Meditation, metaphysical assumptions and rebirth

Discussion
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21

Thanks, Karl!

I’m not sure if I explained myself correctly when saying “not seeing rebirth as a problem”.

What I was trying to say was that, since I was born in a Western country as a Catholic, I never thought about rebirth as a thing (i.e. I never considered or heard anything other than eternal Hell/Heaven for a destiny in the afterlife), even less as THE problem of sentient beings.

By getting acquainted with the Dhamma, not only I was solving a problem I knew I had (suffering), but I had to start to consider something I never knew existed as a problem I had. When faced to the idea of rebirth, at first I felt the same way I feel about Original Sin: I was being blamed for something I didn’t do and for not believing such event happened to begin with; Christianity (or Judaism?) invented a problem for us and they offered themselves as the solution, damning us to hell if we didn’t believe in the problem and not justifying well enough how did people know the problem was real in the first place.

Kind regards!

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22

Ahh yes, this is a really good point! And may I say, I really appreciate the way you’ve gone about inquiring. My only suggestion at this point would be that it’s okay to leave it unresolved. Such things are often a process of an unconscious evolution, try as we might to pin it down rationally.

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Coming from an agnostic background myself, dealing with gods and rebirth has certainly been a bit :exploding_head:

Thanks for the clarification and the insight. :pray:

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Thanks, everyone, for your kind answers and comprehension.

May you be free from doubts and suffering!

:pray:

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I was waiting in this thread to see if somebody mentions an obvious problem in what you wrote. As you ask about some possible help in the form of different thoughts, I give you these:

in what you writes the problem is not really the Rebirth but the absence of an investigation in the metaphysical assumption you are keeping, which is non-rebirth.

You wrote the rebirth assumption should exist by faith or the authority of the mystical experiences. This is not very right. On the contrary, the rebirth assumption is supported by an enough logics which is absent in the non-rebirth case. Of course, there is also that plus of the mystical side and the memories of quite people. And this is a good support because we know there is no person in this world with some mystical experience or memories from a previous non-existence. This can sounds obvious but that obviety is philosophicaly auto-explanatory.

Despite we don’t have access to an empirical experience of this problem, there are enough logical resources to clean our attachment to non-rebirth and the logical incoherences of this metaphysical assumption and belief. This is the biggest part of this problem. We were not born in some cultural context with rebirth but in one with non-rebirth. Therefore, we cannot adopt the rebirth like a blind substitute for non-rebirth. First we should look in the strong errors in the metaphysical assumption of non-rebirth.

Few times we read about these obvious contradictions in metaphysics of non-rebirth. That’s logical because this is like a comfortable shared non-sense, working like a brain programming in us. It only works like a platform wtihtout foundations although useful to request proofs for other thing. We can see hordes of people requesting all type of proofs for rebirth while they didn’t request any for non-rebirth. Why so?. Because most people is dragging their own metaphysical assumption in a quite ignorant way, without asking about its real sense and logical authority.

In example: you uses “death” like a clear border between continuity and nihilism because the moment of death; between existence and non-existence. However, when we think about death, this is not only the immediate appearance of a physical body without activity. We are naming “death” to the belief in a metaphysical assumption of an stage in where there is non-existence. This is the inferred knowledge of “death” arising from the view of a body without any activity. However, here we forget that same stage (the same metaphysical assumption endowed with the same nature of non-existence) also existed before we were born. And it has not impeded our birth. One should think two times about this. This is a foundamental metaphysical contradiction dragged by all the people believing in non-rebirth.

I writes “dragged” because mostly they cannot see these obvious thing. Be in case of common people, academics even some buddhist teachers. This collective “forgetfulness” is sealed in that metaphysical packet because this is a a foundamental piece to keep that wrong view.

Many buddhist teachers don’t put emphasis in this issue because this problem is not a direct obstacle to enter in the stream, at least in a general way. However, the wrong view of non-rebirth will be a problem soon or later because it conditions a deeper understanding of Reality. This is a wrong view opposed to the continuity ruling the Nature and the whole Universe, and of course the continuity present in the Dhamma law.

Notice also with non-rebirth we are forced to do one very strange exception to that law: with oneself. Why so?. Nobody can answer to that. There is no logic available to keep that exception. At the end this only can sound amazing or funny, depending of the person.

There are still more things to say about the incoherences of non-rebirth. There are more although it would be long.

Many times we forget the healthy skepticism present in Buddha teaching should be directed first to check our own assumptions before those from other people. On the contrary, we will lack of clear thoughts to understand other ideas and assumptions.

