Both from the external point of view points to the same empirical findings. There’s no self, yet unenlightened people feel that there is due to self delusion. And it carries across lifetimes, so while the past life is not a soul, or self, but just causality continuing, it’s still feels like it’s the same self for those who are not enlightened.
The difference between reincarnation and rebirth would be the philosophy behind it. How to explain the phenomena. I will just take these 2 as the same word referring to the same phenomena from now. Just because one has different ways of explaining the phenomena, doesn’t deny the existence and factualness of the phenomena.
Just by having kids who can remember things which no normal materialistic way can explain is enough to raise questions as to how valid materalism is as a philosophy to describe the world. The alternatives are like possession, mind reading etc basically are also against the materalism assumption. And judging from many cases, they conclude that rebirth/reincarnation is the most likely explanation.
Not so relevant, we don’t expect the Pāḷi canon to describe all possible supernormal phenomena that exists in the world. Just that all possible supernatural phenomena is able to fit inside the superstructure of the Buddhist cosmology, including prophets and God based religions from DN 1. From materalism point of view, if materalism is true, we would never expect any, not even a single verification of memories of the kids to happen. We can say they are delusional, but thousands of cases later, it becomes harder to deny that materalism assumption about the world is faulty. If Buddhism is true, there is no surprise to find some kids can remember past lives.
It would be interesting to find cases before this date indeed, well, perhaps the tibetan ones would do. Would just saying that the data is clouded with religion makes it biased? I haven’t read wide enough yet to find if there’s any stories before this period. But still, this period being pre-internet is a strong case for not cheating due to finding information online.
How about this: if rebirth is not true, we wouldn’t find kids claiming to remember past lives to have the correct details. So prediction if rebirth is true: kids who remembered past lives should be able to correctly (within human memory error) point out the things related to their past lives accurately as possible. And this has been seen in so many cases that once we read it, any disbelief goes shatters and out of the window. Read enough cases, then there’s no way this cannnot be deemed as a fact. So I suspect people who still doubt haven’t read enough detailed cases of verified past lives recollection.
There’s also quantum information which cannot be erased. Although I suspect memory is more of classical information, there’s also no reason why it cannot be stored in a non-phsyical medium (mind) then reloaded to another body, much like we can store data in a pendrive and put it to another computer. No physics violation here.
I am not sure how this can be done. Any suggestions? Not like recalling past lives is about numbers. But still how to analyze the thousands of cases consistently to come out with statistics, I am not sure. I am not that deeply learned in all the details of the cases and stats yet.
I think we shouldn’t use conservation laws onto the mind. Using this we come to the conclusion that mind cannot cease forever. Mind ceasing forever is what happens at parinibbāna.
Also, what many people who has reviewed the evidences says that it’s enough for a court of law, which many countries use for judging life and death. Scientific verification depends on scientists being able to overcome their views and read the cases then proclaim boldly against the majority of scientific opposition that this is fact. I don’t forsee this happening soon. That social internia is what I am battling against here.
Sorry… have read this multiple times and I don’t understand.
Yes I don’t think memory is generated by the neurons, I see the neurons like a hard drive storing whatever the consciousness puts there. If you could 3d print your brain, with perfect precision, the copy wouldn’t love your mother and hate/love brussel sprouts (depending on whether or not you did :)).
That assumes the brain is the memory as opposed to the thing storing the memory, stored there by the consciousness that experienced the memory.
If memories arise from physical matter, they are finite, as the physical matter is finite. But there is no limit to what could have happened or what might happen- ie infinite. If you say there are only a finite number of things that can happen, I just take the one furthest to the left and move it 1 foot more…
So it is impossible for a finite physical object to be the the source of memory as there are infinite possible memories that could exist.
If you think science is so profound, may be you do not realise how profound life is, till then one really has no hope of appreciating what has been done in this Dhammavinaya even on a pariyatti level.
