rebirth of an individual personality, like your example of being Queen Nefertiti born again. That notion is basically an invention of 19th and 20th C. theosophers and - FWIW - doesn't find much support in original religious texts. What *does* find support in Buddhist, Vedic, Christian, Hermetic, and Platonic (and probably others I'm unfamiliar with) texts is the notion of transmigration, which means a transition from one state of being to another, whether earthly or not. From a metaphysical perspective the problem with reincarnation is that it suggests a limit to universal possibility; that is, if it were true it would mean that God is limited.

[Jeonmunka]

The trouble is, all the new agers never admit they were once an average person with an average, boring life - in all cases they were some sort of monarch or some person who had an especially tragic or an outstanding previous life.
That's the reason I call bs on the whole thing.
Not just that but in Buddhist theology if an ant progresses to the next level simply by virtue of being an industrious ant, what if one reaches to a dog - again, animals suffer no self-conscious, so, I've had some real bad events with dogs, dogs that attacked etc and dogs that I would call, 'bad.' What of them, as they should move down a few rungs?

[Fox]

[Louis VI]

The cells of your body will become constituent ingredients of other forms of beings.

[Koveras]

[Seoulio]

My basic school of thought is that if you beleive in an afterlife then you MUST believe in reincarnation.

Now some may agree with that, others may not. But if there is some kind of afterlife then there is clearly a soul that goes somewhere, now as good as that place may be ( who knows it may not be "paradise" it could just be an alternate plain of existence that is just as mundane as this life can get) you would rpetty much have to believe that you could go back and try your hand at life again.

It doesn't make any sense to me at all that you can get there, and have no ability to go back to take a corporeal vacation if you will.

The question is do you ever actually have any memory of that life previous when you do die again

[Skipperoo]

Not a believer myself, at least not in the spiritual sense of the word. Accepting reincarnation necessitates belief in the soul (which I deny, utterly) which in turn generally necessitates the belief in some form of creator (a concept towards which I'm agnostic in the original sense of the word).

When reading Buddhist thoughts on reincarnation I tend to interpret it in a much more literal and materialist sense. I.e. we are constantly undergoing changes in this life - the 'You' that exists now is different to the 'You' that will exist 10 seconds from now, this is your reincarnation. Even then it really only exists in a biological and cognitive sense.

[laguna]

Place to debate this, make sure you hit the forums or check out the story.

http://whywontgodhealamputees.com