The investigation of the own metaphysical assumptions we are carrying is a very needed task. Siddharta did it to become a Buddha and also we should do it.

Also I believe a main difficulty for this purporse is when these issues go deeper in existential terms, and it can require from a real honesty with oneself. There is too much people with auto-impossed limits as soon they perceive Dhamma can touch other “important” worldly implications. I mean the people who see the Dhamma from a utilitarian point of view, for third purposes be political, scientifical, ideological or whatever. In such cases probably happens what an old philosopher said: the Truth is a demanding lady who don’t threw herself into the arms of a nobody.

Some different thoughts. Hope it helps.

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I do like the types of questions being posed by the OP. I suppose almost all religions propose some kind of answer to death (one role of this being reasonably consolation regarding dead relatives or to ease the practitioner’s own fears). Also, I guess that if the focus is just confined to this life, the solutions that the religion proposes will necessarily be just temporary answers to a temporary problem.

Rebirth may well be something amenable to empirical investigation (if ones assumes the Buddha and other sufficiently advanced practitioners were/are able with spiritually-enhanced vision/memory/senses to investigate such things).

However, some things do seem to border on the metaphysical to me. For example, one of the most fundamental Buddhist tenets is that all things are impermanent. A lot then makes sense based on this. Obviously, clinging to things that are impermanent will lead to suffering and, by implication, there can be no permanent unchanging essence in self. If there are permanent things, well then that would change things.

Though, how would one empirically even falsify a tenet like “all things are impermanent”? Obviously, it looks like all categories of human experience (say, using the five aggregates to classify them) are impermanent. But how does one empirically prove that all things have to fall within the framework of the five aggregates? Or because one has never experienced something impermanent, then nothing permanent can exist?

It’s like one is living in a single room with no windows all one’s life. Maybe there is someone else sharing the room with better sight who can see into large numbers of other rooms. Perhaps the conclusion from that is that life is rooms. However, perhaps that doesn’t account for the outdoor world outside the building that none of them have ever seen. Or, perhaps, in some cases, there is no such outer world. :man_shrugging:

Of course, perhaps after one has thoroughly investigated all experience for a long time, one makes that leap of thought or faith. The Buddha, after investigating his past lives, said that samsara seemed to have “no discoverable beginning” (Bhikkhu Bodhi’s translation). That’s essentially an empirical statement, certainly not metaphysics (doesn’t venture into saying there definitively was no beginning). However, the principle that “all things are impermanent” does seem to venture into metaphysics to me (a kind of metaphysical initial starting point).

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Hi, everyone!
I’d like to share a few ideas I’ve been pondering lately, inspired by three experiences, two of those not being mine. About those experiences:

  1. I tend to listen to a lot of science related videos and podcasts. There’s this one channel whose main focus is skepticism applied to different topics. In one of the channel’s videos, the host talked about how she liked to try and investigate things associated with the paranormal. She says that she has learned to have lucid dreams, and that she has had a few experiences with astral proyection. She explains that in one of those instances, she was able to see things of her environment, even when her eyes were closed. However, after coming out from that state, she noticed that some of the things she saw in the altered state if consciousness were not in the same place as when she returned to the “normal state”.

  2. I listened a few days ago a interview to Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist and author of some books about emotions. In that interview, she talks about some of her experiences with dreams. IIRC, she says that she’s able to fly in her dreams, and that she can fly faster when her body is facing down. Her hypothesis is that that happens because of her experiences when not sleeping (i.e. everyday experiences). Since she has watched a lot of movies showing that superheroes fly faster when facing down, the logic of her dreams follow the “logic” of awakened experiences (even if this one comes from sources not based on real life situations).

  3. Recently, I changed the arrangement of my furnitures and bed in my bedroom. Almost two months have passed, and it still happens to me that everytime I’m about to open the door, I “see” my bed in its previous position. I remember watching a video on YT in which a neuroscientist explained that we have a GPS-like system in our brains, which helps to orientate the body in the general context of the inhabited space, based on previous experiences in that place.

Based on those three stories, I’ve been wondering if our brains have some kind of “prediction layer/state”, in which it tries to predict how the world will respond to determinated circumstances and actions. What if, when in deep meditation, we’re able to access that layer, and we can see what’s the content of those predictions, doing something similar to when lucid dreaming? And like what occurs with dreams, that “layer”/state is based on experiences and beliefs about how the world works? Of course, as Ven. Sujato has proposed, this could hypothetically be rejected if we check the claims of past-lives memories and contrast the with evidence. But, what if the cases that are verified to be in accordance with those “memories”, are merely are successful by chance? I mean, maybe there are a million cases of allegedly past-lives recallings, and, by simple statistics, there’s a chance of finding some similitudes between the stories described in those memlories and real life events of the past.

