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Kickle said:
what is the difference between dying and being reincarnated as someone else, and dying, ceasing to exist, and a completely different person being born?

Emotional impact for the believer.

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That is, what is the difference between dying and being reincarnated as someone else, and dying, ceasing to exist, and a completely different person being born?

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Seanfu said:

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Kickle said:
what is the difference between dying and being reincarnated as someone else, and dying, ceasing to exist, and a completely different person being born?

Emotional impact for the believer.

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Assuming reincarnation is real and we are all immortal beings, we are in hell.

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BINGO.  An author who goes spank-tastic on this issue is Stephen King in his Dark Tower series.  Now there's a guy who seriously knows his Mandelbrot from his relativity.

Basically, anyone on huge doses of shrooms can prove to themselves that they are: immortal, divine, eternal, the whole sha-bang, God, Satan, the cause of all evil, the reunification of all good - YOU KNOW - which begs the question: so why the choice between David Lederman and Jay Leno on a damp Friday night??  What the HELL am I doing here??

That's why reincarnation makes sense to me.  I must have done some serious shit. 

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Noteworthy said:
in the context of icelandian death anxiety, however, it is a positive thing to have another go rather than to cease existing

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well, maybe we're all taking the icelandian death anxiety theory a little too seriously

are we scared of death...or life?

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it is a daunting idea. it's also speculation far as I can tell. same with death being the end. just speculation. speculation that we make more solid because it helps us emotionally.

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. Some people feel if they are going to stop existing there is every reason to make the best of what's here, now. A view that places them squarely in the midst of the present moment because it doesn't get any better than this

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Kickle said:
it's not that I don't see it, it's that I don't trust anything 100% because I really doubt I have 100% of the information. I leave it as open as I can while playing along with the guessing game.

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When early inventors were dreaming of creating flying machines that could lift them into the realm of the birds, they worried that they did not have adequate information - but they knew that flight MUST be possible, because they could see creatures doing it every day.  Something about the bird's wing, its weight, its shape and its motion held the secret to flight.

With incomplete information, many aviators took to cow paddocks on bicycles with wings, to have a crack at the dream... until somebody discovered that if you curve the top of a wing, whilst keeping the underside flat, the air current traveling over the wing takes longer than the air current moving under the wing - and the wing will lift into the pressure cavity created.  Then all you need is a power source strong enough and light enough to move the machine horizontally through space.

My point is: there comes a moment when you step off the fence into full-blown knowledge, gained from direct experience, revelation and logical extrapolation.  This applies to issues like reincarnation, just as it does to aviation.

I have read enough direct testimony of past lives in the psychiatric files of Stanislav Grof (who has an awesome 40 year career behind him, working with patients on LSD) to confidently say that past life data, emerging from "holotropic" journeys into the subconscious on psychedelics, is a reality for many people during psychedelic assisted psycho-analyisis.  In many cases, patients were able to describe whole periods of history, which they had no previous knowledge of, and even the exact circumstances of particular personality deaths, which could later be verified through historical research.  Quite mind-blowing stuff.

So that's the data side of the issue, which I feel has been pretty exhaustively covered by Grof.  The other side of this issue is direct, personal experience and revelation, on psychedelics.  Well, there (naturally) I can only speak for myself.  But my experiences of the infinite consciousness of the One, has led me to know that I am indeed eternal, living an eternal life - I am, to use religious terminology: God on Earth - and my deep hunch, bordering on knowing, is this:

When little mortal beings, going about their endlessly reincarnating mortal lives, FINALLY come to this moment of self-realization, it signals revolutionary change for the entire species.  "Enlightenment" has, of course, happened throughout history - but we have never been at this particular point in both technological and spiritual development, which affords massive opportunities for enormous pandemic change.

Like those turn-of-the-century aviators, we KNOW that to live an eternal, mortal life, in finite humanoid form, but with conscious access to the indwelling mind of the Universe - is possible.  We have imagined it, seen it in astral flight, understood the excitement of what it will mean for civilization and inter-stellar space travel... but we are still peddling our flying contraptions over cow pats and crashing into hedges.    Many of us know that the time of divinely gifted wizard-druid-shaman-X Men is nearly here.  It must be, so many of us are borderline awesome already :-)

I think it's okay to be struggling with this stuff.  And I'm at peace with where we are - but I can't help dreaming of those inter-stellar skies, and at the moment I'm working on a cool idea for growing astral wings

Bryn.

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For the record I'm probably one of the only people on these boards to actually have a NDE under my belt

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guruu said:
new lives aren't so much a chance to redeem yourself as they are another forced attempt at redemption.  Nobody wants that, much better to achieve liberation in this life while you can....who knows when the next one will come around, or what it will be like, or who you will be like.

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My point is: there comes a moment when you step off the fence into full-blown knowledge, gained from direct experience, revelation and logical extrapolation.  This applies to issues like reincarnation, just as it does to aviation.

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If you really feel this way I encourage you to directly experience death. Nothing stopping you from killing yourself except yourself. I suspect that you're not certain of being eternal when push comes to shove.

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Kickle said:
My point is: there comes a moment when you step off the fence into full-blown knowledge, gained from direct experience, revelation and logical extrapolation.  This applies to issues like reincarnation, just as it does to aviation.

If you really feel this way I encourage you to directly experience death. Nothing stopping you from killing yourself except yourself. I suspect that you're not certain of being eternal when push comes to shove.
 
