Reincarnation: Samsara and Karma

Spirituality Religion
#1

This thread is to answer some important questions Neitzsche PMed me with regarding a situation where his peers are making fun of his beliefs of reincarnation by trivialising it by saying, “Haha, you believe you going to get reincarnated as a catapillar in your next life” This is the usual strawman detractors of reincarnations make.

[B][U]The science of reincarnation[/U][/B]

Swami Vivekananda answered this question very simply when he was giving a lecture to a Western audience on reincarnation. It is clear if we look at the third law of thermodynamics that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be converted from one form to the other. Simply put everything which is made out of energy goes back to energy. The body which is made up of the matter of flesh and bones is made out of energy, so it goes back to energy. However, what about the mind? Is the mind like flesh, bones and chemicals? Not at all. The mind is first of all has no position in time and space like other things. The brain has a position in time and space and hence why we can see it and touch it, but nobody can see and touch a mind. The mind does not obey the laws of space and time. It is not bound to the present, the past or the future. I can go back in my mind to a time when I was 5 and jump to a time when I was 20. Similarly I can go to any place in the world right now within my mind.

It is clear then the mind is not the same substance as physical matter it is a different substance altogether: consciousness. Therefore just as physical matter returns to physical energy; the mind returns to consciousness. (Indeed, isn’t that what is happening everytime you go to sleep?)

Now recall Einstein’s law E=Mc^2. Matter and energy are constantly converting into one another and the sequence is reversible; energy becomes matter and matter becomes energy. Similarly, it is true for the mind and consciousness. Mind and consciousness are constantly converting into one another. However, can consciousness convert into mind; mind convert into energy and energy convert into matter? Absolutely, otherwise how could you incarnate in the first place. If mind did not convert into matter then how could the phenomenon of psychosomatic effects be explained? How could you explain something as simple as moving your arm if your thought energy did not convert into electrical energy?

Now note something when energy becomes matter energy is still existent in the matter. In other words we know what appears to be matter is actually just condensed energy. However, the same cannot be said for energy that energy is condensed matter: liquid states obviously exist before solids state and not vis versa. Similarly, mind precedes energy and matter. Before matter is even existent it exists as thought energy which in turn is a transformation of the substance of consciousness. When an incarnation happens consciousness evolves into matter. So what is matter ultimately? Matter is condensed consciousness.

Each of us is a mind and each of our minds is a transformation of the original consciousness substance. As each mind is distinct, each body the mind manifests is distinct. An animal mind is different to a human mind for instance, thus the body the animal mind manifests is an animal body and not a human mind. However, what if you could get one with an animal body to think like a human mind and get one with a human body to think like an animal mind? Then it would so happen that in their next incarnation the animal body now with a human mind will develop a human body; and the human body now with an animal mind will develop an animal body.

The moral here is think, act and speak like a human and you will not have to worry about becoming an animal in your next life. In fact it is rare for a human to regress to an animal form once it becomes a human as evolution tends to go up, only a human who has engaged in animal thoughts, acts and speech too much will fall back - such as a cannibal.

#2

[B][U]The proof of reincarnation[/U][/B]

The proof of reincarnation is past life memories. A past life memory is a memory of you being in another body in another lifetime. You had a different appearance and different parents though you will share similar habits. A past life memory can be investigated using the scientific method by quantitative and qualitative research methods and these investigations have indeed been done and documented in the scientific literature. The best of these studies are studies where the subject not only has a past life memory but past life physical traumas and birthmarks. For example, if in a past life you were a solider fighting in WW2 and you got shot in the throat and died then the physical trauma may carry onto into your future life as problems in your throat.(The energtic explanation for is that the bullet to the throat depleted that region of prana causing your throat chakra to weaken considerably and as a result when your entered your new body created by your new parents your prana did not flow to your throat region properly causing problems) The pioneerring researcher in the field of investigation past life memories is Ian Stevenson and has been documented in several scientific journals:

Wiki: Ian Stenvenson

Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD, (October 31, 1918–February 8, 2007) was a Canadian biochemist and professor of psychiatry. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which investigates the paranormal.[1]

Stevenson considered that the concept of reincarnation might supplement those of heredity and environment in helping modern medicine to understand aspects of human behavior and development.[2] He traveled extensively over a period of 40 years to investigate 3,000 childhood cases that suggested to him the possibility of past lives.[3] Stevenson saw reincarnation as the survival of the personality after death, although he never suggested a physical process by which a personality might survive death.[4] Stevenson was the author of several books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1974), Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997), Reincarnation and Biology (1997), and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003).