As I noted there, the liberating knowledge involving past lives seems very much tied up with seeing through the illusion of self, seeing the taking up of many identities through many lives. It’s a high level of attainment, a precursor to understanding the Noble Truths:
Jayarava criticises the research on past lives as not science. However, for me, that’s not the important point. It may or may not be poor science but it is definitely trying to be science. My criticism is that appeals to such research as support for Dhamma (along with speculation on connections between quantum mechanics and Dhamma) falls into the very same materialist view that the proponents say that we should be avoiding. It is an appeal to science to support Dhamma. If the Dhamma is not bound by a materialist world view it should need no such support.
I was just thinking this. Trying to prove rebirth via science is to adopt a scientific materialist worldview. It’s scientism. You can’t prove rebirth via science, but that’s ok. Science isn’t the only way to look at reality. Science doesn’t really tell you what is anyway. It tells you what is probable, hypothetical, theoretical. It’s conceptual, not actual. Very often I find it’s non-scientists who are the most dogmatic regarding science being how the world actually is, and how everything must be justified by it. The likes of Richard Dawkins being an exception, of course.
I think trying to prove or justify rebirth via science is just as mistaken as denying rebirth because of science.
I think we should clearly separate between science and materialism view.
Materalism is just that materials exist. And it cannot even conceive of any mechanism for rebirth to happen, not in the full way that our Buddhist text requires, eg. rebirth to Brahma, formless realms, etc.
Science is a method of investigation of reality, which heavily rely on observation, measurement, objective verification etc.
Also when I say evidences, I prefer to make it closer to court of law evidences, rather than scientific evidences as it is clear that the scientific community has not approved of rebirth yet in general, despite so many of the cases are published in peer reviewed journals.
Science on the philosophy of relying on evidences to judge competing hypothesis is compatible with kalama sutta.
Now kalama sutta is appropriate to be used here as the rebirth evidences is mainly of the function to guide people directly into Buddhism or to guide secular Buddhists into Buddhism. It is to those people whose faith in the texts are not as strong.
So kalama sutta basically says, don’t rely on text/tradition/teacher, or logic/one’s own view etc alone but when one knows for oneself that the qualities leads to good etc then adopt it. Basically empirical findings, in Buddhism, we say the results of practice, in science it is experimental results.
Science’s texts are the papers produced, text books, the logic includes the maths, the derivation of formulas, basically most of theorectical physics.
Buddhism’s results from the dhamma practise in as far as psychological benefits go, is approved by even secular Buddhists. So to appeal to that alone to justify secular Buddhists to believe in the whole of the dhamma is not enough. It is skillful means to use what they believe most in: the weight of evidences. If they are able to get the cloud of materalism out from science.
Thus, there is a place for rebirth evidences, it is for secular Buddhists. And given that most schools in the world do not teach the kids that rebirth is a fact, eventually when they come to Buddhism, they will compare and contrast their faith in science which has given us technology vs their faith in Buddhist texts. For those who knows the possibility of secular Buddhism that would be their most attractive option.
It is a lost for the true dhamma for us Buddhists not to use rebirth evidences as a means to convince these new Buddhists to come to the right view.
I have reservations of doing this for the following reasons:
If the science is subject to change. eg. cosmology is a very changable science currently, we might choose the wrong model of steady state theory instead of big bang theory, if we emphasized on beginningless as most important to Buddhism rather than expansion of cosmos. This doesn’t seems to apply for basic things like earth is round, which is now just facts, or water is H2O and it’s isotopes. No new science would disprove that H2O when we gather enough of them have the property we associate with water. Rebirth evidences I believe is akin to the later. No new evidences can erase the past cases that there already are kids who can recall a memory of a dead person by no normal means.
The connection is not directly matching. Eg. using blackholes to compare it to irreversibility of Nibbāna. When Hawking radiation is discovered, this would be an embarrassing match up. Rebirth evidences is a direct match to rebirth.
Also, there’s tons of search on secular Mindfulness, meditation etc. I don’t think it’s skillful to throw them all out. Physics and Buddhism is more speculative in nature.
