Memory of previous lives in brain?

The Watercooler
21

There is such a thing as jivitindriya and jivita in Pali buddhism. Bodhi translates jivitindriya as life-faculty. A Dutch pali translator translates jivita as vitality.

In Bodhi’s Comprehensive Manual of Abhdihamma jivitindriya as mental mental (cetasika) is described as something that vitalizes the associated mental states. It has the characteristics of maintaining the associates mental states, the function of making them occur, manifestation as the establishing of their presence, and the proximate cause is the mental states to be maintained.

Together with vedana, phassa, manasikara, cetana, an element of samadhi, sanna, in abhidhamma it seen as a mental factor that is present in any moment of awareness of something, or, in any vinnana moment.

The Dutch translator explains jivita as: the life of mental factors, which comes down to: it maintains there presence, their continuation.

I tend to: a kind of mental factor that works like a kind of animation of the vinnana and all its factors. It makes the experience perky, vibrant, vivacious, vigorously. I have seen this many times in myself. There is something that makes some experiences extremely perky and others not, or almost not.

Maybe this happens when you read a book and the mental images become very perky, vitalized and it is like this is all real. Maybe it can seen this way? That it, as it were, animates. I think great
demagogue and speekers are also able to give rise to this. It is like becoming enchanted. Hitler was also able to do this. When a situation vitalizes, i believe, it is also enchanting and it is perceived as very real.

Maybe something like this.

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22

???
What’s the significance of A. Thanissaro ?

23

Ajaan Thannissaro frequently suggests that it is helpful to think of the “mind as a committee” consisting of members with various agendas, some helpful, some not - or even malicious to the goals of others.

At other times, and with other teachers, we sometimes hear of various aspects of kileshas being personified. So selves, or “voices” of the mind can be distinguished over time.

Although I’m not sure AT embraces Dick Schwartz, and the IFS model, he is generally very well read in western philosophy / science and i hope to discuss it with him.

Schwartz is revolutionizing clinical psychology with the idea that we are all “multiple personalities” and shows, very successfully, that dialog and conflict resolution among these members of an “internal family” is of great benefit.

I’m curious as to possible relationships between our past life “selves”, and these selves (generated by trauma and dissociation in our current life).

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This reminds me of stories of accidents/surgeries of the corpus callosum being cut and the distinct “personalities” inhabiting/controlling one half of the body and getting into arguments with eachother. :joy: :pray:

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Yes. The isolation of grand mal seizure to half the brain resulted in “split brain” patients who showed us some fascinating aspects of localized functionality.

It is an analogy I often use to explain IFS to people.
Much more palatable than Sybil… who’s story was actually fraudulent as it turns out. Not that that in any way means Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka multiple personality disorder) is not a real thing. And, sadly, we only know about it because of how the mind reacts in cases of extreme, inescapable abuse.

So, unless you get to see the benefits by experiencing IFS for yourself… most people don’t appreciate seeing themselves as multiples.
:rofl:
(See what i did there?)

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To see how access to previously developed skillful qualities can be maximized.

I’m not interested in entertaining, torturing, or distracting myself with dilemmas.

Re our side conversation on “science vs. sutta”
or… Breath “stopping” in J4…
I don’t see how parsing “formation” from “determination” relates to my idea of the fading of craving as a volition. If y’all pali people tell us that solid EBT say breath “stops,” I’d still like to leave open the idea that one could interpret that as “volition” stops. I don’t intend or determine to breath while I’m sleeping, for instance.

27

Turns out … To whom? Most obviously her admitting that she lied can’t be prof of fraudulence, it merely makes things more ambiguous since we can’t be sure on which time she lied. As far as my judgement goes, I believe it is very unlikely to invent such experience without actually experiencing it.