Stevenson traveled extensively to conduct field research into reincarnation and investigated cases in Africa, Alaska, Europe, India and both North and South America, logging around 55,000 miles a year between 1966 and 1971.[3] He reported that the children he studied usually started to speak of their supposed past lives between the ages of two and four, then ceased to do so by seven or eight, with frequent mentions of having died a violent death, and what seemed to be clear memories of the manner of death.[3] After interviewing the children, their families, and others, Stevenson would attempt to identify if there had been a living person who satisfied the various claims and descriptions collected, and who had died prior to the child’s birth.

Reception

Stevenson’s conclusions gained little support from within the scientific community, although Eugene Brody has suggested many of them simply dismiss ideas like reincarnation.[7] While Stevenson published his research in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and three scientific commentators have stated that Stevenson rigorously followed the scientific method in conducting his research,[7][8][9] mainstream scientists “tended to ignore or dismiss his decades in the field and his many publications”.[4]

In 1977 the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Stevenson’s work. In an editorial for that issue, psychiatrist Eugene Brody explained the decision to publish research that might normally be regarded as unscientific due to the “scientific and personal credibility of the authors, the legitimacy of their research methods, and the conformity of their reasoning to the usual canons of rational thought.”[7] In the same issue psychiatrist Harold Lief wrote in a commentary: “Either [Stevenson] is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known … as ‘the Galileo of the 20th century’.” More recently a review of Stevenson’s European Cases of the Reincarnation Type described it as “an inspiring example of application of a painstaking protocol to sift facts from fancy.”[22]

Stevenson’s work has drawn criticism from skeptical groups and individuals such as The Skeptics Society[6] and Robert Todd Carroll, while philosopher Paul Edwards included a lengthy criticism of Stevenson’s work in his book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. In each of these critiques, the authors question both the methods used and the evidence gathered by Stevenson, and offer alternative, more mainstream, explanations for the types of cases Stevenson argued were suggestive of reincarnation. Philosopher Paul Kurtz, founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, has gone further and suggested Stevenson’s reincarnation research is pseudoscience. By contrast, in his books Death and Personal Survival and Beyond Death: The Evidence for Life After Death, philosopher Robert Almeder endorsed Stevenson’s research, rebutted most of Kurtz’s objections, and concluded that the evidence he assembled argues strongly in favor of reincarnation, to the point of it being irrational to disbelieve that some people reincarnate.[20][23][24]

Stevenson’s work also attracted the attention of Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke who, while intrigued, felt it fell short of providing proof of reincarnation, which they both viewed as unlikely. In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), Sagan wrote that claims about reincarnation have some experimental support, however dubious and inconclusive, further arguing that one of three claims in parapsychology deserving serious study is that, “young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”[25] Clarke observed that Stevenson had produced a number of studies that were “hard to explain” conventionally, then noted that accepting reincarnation raised the question of the means for personality transfer.[26] Skeptic Sam Harris said of Stevenson “either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on.”[27]

Stevenson has empirically proven reincarnation and he used the same scientific method with the same rigour as any other scientists does. This is why he has been published in major scientific journals and his work recognised. Therefore if anybody ridicules your belief in reincarnation, mention Stevenson and his studies and ridicule them for why they cannot accept what has been proven with over 3000 studies. Indeed, since Stenvenson there have been other researchers in this area and the body of scientific evidence for reincarnation is now overwhelming.

#3

It’s indeed funny how young children are more subtly awaken. My cousin, when she was 4 to 6 spoke to her teacher about her teacher’s dead relative, no young children knew about it obviously, not to mention lots of weird things she said with no reason.

When I was 4 I told my mother an Indian with a turbant came to talk to me. I don’t even remember saying this to her.

It’s funny that you mention Einstein and this mind/energy/matter problem, Jung, that personally knew Einstein and other important physicists of his time dealt a lot with this mind/body(matter) dichotomy. Jung stressed that mind and body are one! Science only separates because it still can’t analyze the whole, but experience tells us they are one.

#4

does ‘mind’ function without the physical body?

#5

Yes, the mind does not require the physical body to function. However, the physical body does require the mind to function.

