Rebirth

I'm thinking aloud, don't take this too seriously. 

So what is the secular Buddhist do with him the Buddha’s memories of past lives? What would a Buddhist do who didn’t believe that that was really true. First off, we need to go past common conceptions to what the Buddha really said. Then apply critical thinking to that.

What would a secular Buddhist do if that actually happened to them as they went deeper in and they experience past lives? I’ve always loved the idea of having a religious experience that is in the wrong sect. I read an Irish story like that, where a catholic had a protestant religious vision. Or was it vica versa?

The only way I can understand it all, is rebirth was an appreciation of conditionality that may be in this life, I was more assertive or in this life I was more charismatic in this life or I was lucky having a really good family, or in this life I wasn’t lucky and didn’t have a good family. you can imagine people throughout lifetimes with different circumstances so that’s the best way I understand it. That way of looking at things would make one imagine.

If you don’t think that that’s really how the world works and that is in the text there are a number of options. You can assume that it was an insertion by another monk who had an agenda about reincarnation. or you can say that he was just lying and he was just saying just cultural stuff just to to be part of the times like you know like somebody who is the Yankees fan or speaks in a certain political way as part of their tribe. Or you could just assume that it is true and that he did have memories of past lives and then that’s just how things are. 

I am willing to be wrong about skepticism about rebirth, and I want to know more. My thing against it is because my past growing up at a Christian country is I’m told to I have to believe certain mythologies as literally true and for me one of the way to cope with that is you backup to your own experience and your own reason and your own way of thinking and you don’t just swallow things because people told you to believe them. I realize now you take a leap of faith with Christianity and accept their mythology, the way you can accept other mythologies. 

It’s possible that I’m wrong and that I just don’t believe it because I’m a mistaken flawed human being who just doesn’t believe things. I’m not sure what I miss out in Buddhism I mean I can still believe in the 6 spiritual qualities or the the five hindrances, or all the other things. I believe in conditionality, I've yet to see something unconditioned. I take the Dharma that makes sense to me and leave aside the stuff I don’t understand.

“I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, i.e., one birth, two… five, ten… fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, many eons of cosmic contraction, many eons of cosmic expansion, many eons of cosmic contraction & expansion: ‘There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There, too, I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.’ Thus I recollected my manifold past lives in their modes & details.” (Noble Warrior Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu) MN36

Reading and rereading the sutra, I can't help but think the Buddha took conditionality and tailored his presentations of it to reinforce his lessons. 

In general I think karma and rebirth are talked about like people are omniscient, and not the ignorant messes they are, without intellectual humility. If I could ban 3 words from Dharma talk, I would ban karma, rebirth and attachments.

When you think about it conditionality could be endlessly complex. Even systems theory barely scratches the surface. Philosophy and science barely scratch the surface. The cosmic perspective is that we’re a blink on a speck

I think you also have to take out the Tulku system, Tibetan cultural practices of identifying past lamas and their system of concentrating resources onto one person, to pass on the Dharma. That may or may not be an application of the ideas set forth by the Buddha. But if you take those out, you can perhaps look at the whole situation with fresh eyes. That takes nothing away from the lovely culture that they have. I respect their culture. I just notice, if it was so obvious like agriculture or printing presses, it would have cropped up in other cultures too. Maybe they are advanced and it does crop up in other cultures. I met a woman once who claimed Judaism had rebirth. I didn't get further information on that unfortunately. 

The twelve nidanas is how the Buddha saw importance in conditionality. There are 3 lives in the 12 nidanas supposedly. I didn't see it that way, and while I've read a few books on the 12 nidanas, I need to study it some more. 

I do think the 12 nidanas and the other teachings can work out without rebirth, and the emphasis should be on conditionality. I'm agnostic as to whether that should happen or what. I'd say my needle moved from skeptical about rebirth to more just not knowing and realizing I need to learn more. 

