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Fiery
Sword of Fire


Registered: 12/24/12
Posts: 36,574
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Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court?
#26861015 - 08/03/20 02:32 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Would claiming that the knowledge that you gained from past life experiences was real in the fact that it happened to you and you would swear by it, so much so that it was enough to hold up in court.
With a good lawyer that would probably put you in the bin because there is no way that past lives are real... right? So then . Some of modern medicine is good. And some is not.
So let's say that YOU were in charge of dealing with the loonies and the regulars
Would you investigate if someone said they had past lives? And from a legal perspective where is the middle ground on consensus of actual testimony?
What about other things like past lives or poltergeists and elemental rudimentary thoughts?
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Mycobro420
Stranger


Registered: 06/01/20
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: Fiery]
#26861072 - 08/03/20 03:02 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Good luck.u might as well plead insanity.if that doesn't work idk what will.sounds like an insanity defence case anyways. What are the charges
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MarkostheGnostic
Elder



Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: Fiery]
#26861229 - 08/03/20 04:56 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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A psychiatric evaluation would postpone the legal proceedings. Metaphysical assertions are unprovable and irrelevant to crimes committed in the physical world. Very very few people are found incapable of standing trial by virtue of an insanity plea. 'The Devil made me do it' has never absolved anyone from paying for a crime and neither has any other metaphysical iterations like demons, poltergeists, etc..
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Fiery
Sword of Fire


Registered: 12/24/12
Posts: 36,574
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
#26861366 - 08/03/20 06:13 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Oh I was just curious. I'm not under any charges or plan to be, but was just hashing out the idea.
I know my best friends know that we've all had past lives. But in a court of law it sounds like folly.
Thanks for sharing.
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MarkostheGnostic
Elder



Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: Fiery]
#26862838 - 08/04/20 03:19 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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There are all kinds of phenomena that lead one to believe in some kind of cyclical existence, Mircea Eliade's "Myth of the Eternal Return," transmigration in a word. The BIG question concerns the Buddhist versus the Hindu/Jain/Jewish assumption that each of us are a monadic 'soul' that passes through the conditions of birth, life, death, reincarnation OR that there is NO soul (jivatman) and thus the Buddhist Anatman/Anatta assertion is true. In Buddhism there is no coherent entity that transmigrates. We dissolve into psychic attributes, samskaras, which like physical elements are recycled for rebirths.
Now the example has been given with cars and ships. If one was to rebuild a vintage car completely from scavenged junk yards and one replaced every single part: engine, transmission, doors, quarter panels, the very chassis, everything, would it still be the same car you started with? Maybe you began with a Chevy Corvair but you replaced every nut and bolt even the paint. Now maybe you only saved the front-end assembly and the muffler. Your newly rebuilt Corvair still has its idiosyncratic pull to the left AND it sounds the same owing to the same old muffler. This is analogous to the Buddhist idiom where a few idiosyncratic traits or memories manifest in a young child that seem to have belonged to a dead person's life experience. If enough of these traits and memories glom together, the child is understood to be a rebirth but NOT a reincarnation of the intact deceased person who has 'put on' a new body like a suit of clothes.
So, it boils down to this radical difference between reincarnation and rebirth. Owing to the incompleteness of memories and traits, the rebirth idiom seems to be more likely. There appears to be a lack of coherence, of cohesiveness. Moreover, thinking or writing 'a' soul suggests that 'it' is a 'thing' separate from other things, other souls. Since it is immaterial, what kind of boundary are we considering that could differentiate one soul from another? And what is the matrix in which these separate souls could be? A raindrop does not maintain the boundary it had falling through the air when it hits a body of water. It's molecules disperse. We are not like the Dax Symbiont in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine which is surgically implanted in one human host body after another lending all of the former host's experiences, knowledge, and wisdom to each new host. This was a sci-fi analogy of the reincarnation idiom with the reincarnating being as a physical organism replete with all the memories of its numerous hosts. Another Deep Space Nine analogy is of that liquid being Odo who had to learn to assume solidity. When he returned to his planet, he 'melted' back into his liquid form with the rest of his planet's inhabitants and YET...each being retained a psychic boundary, retained their individuality and individual experiences.
This is a very real metaphysical conundrum and one cannot simply choose to 'believe' the version one likes best and commit it to dogmatic 'belief,' end of uncertainty. So you and your friends might "know" something about aspects of past lives manifesting in new human beings, but you cannot "know" the accuracy of the idiom you subscribe to: reincarnation or rebirth. The further question is does this difference matter to the way we live our lives here on Earth? Is it necessary to change one's assumption about disincarnating from the knots of existence we have unwittingly become caught up in OR are we to embrace the notion of resurrection, of being 'reconstituted' as something else in a linear transformation that ceases to be linear in Eternity? Does THIS have any bearing on how we live our lives? The early Christians who rejected transmigration (reincarnation) thought it afforded too much time to get it right and so insisted we do it in one lifetime, or suffer eternal consequences. Just sayin'.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Lion
Decadent Flower Magnate


