Reincarnation?

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Zuruck
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Reincarnation?

Post by Zuruck »

I was wondering about something while I was watching the movie Troy yesterday. You hear people say that they have lived on earth before as something else yadda yadda...what do you all think?

Is reincarnation tied to spirituality? What makes my conscious different from someone else's?

Now granted, I had smoked a joint and was playing the acoustic so my mind was working fully, but I'm intrigued by the idea. Normally, I would toss it aside...but it provides an opportunity to discuss a subject everyone thinks about.
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Re: Reincarnation?

Post by dissent »

Zuruck wrote:but it provides an opportunity to discuss a subject everyone thinks about.
Well, I used to think about this in a former life, but now I realize it is just a pile of hooey so I exercise my brain elsewhere.
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Post by Genghis »

I dunno, if everyone who believed in karma and reincarnation actually came back as a better person, wouldn't we be living in a world of rich-ass saints by now?
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Post by roid »

not really Genghis, coz mere belief isn't enough to allow you to "level up". you have to be good in your life to "level up" in the next.

what i find confusing is when ppl say that even inanimate objects have souls, and these are generally souls who have been bad in past lives. ie: they might be reincarnated as a rock.

my question is how does a rock die, so it can be reincarnated? if you smash it and split it into lots of little rocks, is this rock now dead, or is it now lots of individual small rocks all with souls?
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Post by Krom »

One of my aunts claims she was an Egyptian princess in a previous life; I call her a Drama Queen in her current one though.

And roid, you never cease to amaze me, talking about rocks in this context. :P
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Post by will_kill »

Zuruck, I have a better idea. No, really, listen to this....ok, here goes...ready?...ahh ok.. well..mm--hhmm...we could just talk about what it feels like to be dying (or know your dying) because in the end, that's what it is...the end . :(


Also, guess what? Were all dying, right now in fact, "some of you may die"<--heheh! while I type this.....


but it's cool if you don't like my idea, your thread is cool as well :P :wink:
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Post by Bet51987 »

There was a point in time when you first became aware of things around you. There were senses like light, touch and sounds, and as time advanced, you became aware of people around you. You became aware that "you" exist.... You will live your life, then die. When that happens, that "you" with all its memories will be gone forever.

However, my personal belief, is that our universe is not only huge, but part of a multiverse of endless universes and full of surprises, so don't think for a moment that there won't be another sense of light, sound or touch, another awakening, another you....but different and new. :)

I really believe this.

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Post by dissent »

Hey Bettina, this happened to me too. I think I was about 27 at the time... :P

(hey now, it's not nice to make fun of the elderly!)
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Post by Krom »

I know some people who might have been rocks in a previous life, in fact they might still have rocks for brains...
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Post by Money! »

roid wrote:not really Genghis, coz mere belief isn't enough to allow you to "level up". you have to be good in your life to "level up" in the next.

what i find confusing is when ppl say that even inanimate objects have souls, and these are generally souls who have been bad in past lives. ie: they might be reincarnated as a rock.

my question is how does a rock die, so it can be reincarnated? if you smash it and split it into lots of little rocks, is this rock now dead, or is it now lots of individual small rocks all with souls?
And that's not even mentioning the fact that how do they expect to "level up" when they are a rock? They have no control over what they do! If someone takes them and throws them at someone, and it hurts the person, do they "lose" a level?

From these points I do not think inanimate objects have souls.
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Post by Phoenix Red »

Probably not, but what constitutes a life in which you are capable of making good or bad descisions? Can an ameoba that exist for 6 hours "level up"? Over the course of many 6 hour reincarnations?

I think reincarnation is pretty much bunk. If life-essence is recycled like that, then I don't see anything that says the life-essence in a new life has to be all from the same previous life/lives. Same as your body, eventually some of the atoms in you will end up in another life-form (many before you even die!) but those aren't you and the new life-form is not all from you. It's just stuff.
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Post by Jeff250 »

It's irrelevant. Most people don't identify themselves with some sort of immaterial life-essence in practice. We identify ourselves by our bodies and our minds (memories, etc.). The fact is is that if I swapped life essences with somebody, this body-mind would never know it because this body-mind would have the same body and mind (that which is observable)--nothing has noticably changed. That's the strange thing about immaterials. And why believe that they swap only on death? Perhaps we swap life-essences every five minutes, or perhaps our life-essences are continually streaming from one person to the next. Who would know the difference? This is why reincarnation is, even if true, not very significant to me.
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Post by roid »

as Phoenix Red said, how does this work for simple ameoba? interesting.