In a weird parallel, I think the way people who are treated who say Shakespeare didn't write the plays doesn't help them understand why that doesn't make sense in the end. There's a kind of violent anger about asking such questions. I entertained the idea that Shakespeare didn't write the plays for a month. I got intoxicated by the idea that we didn't know much about it, and what eventually sunk in was that a noble wouldn't grind in the theater like Shakespeare did. And also there's a bunch of blanks in the history book, so that can be filled in with whimsical alternatives. In the end Keats' negative capability allowed me to think while not knowing. Francis Bacon doesn't make sense to me. The best fit, the Earl of Oxford Edward de Vere, did go to Italy and was involved in a shipwreck, and lived with the translator of Ovid, and was a lawyer and studied law--lots of lawyers think only a lawyer could have written the plays. 

Shakespeare was a really good writer, and he was also a collaborator and an editor. Mostly he was a businessman who made a lot of money in the theater, through acting and writing and reinvested it into owning the company. Copyright wasn't a thing in those days. He left money on the table by not publishing his plays even if there were bootleg copies out there. The fellows who inherited the prompt books in the theater cashed in years after his death. Anyway, I don't think you're insane if you wonder for a little while if someone else wrote the plays. In the end the books trying to prove it are obscure but they also give some more background into the times, and I just found it so weird that people shut down the question. I'm so grateful to James Shapiro for writing a serious book to answer the question.

In the same way, with my modern mind, I'm disinclined to speculate about such metaphysical things like rebirth. I mean with conditionality people are coming and going out of existence all the time. It's really quite amazing. I was looking at my daughter's photos from when she was a baby and it's amazing how much she's grown. My sons constantly amaze me. Life really is quite astonishing and I'm tempted to use the term miracle as a metaphor. 

I object to weird extrapolations where if you're this or that, you'll be reborn as a snake or whatever folk wisdom people like to come up with. They are colorful but I'm a skeptical person, you can't know any of that stuff. Moral lessons, mythology and metaphor maybe. I'm not putting any eggs in any other baskets, but this life, but we'll find out. I am attracted to longtermism and effective altruism.

I know people have memories of past lives, and like to talk and write about such things. Maybe. I do believe in people's experience. I don't literally believe in ghosts but people have told me their experiences of ghosts and I don't doubt that is their best articulation of their experience. So if people have experience of past lives, then I do believe they are communicating their experience, even if that doesn't show up on my registry of how things are, to the best of my knowledge. 

People have said, "you have to do it in this life," when they imagined my skepticism about rebirth. I mean if I get the sense that that is how it is, then I'm OK with that. I mean I'm OK with progressing on the path, as much as I've screwed up my life, I don't think that's Buddhism's fault, I feel like it's given me good things. A lot of times when you read time travel and alternative timelines fiction, things are screwed up in other ways when you reverse mistakes. I make a lot of mistaken moves in chess sometimes, and I'm not always punished or they later set up a series of good moves. Nothing in perfect. I don't think I have to do it in this lifetime, and if that's the way it is, then that's the way it is. But if that's not the way it is, then that's OK too. 

Someone said, "that energy has to go somewhere." That smacks of a soul to me. I have the memory of my grandparents who all passed away quite a while ago, and you know, their memory lives inside me. Their examples are part of what informs my world, I derived great benefit from spending my summers with them as a child, and visiting them as an adult. Their lives live on in my fading memory. They say you're truly dead when nobody has a memory of you. 

The traditional explanation is a candle light going from one wick to another. Maybe. That brings up a lot of questions about what's the number, and if all the insects were killed where would all that energy go, where will that energy go when the sun expands past the earth and kills all the life remaining on it? That's not happening for a really really long time and I expect humans will be on other planets by then. I guess I could imagine planets going out of existence and coming into existence on a large scale, so in the end those kinds of questions don't confuse me.

I read about how a monk tried to rape a farmer girl because a great lama died, and he wanted to have the rebirth nearby. That sounds like he was kind of assuming a few things, and rape is never justified even if that was true. I'd need a lot more concrete proof to justify that, and wanting the lama reborn nearby seems kind of selfish. This is the thing, people can justify anything with just about anything. 

There's a movie where someone dies, and then they're like flying around trying to figure out where to be reborn. I can't think of the name right now. 

There's that scifi novel where it follows the rebirth of some people: Years of Rice and Salt. I read about half of it but lost interest.

I'll keep trying to understand.