#6

I think there is a consensus in all Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism that the state of mind at the minute of death determines your next life. As Osho once commented, if your mind is fixed upon sex at the minute of death as it has been fixed upon it throughout your adult life, your energy leaves your body from your sex chakra and enters into another body, again, at the sex chakra. So far this makes sense to all Buddhists, Hindus, and Jainas; for they disagree in everything they discuss among them, save one: reincarnation.

#7

[QUOTE=High Wolf;61192]I think there is a consensus in all Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism that the state of mind at the minute of death determines your next life. As Osho once commented, if your mind is fixed upon sex at the minute of death as it has been fixed upon it throughout your adult life, your energy leaves your body from your sex chakra and enters into another body, again, at the sex chakra. So far this makes sense to all Buddhists, Hindus, and Jainas; for they disagree in everything they discuss among them, save one: reincarnation.[/QUOTE]

I remember a parable in the Mahabharata in which a Brahmin rescued a deer from certain death. From then on, he forsook his daily duties and tended the deer for the rest of his life. Before he died, his thoughts were fixated upon the deer; indeed, the deer was kneeling beside his bed like a dutiful son/daughter. Unfortunately, after his death, he became reincarnated as one.

#8

[QUOTE=Nietzsche;61196]I remember a parable in the Mahabharata in which a Brahmin rescued a deer from certain death. From then on, he forsook his daily duties and tended the deer for the rest of his life. Before he died, his thoughts were fixated upon the deer; indeed, the deer was kneeling beside his bed like a dutiful son/daughter. Unfortunately, after his death, he became reincarnated as one.[/QUOTE]
This one is also in the Srimad Bhagavatam. I have not read the entire Mahabharata yet, but maybe it has a similar story.

[QUOTE=High Wolf;61192]I think there is a consensus in all Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism that the state of mind at the minute of death determines your next life. As Osho once commented, if your mind is fixed upon sex at the minute of death as it has been fixed upon it throughout your adult life, your energy leaves your body from your sex chakra and enters into another body, again, at the sex chakra. So far this makes sense to all Buddhists, Hindus, and Jainas; for they disagree in everything they discuss among them, save one: reincarnation.[/QUOTE]Yes, the basic concept of tranmigration is shared among all dharmic religions. The Bhagavad Gita also states that your state of mind at the time of death will be of influence in your next life.

[QUOTE=Surya Deva;60618][B][U]The proof of reincarnation[/U][/B]

The proof of reincarnation is past life memories. A past life memory is a memory of you being in another body in another lifetime…[/QUOTE]I believe all these “proofs” of reincarnation are nonsense. Indian philosophy recognises two types of knowledge, one is sakala which can be proven through science and the other is nishkala which is in the domain of religion. Reincarnation is a nishkala concept. Trying to mix the two will result in people mistaking their mental illness for enlightenment.

#9

@ Sarva,

Could you go into more detail regarding your views of Reincarnation? And can a nishkala concept such as reincarnation be proven or is it just faith (for lack of a better word)?

Thank you.

#10

How is a past life memory which can be investigated and then proven to be real not be a proof of reincarnation?

There are two proofs of reincarnation, depending on which pramana you accept:

  1. Scientific investigations of past life memories(Even Patanjali mentions past life memories)
  2. Logical proof that the soul and the body are distinct and soul is merely in association with the body. The classical Vedanta “I am not my body, I have a body” In the Gita the argument is succiently given as the body passes from birth, childhood, adolescence, old age to death but the witnessing consciousness remains unchanged: sthita prajana. This witnessing consciousness(i.e., the soul) is unborn. It is only bodies which are born.

I know of a few people in my family who have recollected their past life memories.

#11

before coming to the waking state from my state of coma for 62 days 6yrs back in an accident, remember a couple of short dreams, maybe of my last life. i dont know.

#12

[QUOTE=lotusgirl;61223]@ Sarva,

Could you go into more detail regarding your views of Reincarnation? And can a nishkala concept such as reincarnation be proven or is it just faith (for lack of a better word)?