By doing this exercise of mental proliferation I’m just trying to say that maybe we’re not giving enough credit to the brain’s abilities to elaborate scenarios and narratives. Dreams, false memories and suggestion-induced regressions are good examples of it. Of course, none of this shows nothing about the possibility of past-lives memories having a correlation with a metaphysical reality of the cosmos.

Maybe I’m just overthinking it…
Anyway, I wanted to share these outloud thoughts with you.

Kind regards!

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28

Interesting post.

20 years or so ago I went to a presentation by Daniel Dennett, who was visiting here at the time. He presented us with some altered pictures to demonstrate how much is modelled and assumed by the mind, and how hard it is to actually see “reality”. A typical example was picture of a 747 with one of the engines photoshopped out. It took a long time for most of the audience to figure out the issue with each picture (the order of 30 seconds), and quite hilarious, as everyone in the room eventually responed with “Ahhh…”. Of course, this isn’t so much a “prediction” as what you’re talking about, but it was a really interesting demonstation.

As I recall, Daniel said that he had the idea of the project, and tried to get one of his students interested in it. Apparently the student thought it was too boring, so he did it himself and published it in high-profile journal…

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That makes sense to me in light of the Buddha’s teaching. He explained that we operate out of delusion and ignorance, with our misconceptions poisoning our well so that we live in a cycle of fabrication and subjectivity. Our consciousness, what we consider to be “me” is actually completely dependent upon contact with our sense data, hedonic tones, perceptions, conditioned views, attention and our intention. So my “reality” is likely completely different form the next person, completely subjective rather than objective. I used to regularly have flying dreams but I move faster when I flapped my arms, different from the woman you referenced. The difference between me and the Buddha is that I’m still operating with impurities. He was able to systematically see his impurities and impediments to a completely clear mind and he removed them all. It wasn’t until he was totally free with crystal clear and pure mind that he was able to see what he couldn’t see before and delusion and ignorance was eliminated in him. Until I’ve done what the Buddha did, my mind will be unable to see things as they really are, making me subject to misperceptions about astral projections, dreams, and such and my philosophies will be based in subjectivity.

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The difference between me and the Buddha is that I’m still operating with impurities. He was able to systematically see his impurities and impediments to a completely clear mind and he removed them all.

I’ve been thinking something similar to what you’ve written here. I concluded that there could be a difference between being free from avijja and being omniscient. If that’s the case, there’s nothing that can assure that the hypothetical “prediction layer/state” would reveal a factual metaphysical knowledge of reality.

In other words, one can be free from the taints, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean that one knows the causal underlying relations of phenomena in general and in specific.

Kind regards!

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I don’t think the EBTs show that the Buddha claimed to be omniscient or that Buddhists should regard him as such. I think the Buddha was only concerned with full awakening, nibbana and ending the cycle of rebirth. He was brilliant in so many fields, but anything that didn’t make a difference in the noble quest wasn’t of interest to him. Yet in his quest he painstakingly tested everything of the mind including altered states of meditation, sifting, separating wholesome from unwholesome, useful from not. Along with misperceptions of the deluded mind, I can’t imagine that he didn’t consider and test dreams and “astral projection”, topics I’m sure were common in his day. If he found them useful, he would have said so and if he didn’t, he must have put them in the “doesn’t lead to nibbana” pile. Offhand, I don’t know of any sutta references where he referenced those things. Not that those topics can’t be interesting. I find concepts like the placebo effect to be quite fascinating, though it doesn’t lead to nibbana!

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Having not read all the suttas yet, I agree with your claim: omniscience does not seem to be a quality generally imputed to Buddhas.

What I was trying to say is that I don’t see a necessary conection between being free from avijja and understanding a metaphysical aspect of existence. Should we assume that, since the Buddha was free from avijja, he had access to some aspect of reality “just as it is”?

When I read that phrase, “seeing things as they are”, what I understand is not “seeing the code of the matrix”, but processing sense-data and perceiving without adding extra assumptions born out of avijja. And so, how could we distinguish between that hypothetical “prediction layer/state” (product of the brain interacting with itself) and a experience of reality (product of the mind receiving info from outside the senses)?

