Meditation, metaphysical assumptions and rebirth

To be fair, there are numerous metaphysics in science (social-constructivism, realism, materialism, phenomenology, pragmatism, and so on).

There are also some Christian denominations that believe that the bodies of the faithful will be physically resurrected in the end times, i.e. they are materialists.

There are also physicists who are not materialists, who think even spacetime not fundamental, but derived from a deeper, non-physical structure.

I don’t think “matter is all there is” has any bearing on science, except in the way it shapes the kind of research questions scientists ask.

If you believe “matter is all there is” you would ask “how does the brain generate consciousness”. If you believed something else, you might ask a different question, but it would still be science.

I’m not a 100% sure what you mean here.

In what way is “matter is all there is” useful to you? How do you use it in daily life to explain things?

What’s your current framework? How would you evaluate metaphysical assumptions about the world?

Of the two statements “matter is all there is” and “rebirth is real”, only one of them comes with a (proposed) method of verification.

Why is a statement that it is (allegedly) possible to verify, weaker or more tenuous than one that is, as far as I can see, impossible to verify?

No worries!

Please read this reply as if it were spoken with a friendly tone of voice! :slight_smile:

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All views are fabricated. So, eventually you have to relinquish them all.

I am going to share a general statement below, not related to the quote, which is my opinion. It could very well be wrong.

The attempts of many people to reconcile rebirth with modern neuroscience is just one big waste of time.

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Regarding point 1. in your post.

One current researcher has been working on this actually, using evolutionary models to show that our realist picture of the world may not actually give us a picture of what is really there.
See the following article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/

Regarding point two. One of my favorite recent defenders of an alternative and well worked out position to physicalism is Bernardo Kastrup. If you want a well argued POV of an alternative metaphysics, check out his work, particularly his “The Idea of the World”. Now, do I think its a perfect metaphysics? no. But its certainly a good one to get a different perspective than the popular materialism that is so pervasive out there.

There’s also Phillip Goff’s “Galileo’s Error” which argues with a slightly different theory, panpsychism.

Regarding point three, I think there are good reasons to abandon physicalism, if you read some of the work of the individuals I have mentioned above as well as others like Chalmers, you’ll see why many others think so. Regarding part b of 3, I don’t think the position of the Buddha is a scientific position, its remains a religious-spiritual position, so it is still based in some way on trust and so on (but also on philosophical issues, such as the pragmatic wager argument outlined by Jayatilleke and expanded on by Thanissaro. However, there are other good reasons pointing to it being true (such as the reports of numerous other individuals of past life memories and so on, as well as other philosophical arguments like Dharmakirti’s classic argument).

Regarding 4, I don’t think we need to take all tradition and all ideas in the EBTs as true, and in Buddhism (as well as in other religions), there many more nuanced perspectives than textual fundamentalism. Indeed, I think the EBTs give us various tools (such as the simile of the raft, Kalama sutta, etc) which show us how to use the texts without becoming fundamentalists.

Regarding 5, all I can say is, fair enough, keep researching!

Finally, for six, clearly there are numerous mystical experiences and there is no single system set out to analyze or compare these. Since these are subjective experiences, the only way to try to understand them is subjectively, through mental development. It’s not a perfect discipline, but then again, there is no such thing!

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I must have missed the rest of your points, or did you add them later? Anyways :slight_smile:

The difference is that Buddhism has a method for obtaining the same knowledge as the founder. In prophetic religions you have to take the profet’s word for it, they don’t tell you “go up to the mountain, and God will tell you what I just told you”.

Buddhism is basically “do this, and you’ll understand what I understand”.

I still don’t see how “matter is all there is” is a explanatory, predictive or instrumental in everyday life.

Maybe it has psychological benefits? E.g. Christianity is pretty awful in the whole “go to hell for not believing” thing, so maybe it has some utility there? No demons and ghosts to worry about?

Is this different than the contradictions that come up in various scientific fields or politics or in ordinary life?

I think ultimately we just have to pick a field, be it Buddhism, Physics, Christianity, etc and see whether it works out.

Like, the Buddha is the only one focusing on suffering and claiming to have a solution for it. Personally that appeals to me, because after considering it, suffering seems to be the primary problem.