I have read enough direct testimony of past lives in the psychiatric files of Stanislav Grof (who has an awesome 40 year career behind him, working with patients on LSD) to confidently say that past life data, emerging from "holotropic" journeys into the subconscious on psychedelics, is a reality for many people during psychedelic assisted psycho-analyisis.

Yeah I've read his works too. I'm not nearly as confident as you. Interesting how that works, isn't it? One person can read it and be completely convinced and confident, another can read it and not be. I wonder why that is? For the record I'm probably one of the only people on these boards to actually have a NDE under my belt and know others who have died and been brought back personally.

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Poid said:

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guruu said:
new lives aren't so much a chance to redeem yourself as they are another forced attempt at redemption.  Nobody wants that, much better to achieve liberation in this life while you can....who knows when the next one will come around, or what it will be like, or who you will be like.

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Didn't you say "your traits and habits will regroup and carry on"?

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soldatheero said:
For me and (I assume Bryn) the data is just sprinkles on the cake as I more so see for myself why I'm eternal via how I perceive my existance in this moment.

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My Philosophy teacher told me that 1/3 people in the world believe in reincarnation... I don't know how true that is. I can't find any statistics on it.

As for Americans who believe in reincarnation, the only thing that I could find that wasn't totally unreliable was wikipedia. The quoted source was some book, so I couldn't really find it. But, according to the wikipedia on reincarnation:

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According to a 2005 Gallup poll 20 percent of U.S. adults believe in reincarnation. Recent surveys by the Barna Group, a Christian research nonprofit organization, have found that a quarter of U.S. Christians, including 10 percent of all born-again Christians, embrace the idea.

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Icelander said:
I suspect that beyond the (imo) death anxiety belief in heaven and hell you would find a limited number  in middle america that believe in reincarnation.

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guruu said:

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Icelander said:
I suspect that beyond the (imo) death anxiety belief in heaven and hell you would find a limited number  in middle america that believe in reincarnation.

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Why are having death anxiety and a belief in reincarnation not mutually exclusive? I can harbor anxiety over my eventual demise, and still rationally believe in reincarnation due to the experiences I've had.

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Because experiences became evidence for beliefs of the afterlife rather than evidence for what actually happened.

Say for example I see a white light when I'm near death. That's evidence for the appearance of a white light when I was near death. It is not evidence for a white light appearing when near death (generalized). Say I feel that the white light is God. That is evidence that I feel the white light I saw when near death is God. This does not make the white light I saw when near death, God (generalized). It does not mean that when people die there is a white light that will feel like God (generalized).

It's the generalizations that IMO suggest being driven by death anxiety. That white light would be God for you too. We're all God's children. Drop everything guys I have the most important thing to tell you, we all need to follow the Bible's teachings. Oh, that guy who didn't experience it, I don't care. He just doesn't know. He has farther to go. If he followed the Bible he would find the light.

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guruu said:

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Poid said:

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guruu said:
new lives aren't so much a chance to redeem yourself as they are another forced attempt at redemption.  Nobody wants that, much better to achieve liberation in this life while you can....who knows when the next one will come around, or what it will be like, or who you will be like.

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Didn't you say "your traits and habits will regroup and carry on"?

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ahh true, but not exactly the same and you still don't know for certain how it's gonna look.

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Do you know for certain that your traits and habits will regroup and carry on? If it is certain that your traits/habits will regroup/carry on, then who you will be like should be (at least somewhat) certain as well.

If your traits/habits won't be "exactly the same" when you reincarnate, then in what sense are they regrouped/carried on?

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guruu said:
...if you don't get out in this life, how do you know that you ever will?

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I'm not sure if this even makes sense...

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Icelander said:
Reincarnation is probably one of the most widely held Yogic beliefs of non Yoga practitioners, almost every human has an inkling of its truth & sees how it could be applicable to the universes cycles

Actually I have very few friends who believe that the idea makes any sense at all.  They instead feel the belief in reincarnation is due to death anxiety and our refusal to acknowledge our animal and temporary nature within the process of evolution.

I suspect that beyond the (imo) death anxiety belief in heaven and hell you would find a limited number  in middle america that believe in reincarnation.

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Cool, i think ive just come across quite a few people that have said to me they can see why buddhists & hindus believe in reincarnation so i got the general impression that quite a few people have an intuition about it, i've heard people often curse their bad luck saying they 'must've done something bad in a previous life' or the often used 'maybe in another lifetime', or 'if i come back i'd like to be a cat/dolphin/bird' etc... you get the idea. I reckon quite a few people that know nothing of eastern religious philosophy still tend to have these kind of thoughts even if just once or twice in their lifetime.

I agree that reincarnation, both the belief in it & the process of rebirth/reincarnation itself are both rooted in death anxiety.

Why else would you incarnate billions of times unless you were scared of dying

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guruu said:
just like 1 gram and some change, we made tea.  It was great, very laid back, we discussed being and thought a lot, like my friend was talking about how anytime you have a thought but don't act on it it gets recycled back into your self and is like an option for next time. played some music, chilled with the neighbors, good times

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cool, im back in the swing of tripping at the mo, i tend to have it come round every couple of years i'll suddenly get back into it, wonderful stuff

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guruu said:
hey, we're all friends 

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All my friends agree with me all the time.