People aren’t nearly as close minded and ignorant as you think they are. And without insisting that and insulting everyone, you have nothing.
Exactly. “they got paid attention to”. What got paid attention to? The brain or their minds? Thats the point, its nothing to do with the molecules, its the mind. That is the thing we are talking about when we talk about rebirth (yes, yes, I know nothing is reborn but we only have the language we have to the Buddhist reading that sentence and arking up 
)
That is the central issue here, you and Jayarava don’t seem to acknowledge the existence of anything but physical matter, at least thats my impression from reading your posts…if I am wrong please explain, I am genuinely interested. I say that there are two distinct paradigms, physical and non-physical and my evidence is that I am here and I cross both paradigms.
Never said the evidence was invincible and never said the evidence was proof. I have no problem with you saying Stevenson made it up, or it was coincidence, or whatever your answer is (I say the people remembering being Caesar are making it up deliberately or due to psychological issues). Then intelligent reviewers can decide whether those theories are better or worse than the theory of rebirth and decide for themselves. For me the entire thesis in the EBT of rebirth, karma, 4 NT and 8-fold path are the best explanation for the non-physical paradigm I have come across and its practically working for me in my life, so what is the problem with that approach?
Good, perhaps I should have selected, can LIGO people predict the next black hole merger? Assuming that the lead time for gravitational waves effect it could had is minimal. Or those who detect neutrino predict which exact molecule of pure water the neutrino is going to react to?
It’s in analogy to we don’t know which family would produce kids who can recall past lives.
Doesn’t explain away the findings in real life which confirms their memories.
My vipaka. I said that to a monk when I was lay, in arguing against his climate denial.
Then read the cases. Read a lot. Then we would have nothing to debate about.
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What is evidence? I
I had some experience with chakra’s. For me their existence is no new-age stargazing bullshit…but, oh, oh…that really seems to awaken the demons in other persons who have decided that chakra’s do not exist at all…and such people are dreamers, new age stargazers.
What i see is: those people are angry people, judgemental. They just cannot accept that such things as chakra’s can exist. Why not?
I can say…there is no person in the entire world that can make me believe that i have no evidence for the existence of chakra’s. I have evidence enough, and if others do not see this as evidence that is not my problem.
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First you have to prove that this has ever happened. And so far the only people persuaded either make their living from publishing such anecdotes, or they are religieux whose identities and social status are predicated on public professions of this very belief. Denisons of Sutta Central have been quite cruel to me because I refuse to profess something that is manifestly not true, even if it is undeniable a belief that people held in Iron Age India. I’m not one for jumping on bandwagons, I tend to want to start my own band.
The anecdotes in question are all self-published, by organisations set up to make money publishing these anecdotes.
We have plenty of a priori reasons to doubt these claims that adults have made on behalf of children who come from far-flung places and conveniently lose the ability to remember when their rational faculties start to develop and they can better distinguish fantasy from fact. So we can’t go back and interview the same subjects.
Confabulation, a lie, a false memory, the result of leading questions, or simply made up by Stephenson to make money from gullible people. How would we ever distinguish between these?
What you are talking about is a series of anecdotes you’ve read in (self-published) books about children who may or may not exist, whose reported statements the author claims reflect memories of past lives. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I’ve read the same books as you did, and I came to the conclusion that we have no idea whether Stevenson ever left his office or talked to a single real child. As far as I’m concerned the idea that he simply made all his stories up is the most likely explanation of the “phenomenon”. Then a bunch of other people jumped on the bandwagon and made up their own anecdotes and cashed in.
And given that his testimony disproves Buddhist rebirth doctrines and the known laws of physics, I think I’m justified in saying that this is an extraordinary claim. So it will require more than a few self-published anecdotal stories designed to be impossible to corroborate.
When it comes to science by contrast, I have personally replicated many of the most famous scientific experiments in history and confirmed the results for myself. I’ve tested all of Newton’s laws for example, and found that under conditions of mass, length, and energy available to me, the predictions are more accurate than my ability to measure. I’ve also puts such laws into practise by doing things like synthesising complex organic molecules from simple ones and analysed the results using physical and spectroscopic analyses. I’ve also built electronic circuits that work as predicted and so on. I know science because I have practiced it.