Other religions seem to be focusing on other problems. Psychology doesn’t have an answer.

Starting from a place of genuine uncertainty, where would be a better place to go?

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Hi!
After giving a lot of thought to the topic of metaphysical assumptions in Buddhism, I think that I’m in a position to summarize in a better way all what I’ve been trying to say, and I’d like to share this explanation to you, in case that it elicits some additional answers and views that could lead to reach better conclusions.

This is how I would say it today:
Can we trust in the power of introspection alone to attain some truths about reality?

I’m not questioning whether the Buddha experienced the sensation of having seen past lives, or having talked to some devas or maras, or having seen how an individual was reborn. What I’m questioning is if we can assure, just by means of individual experiences and introspection, that we indeed know that what we experience has a objective correlate/reference or that what we think are explanatory mechanisms of some phenomena are indeed the real mechanisms underlying those phenomena.

Did the Buddha and his followers put to test the idea that x individual was y individual in his/her past life, or that it was a matter of fact that z deva was present in front of me a few seconds ago, etc.
If they didn’t, are we just trusting their introspective powers as privileged?
Are we trusting in the account of the followers of the Buddha just because that account coincides with what the Buddha experienced?
If mere coincidence of introspective “knowledge” o revelation is good criteria to acquire some belief, then why not to trust in the “knowledge” brought by cases of mass hysteria? (Just in case, I’m not saying that what the Buddha and his followers experienced was based on some delusion; I’m just doubting in the power of mere numbers to say that some belief points to some truth about reality).

I hope that I’m adding some relevant perspective to the conversation.
If not (if I’m just exposing the same ideas than before), then ignore this message.

EDIT: I wanted to add another example:
There are some pathologies or traumatic events (for instance, in some cases of Alzheimer’s disease, or after some brain traumas) that can cause to the individual to experience a feeling of fragmentation of the sense of self. Does that feeling necessarily points to the ontological conventionality, fluidity or dependent origination of the self?
In this case, thefeeling caused by those pathologies and traumatic events can lead to a reflection that reveals some actual aspect of reality (of the self, in this example).
However, I doubt that some cerebral process or state that could cause some feeling or intuition necessarily reveals aspects of reality.

Kind regards!

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I recently came over something called Ostrom’s law, which goes something like “what works in practice must also work in theory.”

So, if it’s possible to make an end of suffering in practice, it must also be permitted by whatever principles actually govern reality, whether we can comprehend them or not.

Maybe it makes sense to start with the practical, and then infer what the metaphysics permit, rather than starting with the metaphysics and trying to infer whether the practical can work?

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Thanks for your answer!

I agree: there must be some natural regularities that allow the ending of suffering.
However, my doubts come about when talking about some ideas seen by personal experience (but not confirmed nor investigated by empirical means, but assumed as true because of the -already preassumed- privileged epistemological standpoint of the Buddha) that directly contradict the current materialistic paradigm, as it occurs with rebirth, past-lives memories, conversations with devas, etc.

Kind regards!

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You might like Nima Arkani-Hamed’s lecture The End of Spacetime as an example that even physics may come to reject the idea of matter being fundamental. The interface theory of perception is another serious challenge to materialism that comes from evolutionary theory.

I mean, are devas really more crazy than aliens? Is rebirth really more crazy than the multiverse?

I think reality is probably a lot weirder than we give it credit for. Even just this earth is packed with so many strange lifeforms. Not many people are going to see a pink fairy armadillo in their life, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

I guess my point is that it’s very hard to know anything for sure except the experiments you’re able to conduct personally, like meditation.

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Thank you so much for sharing this stuff. As soon as I’ve free time, I’ll be watching it.

However, I think some of my reasons for doubting persist, and I’d like to clarify my idea:
My difficulties for believing in rebirth, past-live memories, devas, etc., do not arise for the incompatibility itself (of course it is an important reason for my doubts, but not the main one), but for the reasons the buddhist practitioners have for believing in such ideas, or, even beyond that, for the reasons the Buddha had for having such views (i.e., that experiencing something that could be interpreted as past-lives memories does in fact assures that there is a metaphysical reality that matches with such idea).