Thank you.[/QUOTE]

Reincarnation is the doctrine that one takes another life after leaving behind this body. This is a religious doctrine and not scientifically verifiable, but it is accepted in all the dharmic religions. This is just one reason why yoga is so intimitely tied with ancient Indian metaphysics. In the Indian view one can reincarnate in different planes of existence and in different life forms. It is said that one achieves human birth after having evolved through 8.4 million other lifeforms if one comes from a lower plane of existence. A human birth is considered very valuable, because here on earth we can either accumulate good karma/bad karma for the sake of material happiness (pavritti marga), or try to break our ties from sansara and karma for the sake of liberation (nivritti marga). Other lifeforms are not accumulating karma, but only suffering/enjoying the fruits of previous actions. There are also those who reincarnate for the benefit other beings.

#13

If energy cannot be created nor destroyed it simply changes forms, we seem to be living proof the spirit energy embodied in human form.

#14

[QUOTE=bjoy;61256]before coming to the waking state from my state of coma for 62 days 6yrs back in an accident, remember a couple of short dreams, maybe of my last life. [B]i dont know.[/B][/QUOTE]Yes, unless you are on the level of a highly evolved yogi, you simply cannot know. Past life experiences can also be illusions and appear just as dreams.

#15

Thank you Sarva for sharing your views. I hope you don’t mind if I abbreviate your very long name! If you do mind, let me know.

#16

[QUOTE=Sarvamaṅgalamaṅgalā;61257]Reincarnation is the doctrine that one takes another life after leaving behind this body.

This is a religious doctrine and not scientifically verifiable, but it is accepted in all the dharmic religions. [/quote]

I am not sure I agree with this Sarva. First of all, dharmic religions do not make a distinction between religion and science. They include both aparavidya and paravidya; material and spiritual science as sciences. Paravidya is also called brahma vidya and atman vidya. In the Gita Krishna says knowledge of both the knower of the field and the field are necessary.

Secondly, actual paramans(proofs) are given for reincarnation. Such as in the Samkhya darshana, especially in the Samkhyakarika. A very brief argument is given in the Gita and in the Upanishads. There are also arguments in Vedanta.

Patanjali mentions what we today know as past life regression therapy. He says by doing samyama on any memory or thought or following the chain of memories backwards one can know all their past lives.

I am surprised you deny the validity of past life memories. Then how do you explain the studies done by scientists like Stevenson which even hardcore atheists like Carl Sagan have acknowledged, where past life memories of children have been investigated and they have proven to be real. As in they do indeed match with the past life they mention and the subjects have been able to give information that they could not have known, unless they were the person who they have past life memories of.

I think acknowledging reincarnation is absolutely paramount because it is the best proof we have of the existence of the soul which transmigrates between lives and consequently the proof of Hinduism too. Let us not allow our buddhi to become clouded with sentiments that reincarnation is a relgious doctrine therefore science cannot touch it.

#17

[QUOTE=ray_killeen;61258]If energy cannot be created nor destroyed it simply changes forms, we seem to be living proof the spirit energy embodied in human form.[/QUOTE]

I really hate it when people tie religion into science.

Surya Deva, thanks for your “explanation” of reincarnation.

What I actually wanted was a philosophical/theological justification of reincarnation as given in the writings of numerous sects within Hinduism.

I don’t want to hear illogical pseudo-science. I agree with Sarva on this one.

#18

[QUOTE=lotusgirl;61223]@ Sarva,

Could you go into more detail regarding your views of Reincarnation? And can a nishkala concept such as reincarnation be proven or is it just faith (for lack of a better word)?

Thank you.[/quote]

Of course its faith. Sarva already answered this.

Reincarnation can be “proven” within the realm of theology/philosophy. Those are the kinds of explanations I hoped SD would give.

#19

Religion and science are not separate in dharma and never have been. I cannot understand why religious people feel the need to separate them. Certainly Swami Viveakanda, the great savant of Hinduism of the 20th century did not have this attitude.

The explanation I gave makes scientific sense and explains the transformations that are constantly taking place between mind, matter and energy.

We have staggering amounts of proof now in science of mind, matter and energy interactions and effects. If you wish I can direct you to those studies. But somehow I think you have a narrow mind on this as has been evidenced by your previous reluctance to accept quantum physics has proven that physical reality does not exist without an observer. In that case I provided you a peer reviewed study from Nature magazine.

Is there a reason to maintain this absolute separatism between science and religion?

#20

By the way the separation of science, religion and state are Western doctrines. This is not a dharmic doctrine which such separations never existed. Why do you insist on enforcing a Western doctrine?