The thing about science is that, yes, it is a system of beliefs. But they are not arbitrary or random beliefs, since any observer, at any time or any place, sees the same thing. It’s not that sometimes we look and momentum is conserved and other times it it not. Or that an Indian observer sees a different result from an American, or a Hindu from a Buddhist. No matter what your a priori beliefs, if you measure the acceleration due to gravity at the surface of the earth it will be ~9.8 m/s^2 with variations of up to 0.7%. And such variations are easily explained by reference to the density of the underlying rocks.
Science gives us justified belief.
Nor is gravity merely subjective. No doubt, our understanding of it is subjective, but by comparing notes, we can isolate the subjective and exclude it from consideration.
When we do this with rebirth we find that there is no consensus that rebirth is the case, and even within a religious system like Buddhism—where the belief is more or less universal—there is no consensus on how rebirth works. And clearly this was a problem historically also.
A very large number of people believe with complete certainty that after death God judges us and we either go to heaven or hell; that no one is ever “reborn” (in the Buddhist sense) or ever could be. This is the view of virtually all Christians, Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Jews, for example. They are every bit as certain as Buddhists and Hindus. They have their own anecdotal self-published literature on how the Bible accurately portrays the afterlife. And they vociferously defend their views using similar pseudoscience. I would say that far more people have this kind of view than believe what most people in this forum seem to believe. Their arguments look identical to yous. NDEs prove the existence of heaven, blah blah. And plenty of them have PhDs as well.
When I was writing my (self-published) book on Karma and Rebirth I looked at many different accounts of the afterlife. Many Buddhist accounts of rebirth. And actually Buddhists have always disagreed over the details. Polemics were written, for example, about whether rebirth was instantaneous (Theravādins) or took an appreciable amount of time (the rest). Arguments broke out over how long it might take. Tibetan Buddhists have a very different view to any other Buddhists.
So on one hand we have things like gravity that everyone agrees on. And on the other we have the afterlife on which there is no consensus or anything like a consensus. Even if we could get all Buddhists to stop fighting about it, all the other religions and all of physics say that something else happens that completely contradicts Buddhists.
And of course, Stephenson himself contradicts all Buddhist account of rebirth. There is no rationale—either from reason or from tradition—for attributing an abhijñā to a 4 year old who subsequently and completely arbitrarily loses that ability two years later.
Well, consciousness is an abstraction. So there’s nothing much to say about that. The nature of consciousness is abstract. Full stop. However, to suggest that we don’t know about memory is simply wrong. We know in very great detail how memory works (though as Chalmers fans will point out, knowing how the mechanism works still doesn’t solve the Hard Problem).
Your presentation of hemispherectomies is tendentious. The vast majority of people who have this operation are children who have severe epilepsy. Typically they have hemispherectomies because half of their brain has not developed properly or is otherwise defective and has not been making any great contribution to the personality anyway. This operation is usually a last resort when the defective side is the cause of incessant seizures (I recall a case of a child having 800 seizures a day). And while removing the defective half does have severe consequences and they usually need arduous rehabilitation (from which they recover because their brains are still plastic), the absence of incessant seizures is such a huge benefit that the massive downsides of the hemispherectomy are worth it.
So despite your attempt to bend this scenario to your story, it doesn’t really fit.
And this is simply nonsense. We share all parts of our brains with crocodiles. But we have them in different proportions. The “three brain” theory–and the crocodile or lizard brain part of it—was a popular misconception in the 20th century. Add it to the pile of discarded popular theories that contains the “left/right” brain hypothesis and “Women are from Venus Men are from Mars”. I recommend Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions are Made, for a modern view of the structure of the brain.
The hard-drive is simply a false analogy. Memory is in no way like a hard-drive. This is a red-herring.
When I invoke the physical world in this sense, what I’m looking for is not the supernatural hard-drive, but evidence of the energy involved in moving things around. Recalling a memory undoubtedly involves the brain which is undoubtedly a physical entity. Anything that can change the brain must act in the real, physical world. In which case we can measure it. But no one has ever made a measurement that could not explained by reference to the natural world. No supernatural explanation is required in any field of science.