Do we believe because it is reasonable, or is it because we’re buddhist?
Also, by accepting that reality may be way weirder than what our current paradigms suggest does not necessarily lead us to say that all buddhist beliefs are the correct ones; maybe, suffering could be eradicated, but that is not evidence for assuming the whole package of metaphysical buddhist beliefs.

Kind regards!

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Do you believe in materialism because it’s reasonable, or because of your identity? :slight_smile:

How have you empirically verified materialism? Are you applying the same standards of evidence to your own materialist beliefs as those you propose for the Buddha’s claims?

I’m not sure how to answer to this question.
Some would say that materialism is not an empirically verifiable fact, but a supposition that allows and deepens scientific investigation.
And, because of the comparative advantages it brings in the ever-increasing ability for manipulating aspects of nature and predicting events, then one could say that it is an useful and successful metaphysical frame.

I agree with you: there’s an aspect of identification in my agreement with materialism, but not only an aspect of identification: the comparative utility is an important aspect.

Also, I don’t know if equating reasons for adhering to x or y worldview makes, by itself, any worldview or set if beliefs equally reasonable.

Kind regards!

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Thanks @bridif1 for bringing this up, and resurrecting (rebirthing?) it, and to Bhante @Sujato for his contributions:

Perhaps we could also ask “What use is it? What can be done with it?” My, possibly simplistic, view of physical science is that we have observations, and we have models that can be used to make predictions. We could ask “is a photon real?”, but I tend to think that the idea of “reality” is secondary. Primary is that with the model provided by quantum mechanics we can make accurate predictions, and use that predictive power to engineer things (such as the technology we’re relying on to discuss here…).

Now, it’s not clear to me that Dhamma should be considered to be the same type of knowledge system as Science (I’m suspicious of the idea of trying to reduce all knowledge systems to a single type - we discussed this recently regarding psychology: The Social and Psychological fields - Arts or Sciences?, and I think the same arguments apply to Dhamma). However, if we consider the first-person observations from meditation (and life!) to be our empirical data, and the information in the suttas as our model, then we might ask how the model enables us to eliminate dukkha:

I’ve been recently revisiting Patrick Kearney’s talks on what he calls “life after life”. [Here’s one version: Dharma Seed - Anatta & the problem of life-after-life]
His thesis is that the Buddha was not interested in rebirth as a theory of post-mortem survival. If we take it that way, we’re making Sati’s mistake:

“Absolutely, reverends. As I understand the Buddha’s teachings, it is this very same consciousness that roams and transmigrates, not another.”

And we would likely suffer the same criticism:

“Silly man, who on earth have you ever known me to teach in that way? …
MN38 SuttaCentral

The teaching is about letting go of (among other things) views of self.

Past-life memories are presented in detail in many suttas as a prelude to awakening, e.g. MN4 SuttaCentral

I remembered: ‘There, I was named this, my clan was that, I looked like this, and that was my food. This was how I felt pleasure and pain, and that was how my life ended. When I passed away from that place I was reborn somewhere else. There, too, I was named this, my clan was that, I looked like this, and that was my food. This was how I felt pleasure and pain, and that was how my life ended. When I passed away from that place I was reborn here.’ And so I recollected my many kinds of past lives, with features and details.

So, is the “reality” or not of these memories the point? Or did clearly seeing the identities that he had taken on over countless lives help to understand how fruitless it was to obsess about identity?

After his awakening the Buddha taught, e.g. SN12.20 SuttaCentral

When a noble disciple has clearly seen with right wisdom this dependent origination and these dependently originated phenomena as they are, it’s impossible for them to turn back to the past, thinking:
‘Did I exist in the past? Did I not exist in the past? What was I in the past? How was I in the past? After being what, what did I become in the past?’ …

After awakening, the Buddha is not tied to concepts of beings. Phenomena arise according to causes and conditions. Those phenomena can, of course, be interpreted as the arising of being (a common simile is a river giving rise to whirlpools), but the understanding is not defined by that interpretation (it’s useful to know about the whirlpools if you are kayaking, but the whirlpool is not something separate from the river).

Of course, since I don’t have the Buddhas awakening, I’m still very much tied to concept of self! So I doubt that the above is particularly accurate. However, it does give me a way of approaching Bhante’s question: “What does it mean?”