I thought he is one of the super strong militant atheists?
In DN 1, on explaining how prophets comes about, there are people who can recall just one past lives and have wrong views about MahaBrahma as the one God. So I don’t think past life recall is that hard a supernormal power to get and it’s need not be always associated with right view.
Thanks for prompting. I just spend the last 2 vassa reading the Jataka and dhammapada stories.
as be pondered, “From whence have I come into this palace?” by his recollection of his former births, he remembered that he had come from the world of the gods and that after that he had suffered in hell, and that then he had been a king in that very city. While he pondered to himself, “I was a king for twenty years and then I suffered eighty thousand years in the Ussada hell, and now again I am born in this house of robbers, and my father, when four robbers were brought before him, uttered such a cruel speech as must lead to hell; if I become a king I shall be born again in hell and suffer great pain there,” he became greatly alarmed, his golden body became pale and faded like a lotus crushed by the hand, and he lay thinking how he could escape from that house of robbers.
Our Bodhisatta was able to recall past life as a baby (one month old), hence he was determined to not become a king to commit bad kamma.
I want to say that i think we all agree that untestable hypotheses, probability values, observable correlations and anecdotal evidence are certainly not the holy grail when it comes to proving a point.
However i want to say that the view of there not being rebirth is compatible with certain doctrines like that of direct realism which can be disproven.
If a person is a direct realist, explains that there is no rebirth because of this, and then has direct realism be demonstrably disproven. He might with that abandon the view of there not being rebirth or he might still hold on to it. One should take note of whether he does or doesn’t.
One of these will proceed arguing that even tho his hypothesis turned out wrong, his prediction might still be valid, even tho he can’t explain how that could be.
In general id like to see any irrefutable hypothesis which maintains there not being a possibility of rebirth.
I think it is important to be constantly aware of where the burden of proof falls and to what extent assumptions remain reasonable & substantiated.
Science works with the assumption of there being the substance of matter. From there it operates within a materialist or physicalist worldview. Sadly some in this thread can’t see that it still starts with an assumption.
This is a bizzare statement. ‘Science’ is thus defined only by you, people who taught you this and some other people who might think like this. It’s not some fixed observable entity or a set of thoughts & behaviors on which there is a consensus as to it being ‘science’.
I do see where you are coming from, but as an outsider i think this definition captures only a very narrow subset of human behavior which would qualify over the span of human history to be related to what we deem ‘science’ in all practical purpose.
I don’t wish to contribute to this thread in order to give scientific evidence for rebirth. Nor do I wish to contribute to this thread in order to give scientific evidence against rebirth. My only motivation is to help dispel the idea that science is definitive or categorical one way or the other. To my mind, it just isn’t.
Take for instance the statement you have above… that science necessarily involves the “assumption of there being the substance of matter.” Surely, for a great number of working scientists this is the case. It might very well be the majority of working scientists who have this view, but there also exist working scientists - who continue to do the function of science - without necessarily holding this view. In fact, there are some interpretations of QM that explicitly reject this view to my mind. See Carlo Rovelli in Helgoland and/or many instrumentalists who just operate and conduct the functions of science without this assumption.
It is possible to conduct science in such a way as to have zero intersection with either beliefs in the existence of rebirth or beliefs in the non-existence of rebirth.
To put it another way, it is possible to hold beliefs in the existence of rebirth that have zero intersection with science and it is also possible to hold beliefs in the non-existence of rebirth with such zero intersection. It is also possible to hold beliefs in both subjects that are totally entangled and mixed up with each other. As with most views, your mileage may vary
I don’t think we will ever see objective evidence of rebirth (or any kind of evidence whatsoever). That is fine with me: I fully believe that rebirth and karma exist. After all, faith is one of the 5 spiritual powers in Buddhism*, and maybe there is good reason for that.
*The other 4 spiritual powers are energy, mindfulness, concentration, wisdom.