Since the brain is physical, remembering past-lives must have a physical component. Even if the memory itself is supernatural, it has to interact with the natural world. And we should be able to detect that interaction. People have looked and never found anything that required the supernatural. Supernatural explanations are usually worse than no explanation.
This argument gives every impression that pseudo-science is straw that religious Buddhists are clutching at to reinforce a belief (a feeling about an idea) that you feel uncertain about. There seems to be a feel a strong need to prove the belief not just to yourselves, but performatively to each other. Given how aggressively and unkindly Sutta Central Buddhists behave towards heterodoxy, I can see why you might fear your peer’s judgement. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of the excrement you dish out to people like me. I get that.
For me it’s problematic that you think “science” can help relieve your anxieties, but that you can’t tell what real science looks like. This is because you’ve never made any systematic attempt to understand it and no attempt whatever to put it into practice. At best you seem to know a little about science from outdated sources and what you think you know is used tendentiously.
If I was coming to you as someone who had only read about Buddhism in early 20th century books and had never tried to put it into practice, I wonder how seriously you would take it when I started talking like an expert on Buddhism? Probably not at all seriously.
Face it: this is a religious argument about a religious doctrine: the doctrine of transmigrating souls. No bone fide scientists believe in rebirth or takes any religious afterlife theory seriously—because they have found no need to and Occam’s razor applies: don’t go inventing supernatural entities, if you can explain what you see without them. Moreover, no Christians, Muslims, or Jews believe as you do. This is not intended as an argument from popularity, I’m just highlighting the lack of consensus combined with religious certainty: only one religion (or better sect) can be right about the afterlife. At most.
The principle objection to the view being defended here, for Buddhists, is that it involves
- ātmavāda (a soul that transmigrates)
- śāśvatavāda (an everlasting soul)
- The temporary attribution of one (and only one) of the six abhijñā (the highest form of Buddhist magical powers) to untrained infants, when they normally only manifest in arhats or buddhas.
Notably, otherabhijñā are never found in modern infants, only the one that reinforces the idea of a soul. So is an abhijñā a highly advanced magical power, a sign of having realised the Buddha’s teaching after years of intensive practice, or is it a completely trivial ability that any child could possess?
For scientists the main problem is that supernatural “memories” are supernatural. And the supernatural doesn’t exist. in 1946, James Randi offered $1 million to to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal ability under agreed-upon scientific testing criteria It remained unclaimed at his death in 2020. And every single time someone has tried to scientifically investigate the supernatural, what they have found is fraud. In every case. This tells us that people who claim supernatural knowledge or abilities are liars or delusional or religious.
As I say, none of you seems to have witnessed this research in progress. We only have Stephenson’s word that he did what he said and did not, for example, make the whole thing up. My guess is that he never left his office and his works should be filed under “creative writing”. It’s easy money as there are always some people who are anxious about their irrational magical beliefs.
Let me ask this, since it is considered by many to the acme of rational/critical thinking: What evidence, if it showed up, would you consider to have refuted your view? Is refutation even a possibility in your mind?
One way you could refute my view is this. At the point of death, publically predict that a certain adult will reincarnate at a certain time and place (which the Buddha could do). Then wait for that child to turn 4 and check what the child remembers about having been that adult by having a neutral third party expert child-witness interviewer go and interview them without knowing what to expect. If the child has accurate memories of the person they supposedly reincarnated from, then maybe… but of course, how do you prevent the parents or anyone from grooming that child?
I recently been wondering if what makes Buddhists so very anxious about this stuff is the idea of non-self. Popular metaphysical interpretations of this religious doctrine frequently suggest that we don’t exist or our sense of self is somehow unreal. This might explain why this ātmavāda of Stephenson’s that you are pushing appeals to you and to so many religious Buddhists. As I noted earlier, Joseph Walser has pointed out that informal ātman beliefs are ubiquitous amongst oriental Buddhists. So in a sense, Buddhists defending an ātmavāda is not so unusual in practice.