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From another angle, we have become very good at turning fossil fuels into gains for a minority of humans on the globe, at the cost of potentially catastrophic climate change that endangers the entire planet.

What you call technology someone else would call transferring wealth from the underprivileged and from future generations.

The narrative of progress is just another organizing social myth. In the past people believed in other myths. In the future, our time will (hopefully) be seen as a time of ignorance and foolishness.

Edit: For example, we kill 70 billion animals each year, mostly for the sake of the sense pleasure of the people who live in affluent countries. In poor countries, people still die from hunger and preventable disease.

If we had a metaphysics that took consciousness seriously, maybe it would be more successful ethically?

How could one judge the reasonableness of a worldview though? What objective standards are there?

In order to answer the first part of your reply, I’ll paraphrase Mario Bunge:
People mistake science for technique, and technique for an specific kind of technological application, namely, the one used by political groups.

It’s important to state the difference between those three elements. Only by doing so, we can know who is the real “enemy” out there (and I don’t think it is science).

On the reasonableness issue:
You’re right, it’s difficult to establish some convencing criteria to distinguish between ideas. Tentatively, I’d propose that reasonableness can be evaluated by judging conjointly the content of the idea (i.e. whether it’s compatible with our current knowledge of reality), and the methods used to acquiere a belief based on that ideas (i.e. whether it’s acquired by the use of some method that allows for feedback, control, testabilty, explanation of underlying mechanisms, etc.), and by the effects brought about by that idea (effective attainment of goals using the knowledge brought by that ideas).

This is just one possible proposal, but I think it is useful to rule out some ideas that can only be believed by blind faith.

Kind regards!

My past self relates to your “frustration”. So because I feel you are a smart person, I’d like to share some thoughts on that, hoping it will help. :slightly_smiling_face: While others have already given good comments, I think one aspect is still undervalued, namely that of meditation. :meditation: So I’ll focus on that.

But first of all: You wonder why you should care about a problem you can’t see. Why should you let rebirth influence your practice if you can’t see it? I’d argue you shouldn’t! There is nothing you can effectively do about a problem you can’t see, anyway! So why worry about it? :smiley: Better be pragmatic about things. Fix the things you can. That’s always been my approach to life and Buddhism, anyway.

What you can “worry” about though, meaning where you can put your energy, is to find out whether you really have all the data to really know the problem in the first place, let alone how it might influence your practice. Do you really know how suffering works, how the mind works? I’d go out on a limb here and assume you don’t. Please forgive me for being presumptuous. :wink: Only when you really know the problem of suffering, can it inform your practice. You can’t do it on mere faith, like me. (In a sense this is the difference between faith-follower and dhamma-follower.)

So how to get that data? You’re absolutely right, don’t rely on faith, belief, or hearsay. That in Buddhism (or I’d say in life in general) is not a way to attain knowledge.

Let me go on a little tangent here. If we’re honest, even science—to which belief in rebirth is often opposed—itself is largely belief and hearsay. I, for example, have never seen the moons of Saturn. But I belief that they exist, because trustworthy scientists tell me so. Yet, because I’ve not seen them myself, I don’t really know.

So if we’re truly honest, we won’t pretend to really know things because scientists tell us. For example, somebody mentioned “according to Sean Carroll we know enough to rule out most of the paranormal / ghosts / gods stuff. Our current scientific knowledge makes it highly unprobable that there exists stuff that has significant influence on us AND is still undiscovered”. (Nothing against that person, I just thought this is a good example, and you said you are compelled by it.) But in a sense this is just putting faith in Sean Carroll! Why should we trust him? Whatever the answer is, unless we’ve done all the work of all the scientist Carroll relies on, in the end it comes down to a kind of belief. And what is “our knowledge” anyway? :thinking: To me, and to the Buddha, there is no such thing. Real knowledge is always a personal thing, something that can’t be shared.

OK, some science-minded people will be triggered by now… :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: And the moons of Saturn may be a silly example. (Which is kind of the point, to be honest…) :smiley: So here’s a real-life example out of my life (and I do have a Master of Science, for whatever it’s worth): No matter how much my professors talked about it, I never really could believe in the wave-particle duality of light (which, you know, is just the weirdest thing–much, much weirder than rebirth!) It just seemed nonsense and humbug to me! It really did. But then I did experiments in the lab and found it to be true. Light behaves that way. Then I could accept it, even though it is still weird.