There was no grave. There were no banks of flowers. No wind. No sky. Daddy and Mother, Uncle Roger and Aunt Hattie, Aunt Clara and the rich old man she married, the minister, all those other people were not here.
Instead of a grave there was a desk. The banks of flowers were blackboards. Instead of a sky there was a ceiling. Instead of a minister there was a teacher.
The teacher, who talked quickly in short nervous sentences, was tall and thin. She wasn’t Sybil’s teacher. Miss Thurston, her teacher, spoke slowly and deliberately and was stout and of medium height. The third-grade teacher was Miss Thurston. This should be Miss Thurston, but it was Miss Henderson. Sybil knew Miss Henderson as the fifth-grade teacher. What has happened? Sybil wondered. It was no dream. The room, a regular classroom in the school she had attended since kindergarten, seemed normal between its four walls. Only it wasn’t her classroom. The windows of the room faced the east, not the west, as they did in the third-grade classroom. She knew all the rooms in the school, and this, she knew, was the fifth-grade classroom.
Somehow she had gotten into this fifth-grade classroom. She had done something wrong, a terrible thing. She had to get out, had to get back to the third grade where she belonged, where Miss Thurston had probably marked her absent. She had to apologize to Miss Henderson for being here, had to explain to Miss Thurston for not being there. But what was the explanation?
Then she began to notice the other children. There was Betsy Bush across the aisle, Henry Von Hoffman in front of her, Stanley, and Stuart and Jim and Carolyn Schultz and all the rest. Well, she thought, the whole third grade is in here.
Most of these children had started with her in kindergarten, and she knew them well. They were the same children, yet they were not the same as when she had seen them last. They were dressed differently from when they were in the third grade. They looked bigger than they had been before she left for her grandmother’s funeral. How could that be? How could all these children get bigger in a moment?
Betsy Bush, assured and confident as always, was waving her hand as usual to answer the teacher’s question. She acted as if she belonged here. All the other children did, too. None of them seemed to think there was anything wrong about being here. Why should Betsy be answering questions when Miss Henderson was not her teacher?
Sybil’s eyes turned next to the page of the notebook open on her desk. She thought of concentrating on the page and forgetting all the nonsense. But it could not be done, for the page made no sense to her, and in her present state of mind the notebook only induced more terror. There were lots of notes, but she hadn’t taken them. There was completed homework, which she hadn’t done, but she noted that the homework was consistently graded A. However urgently she forced herself to minimize the meaning of all this, the more terrified she became.
She tried hard to shut her eyes to this teacher who wasn’t hers, to this classroom with the windows on the wrong side, these children, blown up beyond their normal size and dressed in strange clothes they hadn’t worn before. It didn’t work.
Sybil began to feel a strange compulsion to examine herself. were her clothes “different”? Was she bigger, too? Her eye descended to her own dress. It was of yellow voile with green and purple embroidery, as totally unfamiliar as those of the other children. She hadn’t owned it, didn’t remember her mother’s buying it for her, hadn’t worn it before, and hadn’t put it on this morning. She was wearing a dress that didn’t belong to her in a classroom in which she didn’t belong.
Nobody seemed to think that anything unusual was happening. The third-grade children kept on answering questions about things she’d never studied with them. She didn’t understand any of it.

28

Seems your interest circles back to people I generously call “creative.” Joeseph Smith, Eban Alexander, and now Sybil and her enablers.

I’m a fan of peer reviewed science, EBTs, mainstream media, and yes… Kierkegaard. But to hold space for truth still wrapped in mystery - it’s important to be able to recognize bunk and maybe even the compulsively “creative” who can titillate and distract with self aggrandizing fabrications that enflame the mass of suffering.

The Amazing Randi comes to mind. Now there was a secular hero.

29

Not bad joke, however I prefer such as that about certain Irishman who, on being fined five shillings for Contempt of Court, asked the Magistrate to make it ten shillings; ‘Five shillings’ he explained ‘do not adequately express the Contempt I have for this Court’.

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Im a fan of mainstream media. My speech is straightforward. Not a joke at all.

People who dismiss traditional journalism (injured with with its post fairness-doctrine deregulation, and disrupted revenue stream) for echo-chamber self-reinforcing propaganda proliferation “entertainment” remind me of the joke about…

the health nut who - discovering there is sugar in soda pop - dismisses it in favor of strychnine.