Buddha’s not the creator of samsara. He just reports what is seen via divine eye. He already left out a lot because people wouldn’t believe him and it would be the disadvantage and suffering of those who doesn’t believe him. SN19.1
Formerly, I too saw that being, but I did not speak of it. For if I had spoken of it others would not have believed me, which would be for their lasting harm and suffering.
That being used to be a cattle butcher right here in Rājagaha. As a result of that deed he burned in hell for many years, many hundreds, many thousands, many hundreds of thousands of years. Now he experiences the residual result of that deed in such an incarnation.”
One shouldn’t judge “the dhamma of the realm of existence, kamma, rebirth” using the lens of a creator God.
Just like before 1905, people created the ether as a medium for light waves to travel on, because they have not seen any waves without a medium. But Einstein came along and debunked it with special relativity.
One has to specify exactly how the detection is to be done. MRI? Just ask the person who can recall past lives to be in MRI machine and recall past lives?
Anyway, I have thought of this before as well, on the physics of information. Memory contains information and information is now part of the physical world, it obeys certain laws of physics or else something would go wrong in other parts of physics. That’s why we use physicalism instead of materialism, as information is not material.
So one of the rules is that information cannot travel faster than light. To specify location, one can just posit a pen drive or a hardware on a computer having that information, and to transmit it somehow, vis wifi, Bluetooth etc to another machine, it cannot do so faster than light.
But what if we imagine the scale of a galactic empire, 100,000 light years across for our Galaxy. And from one end of the Galaxy, they want to contact the people on the other end, and they ask this meditator who is skilled in choosing location of rebirth to be reborn at the other end of the Galaxy, carrying a lot of messages he memorized. Off she goes and dies, and got reborn on the other side with memory of past lives.
If the Theravada is to be right that rebirth is instantaneous, then we have achieved faster than light communication should that kid which is reborn manage to recall past lives and tell the messages he memorized when he was a lady.
And such back and forth communication can be set up for galactic communication with just a few years of delay instead of 100,000 years for light to travel from one end to another.
That would violate the laws of information in physics, with implication of special relativity is wrong, thermodynamics has to be rethinked and so on.
But it’s not game over yet. The EBT says there’s in between life, so it’s not necessarily immediate. And Theravada Abhidhammic model of instant rebirth is that the death mind moment is immediately followed by the rebirth relinking consciousness. And in physics we posit that due to time dilation in special relativity, anything that moves at the speed of light in vacuum doesn’t experience personal time passing.
Thus, it is possible for that person to be travelling from one end of the galaxy to the other end at light speed, but time stopped for her thus there’s no subjective recall of a time gap, and thus subjectively it feels like immediate rebirth. But from the point of view of external observer, it’s not immediate, which also fits in the EBT sutta. This is one way to reconcile EBT with Theravada.
Anyway, I thought about this and discarded it last time due to reading rebirth cases where the in-between life is really like the person is disembodied and just waiting there hazy until got reborn into a new body. Theravada would consider it as temporary rebirth in ghost realm. Maybe I should consider it as that too instead of identifying that as the in-between life.
Long story short, past life recall does not need to violate physics, although such an experiment is still interesting to conduct, too bad it cannot be done on earth due to the years needed for the kid to grow up and speak. And the galactic sized experiment needs light speed verification to set up and compare results via the normal way, maybe the human lifespan then is long enough to wait for the results.
This reminds me. At the cutting edge of gravity research, general relativity fails and thus we have dark matter and dark energy. And there’s modified Newtonian gravity and super gravity and various ways of combining quantum and gravity. The physicsists cannot even agree on the same picture of what gravity really is.
Doesn’t deny that things fall. Same with the critique of rebirth theories being multiple doesn’t deny the raw data of children knowing things that there is no normal physical way for them to know, but is consistent with rebirth as explaination.
Have those people sat, got the Jhānas, trained for divine eye and past life recall and see for themselves if they can see the same thing as so many Pa Auk practitioners claim to see? And verify that all the things in commentaries and sutta are right? Specifically, rebirth, gods, etc.
This is explainable within the Buddhist cosmology framework. We also have heaven, just that we claim the christians don’t see far enough to see that heaven is impermanent. Also NDE sight can be influenced by views. Whereas rebirth evidences are objective. Kids claim they lived in such and such a house, with such and such name as family, never met them in this life, never been to that area in this life, when people investigated, bingo, as the kid described it.
The memory not being 100% reliable actually can be used to explain why some details don’t match 100%.
But let’s think about this. Given a house already, there’s a finite amount of families living in there for say 200 years the house exists. That’s not a lot of families to make a randomized any name will do selection. To be able to accurately name names of actual families who live in the exact house without access to census records or internet (even with today’s internet it is not easy to find), cannot be explained away as just coincidence. And it’s not just one case. And there’s plenty of other details as well, not just names.
Rebirth evidences being objective means whatever the kid’s religion is, it doesn’t affect the strength of the evidences. James Leininger’s family modified their Christianity to fit in rebirth.
We would say that the orthodox version of many God based religions cannot handle Rebirth evidences. So it’s not that all religions have an equal footing. Some religion’s cosmology just cannot accommodate some facts of life.
Same too with the religion of scientism which insists that nothing which is incompatible with physicalism can exist, as a matter of faith, not as a matter of rational investigation of evidences.
I think you didn’t read my comments on rebirth vs reincarnation. Externally, they look the same. That’s why they call it reincarnation evidences. The difference is in the philosophy. As no one can see a soul, how can reincarnation be objectively different from rebirth?
It’s just how we explain it. Reincarnation posits a soul to explain whatever is passed on from previous life to the next. Rebirth sees even whatever that is passed on is also subject to impermanence, thus is not self. Just even within one lifetime, so many changes happens that by the end of this new life, whatever is passed on to the next has barely anything the same as from previous life. Hopefully it includes faith in the triple gem, the 5 faculties etc.