We are all actually multicellular organisms. We are made up of estimates of between 10 and 100 trilion smaller single organisms - cells. You and me are perhaps just as much living entitys as a city full of humans is a living entity. Or perhaps the whole planet is a living entity, as in the Gaia model from new-age religion.

It's a strange thought, that our very consciousnesses, our very souls, could be nothing but loosely defined abstract constructs of the multi-trillion strong multitudinous "society" that we call our human bodys. Our great 2 armed 2 legged citys that we walk around with.

I remember seeing in a nature documentary a frog that hibernated for the winter underground and froze SOLID. during this process it releases antifreeze agent into all of the cells in it's body, and then the heart stops, all of the cells become autonomous. the blood freezes. everything but the individual cells freeze, and each cell - disconnected - goes into it's own hybernation (they do not freeze because of the antifreeze agent). At this time, the frog is technically not a frog, but a mass of individual cells - not connected to one another - frozen in a mass that is in the shape of a frog. The frog for all purposes is no more, there are only cells. So the frog is in this time split into billions of independant individual components. it's amazing.
then when it unfreezes everything starts up again, the infrastructure of the frog allows the cells to live as part of a greater whole again and the frog lives once more. but what happened to the "frog" in the meantime? where did it go? did it goto froggy heaven perhaps, and then come back? or was that frog's life always merely a loosely defined abstract construct of the many lives that made it up, so technically perhaps that frog NEVER existed. and likewise perhaps all of us humans simply do not exist.

the Dictyostelium Discoideum (<- look at the pics of it's lifecycle) is another interesting example.
These are individual ameoba, they eat food and split & divide just like normal ameoba. But when the food runs out in an area - they send out a signal, then all band together into a single large mound of cells, then this mound of cells moves around just like a multicelled slug. For all intensive purposes, although it is made of multiple cells, it is acting as a single multicelled animal. Then when it finds light it roots itself into the ground and errects a stalk high into the air with a spore pod on the end of it, which then allows some of the cells to act as "spores" to get caught on the wind and travel to other areas to start the whole process all over again. It all starts with just one cell landing on some food - it keeps dividing until the food runs out then all the cells come together to form a large multicelled entity that moves as one. As these cells gradually come together and organise themselves (somehow), at what point is it a living entity? Where did that entity's consciousness come from? And if all of those ameoba cells re-seperated into individual ameoba, would this somehow "kill" the greater entity? the consciousness of multicelled slug probably has no concept that it's made up of individual cells, and the individual cells probabaly have no concept that they make up a greater being - they are simply acting on cause and effect instincts. So, if that slug and all it's cells died at once (like from radiation), so it died in it's slug form. Is that at all different from the "death" experienced by that slug's consciousness by the cells seperate into individual ameoba cells?
and if this multicelled "slug" entity is so easy to create and destory - by either respectively collecting or seperating it's cells - what is life really? do souls really exist?
(Videos of the whole process are indeed facinating, i downloaded some a few months back from the net and found it all highly facinating.)

so with things like the Dictyostelium Discoideum, and the freezing frog... Do we as the existential consciousnesses of multicelled organisms really exist at all?

perhaps we are simply the collective unconscious dream of all of our individual cells.

and perhaps our earth too has a consciousness which is the collective unconscious dream of all of the life living on it.

and perhaps too the Milky Way galaxy has a consciousness which is the collective unconscious of all of the life containing planets it contains.

and the cycle just keeps expanding outwards, each level of consciousness being unaware of it's part in the bigger whole, the immense GOD consciousness entity being the final product of it all.
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Post by roid »

so if GAIA is made of nothing but us individuals in her system, wouldn't us humans going to HUMAN heaven as individual HUMAN entitys take away from GAIA's soul? Since GAIA's consciousness would be nothing but an abstract existance that operates somehow from the collective fucnction of all of it's individual cells - or living beings on earth. If we all claim our own individual identity in death, what becomes of the greater GAIA's soul when earth dies? If all of it's souls goto their own heaven, there will be no soul left. So does GAIA goto planet heaven when it dies?

it may seem stupid, but here's the crux:

how is it any different to multicellular humans going to heaven? we are made of individual LIVING cells, all with their own life, when these cells die, perhaps they think they will all goto CELL HEAVEN where they can be with all of their cell friends and family.
But if that happens, then where does that leave OUR souls - as humans? How can we goto heaven, anymore than a planet can goto heaven? they can't all goto their own heavens at once, since they are all simply constucts of their lesser cells.