So do you belief in the particle-wave duality? Or not? If so, have you seen it for yourself or is it just a kind of faith? … Even scientists often don’t ask themselves such questions, which is kind of ironic to me. :sweat_smile:

Anyway, that rant against science aside. What, then, is the way to really know things? In science you often first need the right tools. For the particle-wave duality I needed a laser and a splitter and look at the interference patterns. To see the moons of Saturn I would need a telescope and look at the sky. I can’t be bothered, though! Because it’s kind of irrelevant to my life.

But if rebirth were true, that is very relevant. So that’s worth investigating. And to see rebirth you also need a tool: the jhanas. And you also need to look somewhere specific: at the past, informed by the Buddha’s teachings.

Currently I can’t see the moons of saturn, because I don’t have a telescope. However, that doesn’t mean somebody who has seen the moons through a telescope uses inference when they say so. Similarly, when somebody sees the workings of rebirth (and really sees it, not imagines it) it’s not really fair, or right, to say they use inference. They’ve simply seen it with a tool you don’t have.

Not only do they have the tool; they also know how to use it. If I give you a telescope without instructions, and you’ve never seen one before, you may do all sort of things with it; turn it around, use it as a drum stick, build a shrine out of it, etc. You may never discover you can use it to look at Saturn until I tell you. So that’s why the Buddha spoke about recollecting past lives and dependent origination, and so on. So that when you have the right tool of jhana, you know where to apply it.

So although this may sound preachy or even dismissive of your approach (sorry for that), the best advise I can give you is just to accept that you can’t accept rebirth. And then use the energy you invest in worrying about it to develop your meditation instead. :slightly_smiling_face:

Because when you say “I don’t think there is enough research on past-life memories done yet to make me certainly uncertain of my current views” I’ll respond to that saying there never will be enough research (external research, that is). Even if the whole world would tell you it is so, you yourself still don’t really have that knowledge. Not the Buddhist kind of knowledge, anyway.

Like I couldn’t accept the wave-particle duality until I really saw it, no matter how wise my professors were, you can’t accept rebirth until you see it. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think that’s the healthy approach. People who assume rebirth without question, they are often the ones who don’t go looking for it. :smiley:

I hope that also explains how you can know that you really know. Because like a telescope or laser is just different from the naked eye, a mind empowered by jhana is incomparable to the ordinary dull mind. Normally doubt and the other hindrances muddy the waters, but after samadhi they are gone.

That’s why the Buddha said the cause of right view is samma samadhi, i.e. the jhanas, and not faith. (Nor thinking things out.) :upside_down_face:

But don’t just trust me or the Buddha on this, I’ll advise you to go do it yourself! Otherwise you’ll proably be in doubt your whole life. Or at best you’ll end up with faith, which, although it can be beneficial, and many people will be satisfied with just that, won’t really get to the heart of the matter.

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Some would say that rebirth is not an empirically verifiable fact, but a supposition that allows and deepens Dhammic investigation.
And, because of the comparative advantages it brings in the ever-increasing ability for manipulating aspects of one’s personality and predicting kammic responses by extrapolating it to the current life, then one could say that it is a useful and successful metaphysical frame.

In short, you may say rebirth, just as materialism, can be viewed as a pragmatic tool. The fact that I believe in the former and you believe in the latter may be accounted for by our personalities, kamma, identification habits, etc. However, when talking and practicing within the Dhammic frame, i.e. for reaching the end of suffering, the Buddha taught rebirth, and I see no reason to doubt his competence. If we do, well, then we can doubt pretty much any other of His teachings: the Four Noble Truths, meditation instructions, sila… How come they are immune to our scepticism?

You may say that practicing sila and meditation does bring visible fruit in your current life. Well, then why not assume that believing in rebirth will as well and accept it as pragmatical, trusting the Buddha’s expertise?

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Here’s an interesting article on that quote:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/18/intuitive-mind/

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I had no idea and stand corrected, thanks for the info!

Yeah, when I see those kind of quotes, I often find they are fake.

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