Please read the many links already posted near the start of this topic. There already are plenty of objective evidences. So much so that I think people who read enough can only call rebirth as a fact. It’s only ignorance that keeps humanity in the dark about rebirth being a fact.
Hello, I don’t know your entire view, and I haven’t read the books you’ve mentioned, which may expand it further, but from what you’ve presented, even as a summary, there are major logical fallacies, which I’ve also seen common elsewhere.
This is a semantic argument. “karma and rebirth are said to be supernatural, and whatever is supernatural can’t be real.” Let’s suppose that when we say “not secular” and “supernatural”, it is another way of saying “not real” / “doesn’t happen”. Then, how do you know what’s truly not true/real / supernatural or not? The process to knowing what’s not real should be the same process as knowing what is supernatural in this case. We know this through different methods of proper inquiry: Are they not true because other people said that those things are in the definition of supernatural? Did you decide this? We draw the lines of what is supernatural and natural ourselves, based on what inquiry? If something supernatural is natural, then nothing contradicts besides random semantics, and then what’s the point of having either of those words. Not natural does not mean supernatural. An alive woolly mammoth isn’t called supernatural, but it’s also not natural.
In more useful usages of “supernatural”, and the way it’s used in pali translations, it does not mean something that isn’t real, it’s just a way of describing certain rare or hard to explain phenomena which may or may not be real. Gods might like to eat supernatural turnips, but maybe those aren’t actually real and they like supernatural parsley which does happen to be real. I could also call someone a “god at tennis” to mean they’re really good, it’s how language goes on.
You concluded rebirth isn’t real because you didn’t have evidence? That’s not scientific nor a proper way to find truth. You have no evidence that I’m 22, but that doesn’t mean I’m not 22.
I don’t know if you were saying this, but if you don’t like an idea, that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Also, it isn’t true since you misrepresented it: for your own liking actually, karma is definitely not just about the next life. Our actions effect us here (source: the suttas, and it’s very easy to observe this). It’s also not about justice or punishment. You are making this assumption that people believe in things to justify some other value they have (justice), (therefore, their beliefs are wrong), when it’s the opposite. You can just observe that your actions have effects, therefore your actions have effects. The same is true for rebirth, it doesn’t matter if someone believes in it out of ulterior motives. In fact, I don’t want rebirth to be true, I don’t know why it’s true, but you can simply observe and see that it’s true. You can see that beings are born most similar to how they are like now, like a sorting algorithm. Although, it is not easy to see. The Buddha didn’t teach those things because it nicely fitted with the way suffering works, he taught what he saw.
Karma is not a belief. Rebirth is not a belief. In fact, your very own beliefs are subjected to the law of karma. This means that you don’t get to escape the cycle of conditionality by believing that your actions don’t effect you. It also means that anyone’s belief that there is or is not karma is utterly conditioned by their past. The harsh reality is that since secularism has been relatively trendy the last couple centuries or so, people were merely influenced by this, and their views aren’t really original even if they cling on to something they believe is the “truth away from impossible supernatural” or not. And the same is true on the opposite, views of karma and supernatural are also just conditioned views by environment. No view is special or exempt from the ways views work. Deeper seeing and development is also conditioned by experiencing and just seeing. Because of your research of the Heart Sutra, you must already have experience about the divide and odd relationship between ultimate reality and one’s understanding.
It does not contradict anything in the current models of physics or biology. And, on the inverse, nothing in science has disproved it either, just like God. Except the difference between God here is that rebirth happens to also be observable. Our current best model of particle physics easily allows for something like rebirth to happen. Actually, the structure of the standard model is begging us to ask about other generations or tiers (higgs → bosons → fermions → ?) of particles. In the past we were able to predict that certain particles may exist, then we proved that they did later on through observation (Higgs most famously, graviton next).