And this is partly why in my work I have tried to reframe all these negations, and all Buddhist doctrines as concerned with epistemic rather than metaphysical problems. The disconnect between science and Buddhism is not wholly eliminated, but many of the obvious contradictions are resolved by clarifying the domain of applicability as what we know rather than what is real.
I thought that’s already commonly done in the tibetan Tulku system. Including the person dying accurately predicting the family they will be reborn in, choosing the items of his past life which are mixed with other similar items etc… Parents usually don’t know about the child until the people who are tasked to find the master who reborn went to that family and they have to test which siblings it is if the dates are too close together.
I am not sure of their neutral 3rd party methodology. It shouldn’t be too hard to implement should one be interested to.
There’s plenty of other rebirth researchers as well and actual photographs plus autopsy reports for the cases of birthmarks correspondence to fatal wound.
You are still using philosophy to judge data, explicitly denying the whole data as fake story, fiction just because of the philosophy.
Absence Of Evidence is not evidence of absence, but actually in this case, evidences are there, but people don’t read it or decide that it’s fiction.
https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/bics-afterlife-proof/bics-essay-contest-winners-2/
Here’s another source, which I haven’t finished them all, and they cover more method of investigation of past lives. They are of quite good qualities.
Try Dean Radin. Dean Radin - Wikipedia I think he claimed statistically significant result for psi phenomena.
Also that statement quoted above is a standard brainwashing thing by physicalism in order to perpetuate itself. How many people actually done a full literature review of all psi research?
I am sorry that has happened but I hope you are not saying I am one of those? I have never intended to be cruel, I have just been pushing back against some of your contentious contentions. I am happy to withdraw any apologist for anything I did that was cruel- not my intention.
Not sure what post of mine you count as the “excrement” I dish out, but happy to respond if you can draw my attention to an example. Everything I have posted I have meant.
…and the University of Virginia continued this unit for decades and all the hundreds of people working there are in the associated departments are all in on this grand multi-decade conspiracy. Things like that have certainly happened…I just don’t find it to be the most plausible solution to this little quandary we have.
Completely disagree. The fact that there are different concepts about rebirth across the Buddhist schools doesnt mean the broad concept of rebirth is wrong, it just means there isn’t consensus. Something can be right even with no-one knowing it (e.g., the gravity you describe in great detail above…up to the time of Newton).…in case you havent realised, I am not questioning science, it would be way above my pay grade to do that as you so kindly point out I am just suggesting that science is obsessed with the physical domain and is blindly ignorant of the mirror domain in the observable universe: the non-physical domain.
I dont see this as any special magical power. It is just a young child, who just died, remember their past birth. I cant remember anything till I was about 5 years old now…but if you asked me when I was 2 years old I probably could have answered what I did an hour beforehand…everything is anicca…even memories. Some, a very few, are able to retain memories for a while, under certain circumstances. That doesn’t mean they are Noble Ones.
Yes, its an object in the non-physical domain. It isn’t explained by particular orientations of protons, Higg’s bosons and upward facing quarks. Thats my hypothesis. You can do all the physical domain experiments using physical domain equipment you like. Functional MRI will tell you which parts of the brain light up when the person is angry but that doesn’t mean you have a measure for anger…just an observation of an epi-phenomenon arising in the physical domain as it intersects with the non-physical domain.
What I am suggesting is that physical things have locations in space (and time). Non-physical things do not. If you feel happy or sad, that feeling isn’t in a particular location, because it is an object in the non-physical domain. If you suggest it is in the brain somewhere, I ask where. A neurosurgeon could excise that person’s left hemisphere, or their right hemisphere, and they could still experience happiness or sadness.
Yes, they can’t cut out both hemispheres as then the fragile conjunction of the physical and non-physical breaks down!
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The fact is the fact. There is nothing above facts in science. To call it nonsense is to show, in your own words:
In the study of memory, it doesn’t matter how reliable the memories are, because that reliability is secondary to the object of study itself - the memories themselves.
And there is also a reasoning fallacy: the fact that memories can be unreliable does not mean that all memories are unreliable.