it's existential issues like this where eastern concepts of the afterlife make more sense to me than the judeo-christian-islam western afterlife concept.
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Post by woodchip »

So what you are saying Roid, is at some time in the future the internet will "Wake Up" and become self aware. The awareness of course will be all the billions of human users and perhaps more importantly...the machine users that will regulate things like heat and light in homes, store data and turn on the T.V. Don't be surprised if when you log on one day your pc starts having a conversation with you.
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Post by Phoenix Red »

That the internet will some day become self aware is not an unreasonable assumption. It's already fraught with self-altering, reproductive code and has an absolutely vast, ever-expanding potential in terms of memory and processing power. People tend to remove rogue code from their machines, but maybe this new sony technology will allow e-volution (har) to begin in ernest.
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Post by woodchip »

You might like to read this about machines and the internet:

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/1 ... qci9l.html
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Post by roid »

woodchip wrote:So what you are saying Roid, is at some time in the future the internet will "Wake Up" and become self aware. The awareness of course will be all the billions of human users and perhaps more importantly...the machine users that will regulate things like heat and light in homes, store data and turn on the T.V. Don't be surprised if when you log on one day your pc starts having a conversation with you.
No i wasn't really getting to that. I was concentrating on issues of the afterlife and how single cellular consciousness might conflict with multicellular consciousness for "rights to a soul" and therefore "rights to an afterlife".

For the internet to evolve into a single multicellular consciousness like we biological organisms do - you would first need to assume that all of our individual computers are ALIVE. So any code would first need to be "living" on an individual level, then expand out to network with other living computers, using the internet as it's communication infrastructure, it's "endocrine system". The individual living computers probabaly being quite unaware of their part in any greater "single internet consciousness".

i guess it's all a question of what we consider to be "alive". some would say that biological cells are just complex machines with entirely predictable instincts, are they really alive? But if we are simply made up of these machines, then if you can predict the actions of all of the individual cells - then you could predict the actions of the greater multicellular organism they make up. Our actions may be many times more complex, but perhaps we are predictable - but the intelegence needed to compile so much data (the compiled predictions of the actions of all of our individual cells) is simply beyond our comprehension.

So in the same vein of one of Mobius' favourite expressions: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Perhaps also we just label ourselves as magical and ethereal "souls" because the inteligence needed to predict our actions is beyond our intellect - so it's easier to just label it as "magic".
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Post by Jeff250 »

I still don't get this whole soul thing anyways. After I die, something in the afterlife gets my soul, so that's supposed to be me?
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Post by Behemoth »

reincarnation is bs :)
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Post by dissent »

Jeff250 wrote:I still don't get this whole soul thing anyways.
You're just not a soul man, babeh!!
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Post by Duper »

Your soul is you emotions, the part of you that "feels", your cogniscience.
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Post by Jeff250 »

A soul would be an important thing to define before we talk about them. A soul as we've been already using it has to be something that can survive the death of the body.

I'm not convinced that an emotional state has the capability to do that. Crazy Bob receives terrible head trauma in a car wreck, and he's just not the same again. Somebody has to undergo serious brain surgery that requires taking out a significant portion of his brain. As a result, his emotional ability seriously impaired. I'm pretty sure that there is enough neuroscience these days to say within extremely high probability that emotions are a result of the brain, which does not survive the death of the body.
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Post by Duper »

Jeff.. if you want to go that route, then thought is nothing more than chemical exchanges in the brain. Which is bull.

I did define a soul. Take into account my entire post. Emotions are more than biological reaction that is triggered by external stimuli...which was not what I was refering to.
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Post by Jeff250 »

Duper wrote:Jeff.. if you want to go that route, then thought is nothing more than chemical exchanges in the brain. Which is bull.
Well, howcome? I think that this is an interesting topic.
Duper wrote:I did define a soul.
Sure, but if there's going to be soul-talk, it would be nice to agree on a definition. Otherwise, when everyone is talking about souls, they will be talking about different things. Already I've been under the belief that souls were entirely immaterial essences. Earlier, Roid made references to souls being like consciousness. Duper, you're saying that souls are emotions or cognisance. There is one thing though that we agree on that has to constitute a soul--it has to have the capability to survive the death of the body--so that's something we can use as a foundation to explore the issue.