If you really need ideas of potential answers… I’m not scientifically convinced there’s dark matter (since all of the experiments failed), but many physicists have accepted it. Logically, the heavens and hells would be made of particles that don’t interact with our material very easily, but probably does interact with gravity (since you are reborn geographically close, and also on the same planet), which actually exactly matches dark matter (doesn’t interact with our material easily, only interacts with gravity). That doesn’t mean other worlds are exactly what we have predicted to be dark matter, it could easily be some other type of material there is yet no name for with the same properties.
Perhaps there are thousands of tiers of these different levels and types of particles that simply don’t have any interaction with our own, you would never know this. I would expect gravity to interact with them since its such a unique ‘force’, and it seems to be the case for so-called dark matter and whatever the other realms are made of.
The current discoveries in science are not at all closed to other things also being true or supporting it, and that’s not how science works. Therefore, the mind of every being has some sort of connection with this other material, probably interacting with it constantly alongside the already complex processes it does, and deep meditation (to the point of ending the earthly material senses) will leave relatively more of this other kind of material. The standard model is very open to these kinds of things, and so would (the unproven) string theory (more like theories and models) for the record.
(From a different post)
No it doesn’t. Thermodynamics is about energy, your memories aren’t made of energy. If you were referring to the law of conservation of energy, memory is just a word used to describe very complex cycles made from senses being associated with each other, which isn’t really a conserved “thing”. Your feelings are created and destroyed all the time, no law was violated, it’s just a much more complex process beneath.
Maybe you are concerned with the “shape of memories” being conserved? So, the law about entropy? Again, memories aren’t made out of energy, but the law of impermanence does apply. Our memories may get faded over time and lost and decayed, even re-written, nothing permanent here, and they are also arising phenomena when they do happen. With an extremely fine and deep seeing, one can still recall very old ones, so they must not be totally “decayed” and way harder to access.
You mean like how it already has? On the quantum level, those laws don’t apply in the same way, and quantum mechanics is also the most accurate and full description of all of physical reality. If you “average” and zoom out of quantum thermodynamics, it does add up to be thermodynamics on the outside, just like the rest of classical physics, but it’s a totally different story on that level.
My relation earlier to the standard model should already give a good enough idea of the rest of the picture within the current laws of both thermodynamics and quantum thermodynamics.
Are you sure your confidence is justified on what is supernatural or not? Because when you actually look at how the world works, it already seems “supernatural”. What about particles appearing and disappearing (bosons), splitting and combining (antimatter), existing as both particles and waves on fields, being pushed and pulled by forces with nothing in-between, or massless light being effected by gravity / space and time bending with each other, emotion, existence at all, or mass and energy not even existing on a subatomic level? Does that sound real, or does it sound totally unexplained? It’s both of those.
For example, magnets work because of magnetic force, but the truth is that no scientist and no one knows why magnetic force exists/happens. You can observe it, draw and predict equations and behavior from observation, and draw Feynman diagrams and perfectly predict magnetic interactions, but no one has the answer to why it would even happen, just that it does.
To say science is equal to reality or understands all of reality is disrespectful to the entire scientific process which functions very differently. How could that be true when scientists and scientific conclusions constantly disagree with each other, and when the scientific process involves revising. Science was never about guaranteeing a full view of the world, and it never claimed to have all the answers from the very beginning and within its design.
In fact, it answers relatively little of this world. There is no scientific proof out there that says that I made this post, that I’m in the same room as a dog as I type this, or that I’m able to experience blue the same way as you for sure. 99% of what I find important and relevant in my life is not explained at all by science, and I involve myself with science in my interests and career. Even then, science in general has had enormous immeasurable meritable effects on the quality of many people’s lives (MEDICINE). Rebirth can be found through a similar personal scientific process; observation and conclusion. Namely, remembering past lives. Until that happens, how could you say it’s not real OR that it is real for sure. Doubt isn’t something we should run towards and be convinced of, it will just take us away from the truth. Nothing says you can’t just suspend doubt and find out the answer later on.
Finally, it goes without saying, but you really don’t need these extraneous scientific justifications to know if there’s rebirth or if impermanence is true, but in theory, it should and does correlate.