The conclusion about the reliability or unreliability of such memories is not a fact in itself, but a conclusion that has to be drawn on the basis of these facts. And the problem is that such a conclusion cannot be made objectively - there is no apparatus for doing so in relation to the past lives.
In a situation where we have facts about memories allegedly relating to past lives, but where there is no way to objectively prove or disprove these facts, to deny both the validity of these memories themselves and the reality of past lives is not only unscientific, it is anti-scientific - it’s not science and it’s not about science, it’s just about personal, unsubstantiated blind beliefs.
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Agreed, physical things need to be measured and observed in the physical domain.
Do you agree that non-physical things equally need to be measured and observed in the non-physical?
You may be surprised to know I do not believe in anything supernatural. I think everything that occurs has an explanation, and very little of that is chance.
The view of God as omniscient, all-merciful and omnipotent can’t exist in any universe where I stub my toe (God knows I am in pain, He cares and wants to relieve my pain, and he can do anything; ergo if I have pain no such God exists).
The Buddhist explanation makes much more sense. If it was internally inconsistent I would reject it…just as I do reject certain aspects of Theravada teaching that not fit with the rest. I don’t believe that women can’t become Buddha’s for example. I don’t believe that dana to an Enlightened one would be better than dana to a begger (in the circumstance where I don’t know they are enlightened) as the teaching says the mind is the forerunner of all things and that makes much more sense to me, I see that system working very elegantly. Its basically the mirror law to physics…the physics of animate objects you might say.
One could ask you the exact same question: what evidence for rebirth would you accept? The only evidence possible is these recollections that you reject out of hand as they clearly must be wrong, as you label them ‘supernatural’ and then use that as an ipso facto argument that therefore they are wrong. This is circular logic.
This is not my understanding of rebirth. The EBT has something like if a blind man is walking along a straight road and doesn’t know there is a massive holed in the road…its likely he is going to fall in. That isn’t a prediction of the future that is certain, it is simply making an educated assessment of what is likely based on the known facts.
My understanding of rebirth is that when you push on the universe, it pushes back. When you live a life (and severe previous lives!) of wholesome thoughts, speech and actions, you are more likely to be re-born in a favourable place than someone who is drowning in greed, hatred and delusion. That doesn’t mean you can say this is going to happen or that. There is a complex physical system and a complex non-physical system operating simultaneously. If I had all the data…exactly what zygote options were available, I could have an educated guess…but there are multiple (?infinite) options for life forms, so how can you predict? Humans are only one option, hence it isnt at all surprising that very few rebirth memories are reported.
I believe you merely rationalize your predilection for the idea that “there is no God”. So while the proof seems to be valid for you, most obviously isn’t valid for others, for example what do you think about such reasoning?
I’ve said that I don’t accept the notion of the watchmaker who is imperfect or who isn’t benevolent. I reject the notion of the imperfect watchmaker, because those aspects of the world’s government and organization that seem flawed or nonsensical might prove otherwise, if we only knew the plan. While clearly seeing a plan in everything, we also see certain things that apparently make no sense, but if there’s a reason behind everything, then won’t these things be guided by that same reason? Seeing the reason but not the actual plan, how can we say that certain things are outside the plan, when we don’t know what it is? Just as a poet of subtle rhythms can insert an arrhythmic verse for rhythmic purposes, i.e. for the very purpose he seems to be going against (and a critic who’s more linear than rhythmic will say that the verse is mistaken), so the Creator can insert things that our narrow logic considers arrhythmic into the majestic flow of his metaphysical rhythm.
I admit that the notion of an unbenevolent watchmaker is harder to refute, but only on the surface. One could say that since we don’t really know what evil is, we cannot rightfully affirm that something is bad or good, but it’s true that a pain, even if it’s for our ultimate good, is obviously bad in itself, and this is enough to prove that evil exists in the world. A toothache is enough to make one disbelieve in the goodness of the Creator. The basic error in this argument seems to lie in our complete ignorance of God’s plan, and our equal ignorance of what kind of an intelligent person the Intellectual Infinite might be. The existence of evil is one thing; the reason for its existence is another. The distinction may be subtle to the point of seeming sophistic, but it is nevertheless valid. The existence of evil cannot be denied, but one can deny that the existence of evil is evil. I admit that the problem persists, but only because our imperfection persists.