So what does everyone think a soul is (and why)? Is a soul material? Immaterial? A combination of both? Nonexistent/irrelevant? Are they passageways, portals, or mediums?

Obviously this is an inexact subject, but I don't think that means that there cannot be any edifying conversation on it.

Duper, you seemed to already indicate that you believe that the material brain isn't sufficient to explain emotions or cognisance and that there is something else, a soul, working behind the scenes. Why do you think that?
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Post by Teddy »

I think most people have the wrong idea of what a soul is...Most christians believe what was passed down generation by generation from a time when people didnt have God's word(dark ages).
Not to mention that the Catholic church has written some interesting books on the early church's history(will insert name of book and which cardinal wrote it later).... the name Catholic means "universal", The book was stating how the church was a mixture of all the religions, christian and pagan (this is also were we get christmas on dec.25, easter, going to church on sunday, and many other customs outlined that were mixed in with christianity at this time.) It was not the universal christian church as many usually think as there were other christian churches at that time.

To get to the bottom of what is what, I've turned to digging through Judism to see what the common belief on this was before the dark ages set in and things could have been compromised.... what i've found is this...

About 2200 years ago, the land of Israel was under the relatively benevolent control of Greece, and was deeply influenced by Greek culture.
While under the influence of the greeks, there came a division in the teachings on what happens when you die and what a soul is....

The Sadducees evolved out of the Hellenistic elements of Judaism. They were religiously conservative but socially liberal. For the most part they adopted the ways of the neighboring Greek culture.

The Pharisees followed the fundamental belief in the eventual resurrection of the dead.The also believed that the description of what a soul is rest's in genesis 2:7-

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

the Pharisees believed that the dust + spark of life from God was a living soul. when you die, It is the reverse. They did not believe that the spark of life from God was your soul however.....

They believed that death was like a deep sleep from which the believers would be resurected from. It was a belief that distinguished the Pharisees from the Sadducees. The Sadducees rejected the concept, and believed in an eternal soul(no resurrection of dead).

In the time of Jesus, he sided with the pharisees on this topic...Not to mention, read the stories of when he resurected Lazarus

11 These things said he: and after that he saith unto them, Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.
14 Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.

To make a long story short... a soul is an alive person,his intelect, and sometimes it means life or mind... however, nowhere have i seen the bible say that our current "soul" is immortal, actually it says the oppostite and that immortality is a gift in the future.

- some probing questions-

regarding christianity in general, why do most christians after reading about the many times that the pagan nations compromised judism, why do majority of christians think that it was impossable that it could have happened to christianity???

regarding death and the soul, if somone who is saved goes right to heaven when they die..... why is God going to bother to resurect them when he comes back??
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Post by El Ka Bong »

Oh Roid !... "Cell Heaven'... ! LoL!

I just showed orange colonies of some kind of slime mold to my son, on a log in the woods, ... it's cAMP in their slime; molecular signal for "party over here" .. !

Speaking of cellular signals, and our "Soul", any of us who have taken a pyschedelic substance, in sufficient amount, in a supportive setting know it's a certainty we have a soul.

Our bodies are vessels holding an enormous amount of cellular/DNA represented 'Energy' ! A freaking huge amount of energy is evident in our brains. And our autonomous nevrves and every cell of our body are energy transducers with a purpose. Our bodies have the purpose to contain a 'larval' amount of energy, consciousness, and Soul, to be released when we die.

But Reincarnation ..? that word sounds like getting 'stuck', held back or recycled. Although if I was given a list to choose from, I'd choose to be a dragonfly.. for the next time around, I'd want a quick but good one ! !

Speaking of bugs, upon my demise after donating all my useful organs, I have thought I should offer my deceased body to a mortuary facility in India. There the mortuaries get your body consumed by thousands of scarab beeteles, inside the morgue's 'box' they keep your body in. Then in a week or two, your bones are all that remains, perfectly cleaned of flesh by the scarabs, who scurry around, mature and very 'alive'... !

So then I imagine someone could take out the beetles in a box, and then free all the scarabs into the woods somewhere, to feed on more stuff and be food for other creatures. My skeleton could also be donated for some kind of other purposes, you know, mounted on a stand in a class room ?!... That's Reincarnation too !

Roid !.. my next psilocybin trip will recall that frog freeze up image, for sure !... and funny you mention it Roid, I used to study D. discoideum in the 1980's.
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