Three questions that exemplify what I’m point at is:

  1. Did the Buddha (or any person of the far past attaining the ability to recall past-lives, and before the theory of evolution was proposed) get to a memory when there were no human beings present, or even when there were dinosaurs roaming the Earth?
  2. Why, in the cases of claims of past-lives recallings, there are so few cases talking about other realms of existance beyond humans and other animals?
  3. Why does it seem that culture plays a huge role in the content of past-lives memories?

Kind regards!

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I’m sorry for insisting on this topic. If there’s no more interest in discussing this (which is totally understandable), I won’t keep on it.

I read in a Christian book about religions of the world. The author apparently makes reviews of them in order to disprove them or, at least, to show its inconsistencies, gaps, mistakes and cons in comparison to Christianity.

He states that believers in past lives believe in it because of the -alleged- existence of past-life memories. But he asks: when people assure that they can see events from the future, why does no one propose that there’s a “future-life” connected to the “current-life”?

I think the general answer underlying this question could be formulated like this:
Based on some -alleged- evidence, is there only one possible metaphysical theory to make sense out of it?

Also…

I was recently listening to an interview done to a neuroscientist, in which he told about an experiment made that added more evidence to the vast amount of already existing data that showed how there are specific neurons that are activated when the visual system detects upward movement, info which is then used to elaborate some motor responses. When those neurons where silenced, there was no response, and when there was a forced activation of those neurons (even when the outer stimuli was not an upward movement of an object), the associated motor response was still elicited. All of this would support the idea of the activity of the brain being responsible for the aparition of subjective elements (feelings, perceptions, etc.) in our experience, i.e. the contact of some visual stimuli. I have a hard time trying to compatibilize the metaphor of the different “bandwidths” in which multiple realms could exist (with the brain acting like kind of radio for different frequences of sense-spheres, channeling and catching some “floting” mental phenomena) with the current paradigm of the neurosciences.

It tends to happen that when there is a scientific theory that have gaps and that supposedly does not explain everything, it is easy for some new tentative theoretical models to try to discard an hegemonic and widely accepted theory (because of its alleged lack of explanatory power) and to propose itself as a better theory to replace the “older one”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but the problem appears when that new theory does nothing for explaining the already explained (in the older theory) phenomena. In some sense, new theories have an advantage place for criticizing the current paradigm for its problems, but that adventagious spot use to make the theorist blind of the challenges for replacing an old theory: the new theory has to explain everything that has been already explained, and even improve its usefulness. coherence, comprehension and explanatory power!

Buddhist in general (at least in most of the forums I participate) seem to dismiss the “raw materialist paradigm” for not being able to explain “paranormal” events. But I see little effort done by critics of materialism for trying to contribute to formulate a more comprehensive and exhautive theory, to collect more evidence of the existence of the “paranormal”, or at least, to express the difficulties of making something better than what we have today and the still little evidence for the need of a whole new paradigm in physics, chemistry and biology. I want to make clear that I’m not stating that what we “know” today is the ultimate knowledge about reality; not at all! It’s just that it is kind of frustrating to see how blind faith and closemindedness makes buddhism look something no different than other religions (at least regarding the metaphysical and cosmological aspects of buddhist beliefs).

I hope these last two posts are not an inconvenience for the forum. I’m honestly not trying to convince anyone nor trying to say that I’m in the right position about the reality of the mind and the world. I just want to share my current conclusion about the whole bunch of complexities and nuances to be considered in order to take any position at all.

Thanks for your time!
Kind regards!

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Materialism is the greatest evil in spiritual circles, not only buddhist ones. It’s sad, but not unexpected.

No, we don’t know it all. But 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.

I won’t quote from the book as I have it in Polish and in dead tree version but I highly recommend buying or getting from library and reading it.

Isn’t that what Buddha actually discovered? Just this body made of flesh (and in consequence chemistry, atoms) plus it’s functions (consciousness etc), and no lasting substance apart from that to be found anywhere?

But we can’t expect him to have understood everything, like for example the fact that brain without external stimulation starts hallucinating:

Short-term sessions of sensory deprivation are described as relaxing and conducive to meditation; however, extended or forced sensory deprivation can result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations,[2] bizarre thoughts, temporary senselessness, and depression.[3]

EDIT: if I ever change my mind based on meditation experience I’ll come back to break the forum rules and report in detail :wink:

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Hi!

I’ve heard that statement made by Carroll. It seem compelling to my non-expert understanding.