Pessoa
My point is that it is fine to believe or not to believe in something as long as one remembers that it is faith.
But mistaking faith for knowledge … It is where self-deception starts.
The argument that God cannot have created the world because of the suffering, misery and ugliness in it (or some similar form) has always seemed to me as inconclusive for proof that there is no god as the opposite argument that ‘God must have created the world because of the order, joy and beauty in it’ (or some similar form) seemed for proof that there is a god. In either case it is presumed that one knows, can distinguish, what god ought to be.
Both alike imply that the holders of each view will only believe in what they approve of, i.e., in what pleases them.
Now, surely, is it not that assumption, that growth or surcease in one’s subjective self, that ought to be understood and faith in its subsidence cultivated?
Nanamoli Thera
Well, I didn’t follow any of that but I am not saying there is no God at all, just not one with those three characteristics…at least my brain doesn’t get it so I go with what my brain gets. Sure I could be wrong, but nothing in your post is an argument against the logic of the three characteristics of the usual concepts of God in the major theist religions.
About “rebirth” or is about “And the supernatural doesn’t exist.” sufficient?
The latter seems simpler.
How about checking scientific documentation and investigation of body of Saint Charbel which stayed incorrupted for numerous years, visited by Christians or Buddhists. It was scientifically investigated by doctors - the video states one doctor studied it 34 times over period of 17 years, he wasn’t the only one there were others.
I can only see rebirth as real if there is an intelligent ground or background against life takes place.
Mental of nature. All pervasive. So the mental domain is primairy and all around us. Not only where we think it, in the head.
I have no faith in a stream of vinnana’s that can travel through space without any support of such an unborn field of intelligence. But i can have some faith in the idea that upon this intelligent field vinnana’s as a stream can re-arise and ‘move’.
I feel most likely the total of life takes place against this intelligent background in which after death all again becomes absorbed, and if there is still some volitional mental energy left, that gives rise to a new moment of vinnana and rebirth. If this intelligent field is the ground for all this, those first vinnana’s re-arising after death, can also be disembodied. Any personal existence is in this sense a perspective in that universal field of intelligence. In this sense we need no brain nor body if this intelligent field is the backkground or ground in wich the total of life takes place.
I do not see how a stream of vinnana can at death moment travel through the air en connect to an embryo somewhere in the world. For me this feels as magical thinking.
But when i imagine an intelligent field, it becomes more realistic.
I also feel this all needs to be explained. I feel that is also part of sincere Dhamma investigation. But probably this will always be pseudo-science? I think i lost you already. Probably your mind has judged this as all nonsense and speculation? If that is the case, then i think you also must be so honest to admit you are not willing to consider alternative worldviews. But maybe you are willing.
But i also feel there are real problems. Buddhist carefully avoid thinking about evolution, i feel. The body of a human show many such clues that we have developed from an ape-like creature. It cannot be true too, i believe, that humans and animal are real categories. Why do we not think about ourselves as animals? Makes no sense, i think.
It is quit obvious i feel, it is antropocentrism. Even how the heavens and hells are imagined to be is seen from human perspective. How can a pond with stinking bodies be hell for an eal? Why are even heavenly beings so obsessed with power, might. It seems all quit childish to me.
Even such human things like status and might are present in the heavens. My God. Good behaviour is rewarderd with the ability to rule over others??
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.
Nibbana is not seen as a place or as somewhere located, but must samsara been seen that way? Or can, for example, hellish existence arise everywhere in this life and after this life? Must it have some location? In the depths of Earth? How realistic is that?
I am also not sure if the Buddha really revealed all about this. Is it possible the Buddha talked about heavens and hells as locations, maybe because that was how people taught about this in that time and was also enough to be conducive to the goal that beings understand that their views and actions based upon them, have consequences for them beyond death?
I do not exclude such things totally.
Yes. I personally feel this perspective of rebirth is important. I feel, without that, Dhamma is more or less groundless.