Are you saying that they didn’t have a developed enough technology? Or are you using “iron age” to try to make people from that time period sound stupid, relying on the false stereotype that cavemen were stupid? That’s not a rhetorical question, I actually can’t tell. Either way, it’s an ad hom argument. Just because some specific people supposedly weren’t equipped to prove something doesn’t mean that their claim isn’t true.
Honestly, this is manipulative language to make meditation sound like delusion. You really mean temporarily stopping processes within the subjective reality of the material senses when you say “reality” which happens to also be the word for truth and ultimate reality, which is clearly quite different from subjective reality/experience. If you go to a quiet place, is it meaningful in this context to say this is “cutting yourself off from reality”? Do you really need to have sounds and sights constantly (assuming you’re in a safe location)?
Those are clearly two different definitions of reality. One is just principles about the behavior of experience and existence, and the other is the result of a physical experiment (and they certainly haven’t measured everything). You conflated several definitions of reality (such as subjective and ultimate) to make an argument. How many significant figures can you measure suffering to?
This is praise. We aren’t here to learn that light goes faster than sound, which is useless for wisdom, we’re here to learn that the experiences of sight and hearing are temporary, bring suffering, and aren’t self.
Many have explained this. Is it not easier to focus in a quieter room? Senses are distracting and hindering. They draw away focus and they bring fettering sensual desire and craving. With less sensual distraction, you can find stillness and see clearly, and therefore see/understand reality easier. I don’t see the problem with this unless you are attached to your senses. The second reason is that you won’t really learn what your senses are until you go outside of it to see what is actually even meant by the term sense, or even the term existence, like a fish leaving its water that it always took for granted. You would realize that those senses aren’t actually you, and they are merely cycles of processes that just go on. In stillness, you would notice and see that everything arising is always going away, and this seeing is never forced nor done through will. It doesn’t matter whether someone can prove any of that, you would just have to try it because personal truth is personal.
Aesthetic fallacy doesn’t mean not providing a reason for a cause, and that isn’t a fallacy on its own. If a study were released about the existence of hundreds of planets in a certain section of the sky, why would you say this is not true yet just because they can’t fully explain as to why or how they got there? If I showed you a picture of my license saying I’m 22, would you still believe for a fact that I’m not, with no evidence that I’m not? Or do I need to provide a causal explanation in order for you to believe this still.
These studies are typical science, don’t have to give explanations to why, and do give testable predictions for some dimensions. If you meet a kid who recalls their past life, you yourself predicted that they remember at age 4-6. It’s actually starting at 3-4 and ending at about 8 thanks to that very study. He also showed that a significantly high number of them died from unnatural causes with exact percents. It’s also certainly limited in that not everyone may have been reborn, maybe it was just those children who remember. What about the relationship to other animals, can they remember their past life? Maybe they were only reborn one time because God is giving them a second chance before they go to eternal heaven or hell. Causal explanation doesn’t mean giving an entire description of all of the ways some process work behind a correlation, like explaining the literal chemical or biological mechanisms in some social study, and just because they didn’t give that doesn’t mean that their generic initial findings aren’t true. That doesn’t somehow mean that hundreds of children didn’t perfectly predict 20 facts about a person they’ve reportedly never met who they claim to remember to be.
If I study a correlation between two things, I really don’t have to tell you why or how that actually happens in order for it to be correlated, although many papers will try to speculate and add conclusions. The extra explanations Stevenson gave in other places are obviously not justified, considering it included ideas of soul, which their findings show 0 evidence of at all, and rebirth if anything is proof that there isn’t soul since soul isn’t reborn or re-dies.
If no child remembered their past life ever, then that wouldn’t also mean rebirth doesn’t happen anyway.
Views might be right that does not mean, i believe, that one deals with them in a way that is wholesome for oneself and others. I think often not at all, because views are mostly food for our sectarian tendencies and hunger for grip on reality.