About this:

One of the questions I make is how to be completely certain by subjective experience alone (no matter how real could that experience feel) that there’s a metaphysical correlation to any such meditative experience beyond what you have described: chemicals and neural circuits causing some kind of abnormal perceptions?

Kind regards!

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Ummm… Future lives are part of dependent origination. They are also predicted by the Buddha (present as well as past) in many places in the canon.

The main issue with materialism is that it is incompatible with leading a moral or spiritual life. If it’s all just chemicals and nerve potentials and there is no other life then why not just do whatever one wants?

SN24.6
Nothing bad is done by the doer when they punish, mutilate, torture, aggrieve, oppress, intimidate, or when they encourage others to do the same. Nothing bad is done when they kill, steal, break into houses, plunder wealth, steal from isolated buildings, commit highway robbery, commit adultery, and lie. If you were to reduce all the living creatures of this earth to one heap and mass of flesh with a razor-edged chakram, no evil comes of that, and no outcome of evil. If you were to go along the south bank of the Ganges killing, mutilating, and torturing, and encouraging others to do the same, no evil comes of that, and no outcome of evil. If you were to go along the north bank of the Ganges giving and sacrificing and encouraging others to do the same, no merit comes of that, and no outcome of merit. In giving, self-control, restraint, and truthfulness there is no merit or outcome of merit’.

Another issue is that materialism is quick to dismiss all meditative experience as ‘originating within the brain’. It accepts only physical phenomena as real… however, the logical fallacy is that all physical phenomena too are ultimately just ‘experiences originating within the brain’.

There really is no way of being sure of what ultimate reality is… something that is addressed by defining it in the Buddhist dispensation as simply a co dependent origination process of empty mental and physical factors.

Regarding metaphysics and Buddhism, the Buddha was always emphatic that what he taught was the ending of suffering, not metaphysics or cosmology. This actually was the main reason why many were disappointed in the Buddha, and even chose to leave.

MN12
The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma merely hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him, and when he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.

So ultimately, what is one seeking? Unending, impossible to prove / disprove cosmology and metaphysics or the ending of Suffering?

DN24
But sir, the Buddha never describes the origin of the world to me.’

‘But Sunakkhatta, did I ever say to you: “Come, live dedicated to me and I will describe the origin of the world to you”?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Or did you ever say to me: “Sir, I shall live dedicated to the Buddha, and the Buddha will describe the origin of the world to me”?’

‘No, sir.’

‘So it seems that I did not ask this of you, and you did not require it of me. In that case, you silly man, are you really in a position to be rejecting anything? What do you think, Sunakkhatta? Whether or not the origin of the world is described, does my teaching lead someone who practices it to the goal of the complete ending of suffering?’

‘It does, sir.’

‘So it seems that whether or not the origin of the world is described, my teaching leads someone who practices it to the goal of the complete ending of suffering. In that case, what is the point of describing the origin of the world?
:smiley:

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Not by subjective experience alone (that is impossible). In case of “past lives” that happend in the last 200 years that should be technically doable provided that location is accessible today and visions are detailed enough :wink:

As to some supernormal powers it should be verifiable too. One might ask how will I know that I verified it, and it’s not all grand confabulation / hallucination as in people with schizophrenia… I don’t have answer for that yet.

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This argument is just so wrong and made so often that I don’t even need to answer it myself, kind atheists have already done that many times, for example here, here and here (disclaimer: I haven’t read all of this yet, though I plan to in the evening). And these are just the first three sites that popped out of google when queried for “why would atheist be moral”.

Also from personal experience, the atheists that I know seem to have higher moral standards than many of the religious people that I know.

I remember discussion I had long time ago with a (very) religious friend of mine. At some point in the discussion my question was along the lines: “If you do good stuff and refrain from evil only because you fear your god or want to please him and not because you genuinely believe in these rules, isn’t that insincere? Why would he let such a person to his kingdom?”. I didn’t receive any satisfactory response back then. I can rephrase that in buddhist terms and see if I’ll get a better response here:
If you do good stuff only to gain merit, to have better future life, and refrain from doing bad stuff only to avoid hellish rebirth - and not because you genuinely believe this is right way to live your life, isn’t that just wrong intention?

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Friend Tuvok, materialism is not the same thing as atheism.

Buddhism is in essence an atheist yet moral way of living. It has as its highest ideal not heavenly rebirth, but the end of suffering. :grinning: :sunflower:

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I didn’t claim that. I only countered your claim, that “materialism is not compatible with leading a moral or spiritual life”. The argument is pretty much the same as for the atheism.

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