I have also faith in that. I also believe that a reliable wittness is a legitimate source of knowlegde. I also do not like the attitude to distrust all people see, experience, know from their subjective experience.
I do not think i am naieve about this, but i know from experience that it is very easy to question the reliability of persons and really slander them. One contact with a therapist can be enough for a person to ridiculize that person. There are really people who enjoy this. This is something personal for them.
They have an agenda to unmask people as unreliable. They are not really interested in what people have to say, what they have seen, what they know. That is their fakeness. Their immorality, i feel.
No, but what about the lens of antropocentrism? What is heaven for an animal, can be hell for us. And vice versa. I have seen, somewhere, descriptions of heaven from the perspective of a man being surrounded by most beautiful female deva’s, making music, dance, …but have you ever seen such from the perspective of woman, or gay people? If not, i choice…fake news. Why would the universe work this way that heaven suits the needs and wishes of man and not of woman, or suits the wishes of humans and not of animals etc?
I have understood science (parts of that) speaks about the fabric of space. That surprised me when i saw a documentairy about that because i had never taught about space in the sense of the fabric of space. I think about this too as in the fabric of intelligence. I like that idea…so it is true 
It’s hard to engage with you with such a criterion of judging truth.
Read AN3.65
don’t go by reasoned train of thought, don’t go by the acceptance of a view after deliberation,
That was just kidding.
I feel it is normal that people do not accept magical thinking. The kind of thinking that a stream of vinnana’s somehow ends here in the Netherlands and re-starts there again in India and ’ descents’ into a womb and joins with a fertilized egg? Huh? What? Excuse me? …Huh??
I feel it is very normal that people ask question with all this.
Maybe a child can believe this to really happen but not an educated person. An educated person understands this is magical thinking. It is almost as if one sees that stream of vinnana as a entity. As an atta. Not very different from a soul.
I feel it is very normal that people have no trust in such explanations. It is like totally leaving the domain of conditionally arising. Suddenly there are streams of vinnana’s flying through to the air, ending here, re-starting there, descending, ascending, entering wombs, joining with fertilized eggs…come on…Suddenly all is magic?
I am not interested in disprooving rebirth, i am interested in an explanation that really appeals to a developed mind and not to a magical thinking mind. I also believe the worlds needs this.
An explanation that is not magical and makes sense. But who can give it?
My feeling is, all must start with seeing intelligence as a kind of fabric that supports all that exists. Nothing can ever escape this intelligence (not meant as a being). Not what we think about as physical, nor the mental. A fabric of Intelligence as fundamental to life.
I do not see this but i feel it is not convincing at all when one can explain all in a way that is almost scientific…if this then that…with this as condition, that arises…etc…but when it comes down to evolution, how beings have come on Earth, rebirth, suddenly take refuge into magical thinking.
For myself that does not feel integer, sincere, upright.
This is the issue I am trying to tease out in the other thread about physical vs. non-physical.
Your statement is suggesting that the “stream of vinnana” has a location and so then it is hard to explain how it “gets to” the other location.
What if your thesis that the vinnana has a location is wrong? What if it is a non-physical object and the reality is that only physical objects are fixed in time and space? What if non-physical objects, “things” like the mind, do NOT have a location? Ajahn Brahm sometimes asks if you feel sad, where is that “feeling”. Can you locate it somewhere in the brain, or perhaps the “heart”. Or does it just exist but not in any location? Ditto other non-physical.
Does my name “Hasantha” exist? Yes
Does it have a location? No (I am not referring to the entity here, just the concept of it
With that framework, of physical things obeying the laws of physics and having a time and space, but non-physical things not needing a time or space, it isn’t so hard to see how rebirth could happen across the universe, either instantly or not.
Magical thinking is believing in essence and substances. The world is supported by magical thinking. It is in the disintegration of such thinking that rebirth might be understood. If you want to know more about rebirth from life-to-life, then study rebirth from moment-to-moment in this very life. How does it work? On what conditions does it arise? Rebirth life to life is no different than moment to moment, but we accept moment to moment without question and have huge effort with life to life. This is because of our magical thinking. What ends moment to moment? What continues? 
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