Registered: 09/20/05
Posts: 8,775
Last seen: 3 days, 13 hours
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
#26862864 - 08/04/20 03:35 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Quote:
MarkostheGnostic said: There are all kinds of phenomena that lead one to believe in some kind of cyclical existence, Mircea Eliade's "Myth of the Eternal Return," transmigration in a word. The BIG question concerns the Buddhist versus the Hindu/Jain/Jewish assumption that each of us are a monadic 'soul' that passes through the conditions of birth, life, death, reincarnation OR that there is NO soul (jivatman) and thus the Buddhist Anatman/Anatta assertion is true. In Buddhism there is no coherent entity that transmigrates. We dissolve into psychic attributes, samskaras, which like physical elements are recycled for rebirths.
Now the example has been given with cars and ships. If one was to rebuild a vintage car completely from scavenged junk yards and one replaced every single part: engine, transmission, doors, quarter panels, the very chassis, everything, would it still be the same car you started with? Maybe you began with a Chevy Corvair but you replaced every nut and bolt even the paint. Now maybe you only saved the front-end assembly and the muffler. Your newly rebuilt Corvair still has its idiosyncratic pull to the left AND it sounds the same owing to the same old muffler. This is analogous to the Buddhist idiom where a few idiosyncratic traits or memories manifest in a young child that seem to have belonged to a dead person's life experience. If enough of these traits and memories glom together, the child is understood to be a rebirth but NOT a reincarnation of the intact deceased person who has 'put on' a new body like a suit of clothes.
So, it boils down to this radical difference between reincarnation and rebirth. Owing to the incompleteness of memories and traits, the rebirth idiom seems to be more likely. There appears to be a lack of coherence, of cohesiveness. Moreover, thinking or writing 'a' soul suggests that 'it' is a 'thing' separate from other things, other souls. Since it is immaterial, what kind of boundary are we considering that could differentiate one soul from another? And what is the matrix in which these separate souls could be? A raindrop does not maintain the boundary it had falling through the air when it hits a body of water. It's molecules disperse. We are not like the Dax Symbiont in the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine which is surgically implanted in one human host body after another lending all of the former host's experiences, knowledge, and wisdom to each new host. This was a sci-fi analogy of the reincarnation idiom with the reincarnating being as a physical organism replete with all the memories of its numerous hosts. Another Deep Space Nine analogy is of that liquid being Odo who had to learn to assume solidity. When he returned to his planet, he 'melted' back into his liquid form with the rest of his planet's inhabitants and YET...each being retained a psychic boundary, retained their individuality and individual experiences.
This is a very real metaphysical conundrum and one cannot simply choose to 'believe' the version one likes best and commit it to dogmatic 'belief,' end of uncertainty. So you and your friends might "know" something about aspects of past lives manifesting in new human beings, but you cannot "know" the accuracy of the idiom you subscribe to: reincarnation or rebirth. The further question is does this difference matter to the way we live our lives here on Earth? Is it necessary to change one's assumption about disincarnating from the knots of existence we have unwittingly become caught up in OR are we to embrace the notion of resurrection, of being 'reconstituted' as something else in a linear transformation that ceases to be linear in Eternity? Does THIS have any bearing on how we live our lives? The early Christians who rejected transmigration (reincarnation) thought it afforded too much time to get it right and so insisted we do it in one lifetime, or suffer eternal consequences. Just sayin'.
I've been having some very strange, powerful, humorous, occasionally frankly ridiculous experiences with memories and visions of past lives and dialogues (internal or voiced) with personalities inside myself that seem to belong to people I used to be.
Basically it feels like shards of personalities that I am in communication with. One of them is an extremely wry Irish man who sounds and thinks kind of like Samuel Beckett. Others have been much darker.
I would interpret it as some form of madness except that so many things inside me and around me seem to be equally mad these days that I can't be bothered to feel worried about it.
-------------------- “Strengthened by contemplation and study, I will not fear my passions like a coward. My body I will give to pleasures, to diversions that I’ve dreamed of, to the most daring erotic desires, to the lustful impulses of my blood, without any fear at all, for whenever I will— and I will have the will, strengthened as I’ll be with contemplation and study— at the crucial moments I’ll recover my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi



Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 26,657
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
#26863007 - 08/04/20 04:44 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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DS9 fans may appreciate this humorous take on a classic Odo scene.
-------------------- Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
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MarkostheGnostic
Elder



Registered: 12/09/99
Posts: 14,279
Loc: South Florida
Last seen: 3 years, 2 days
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: The Blind Ass]
#26863231 - 08/04/20 06:43 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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It's funny til it becomes the norm.
-------------------- γνῶθι σαὐτόν - Gnothi Seauton - Know Thyself
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Fiery
Sword of Fire


Registered: 12/24/12
Posts: 36,574
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: MarkostheGnostic]
#26863250 - 08/04/20 06:56 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Quote:
MarkostheGnostic said: There are all kinds of phenomena that lead one to believe in some kind of cyclical existence,
each of us are a monadic 'soul' that passes through the conditions of birth, life, death, reincarnation OR that there is NO soul (jivatman) and thus the Buddhist Anatman/Anatta assertion is true. In Buddhism there is no coherent entity that transmigrates. We dissolve into psychic attributes, samskaras, which like physical elements are recycled for rebirths.
.
One minute. this might take me a second to digest. I'm not sure what you just said but it sounds mono-nistic , I'm not sure but I know it was like a true casting if an idea.
I need time to digest this!
But in the meantime try to explain that to someone else.
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 37,532
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: Fiery]
#26863862 - 08/05/20 06:32 AM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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just before Covid, the seventeenth Karmapa sent a small gift by emissary to my cousin who is now a Hassid working in property management.
In 1971 that same cousin, in saffron robes from Thailand (where he had been a monk for 2 years already), had a brief encounter with the previous Karmapa in Sikkim.
The new Karmapa was sending a message that he remembered my cousin and valued the connection.
This suggests some memory can be transferred, or that the karmapa's staff does great note keeping.
mysterious.
--------------------
_ 🧠 _
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi



Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 26,657
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: redgreenvines]
#26864051 - 08/05/20 08:51 AM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Impressive either way!
-------------------- Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
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laughingdog
Stranger

Registered: 03/14/04
Posts: 4,828
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Re: Is my testimony of past lives enough to hold up in court? [Re: Fiery]
#26872143 - 08/09/20 06:48 PM (3 years, 5 months ago) |
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Quote:
Fiery said: ...What about other things like past lives...
. Generally speaking I would say that the lack of a sense of humor, that goes with most so called "supernatural phenomenon", is a clear indication that beneath the manifest content usually lies an agenda that has more to do with ego.
. Also the lack of repeatable or verifiable results, may raise some eyebrows.
. This common sense view, of course never stopped, 'the Seth material', the 'Urantia book', 'the Book of Mormon' by Joseph Smith, or other similar material from becoming popular. * . Then there is the phenomenon of cults. One such cult called 'Heaven's Gate' even lead to its members committing suicide. Definitely a total lack of any sense of humor there. . That a whole culture may be into irrational beliefs, is also probably more the rule than the exception, and probably tells us more about 'flaws' in human nature than 'reality'.
* in fact it almost seems to be a regular industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_channelled_texts P.T. Barnum would not be surprised
Edited by laughingdog (08/09/20 10:51 PM)
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