Evidence for rebirth

Exploring Theravāda's connections to other paths - what can we learn from other traditions, religions and philosophies?
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Ceisiwr
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

Post by Ceisiwr »

In response to the request on the other thread, I will briefly summarize evidence for rebirth/reincarnation, though scientists don't seem to like it because they are afraid that it would strengthen religion.

I get suspicious of this kind of reasoning, that scientists deny supernatural claims because of ideology. If it can be proven via the scientific method, beyond all reasonable doubt, then science accepts it. What you suggest just sounds like a conspiracy theory, which is usually a non-theory.


The Big Bang theory was seen to support the abrahamic religions (I think the pope at the time thought about making it a church dogma) yet it was accepted within science, over the steady state theory (which was a model that leant less support to certain religions).
Last edited by Ceisiwr on Mon Feb 24, 2014 11:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Ceisiwr
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

Post by Ceisiwr »

. In that way, ancient Buddhists were much closer to modern thought than ancient Greeks and Romans. So that means that many of the past lives the Buddha remembered were on other planets.

The Ancient Greek materialist philosopher Democritus proposed that there were other planets, and that some of them had life. He also put forward the atomic theory.
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Ceisiwr
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

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The key point is the tremendous skill of consciousness in doing this. A landscape might be encoded in the relative positions of hundreds of thousands of nerve impulses, and in less than a second, consciousness decodes all that and creates a subjective image of the landscape. That means that the unconscious mind part of consciousness has skills equal to or better than our most powerful supercomputers.

That extremely high level of skill couldn't have been learned by a baby during a couple of months in the womb. So where did the skill come from?
Why?
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Ceisiwr
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

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The above isn't enough for a formal proof, but it is suggestive. There is also a small amount of evidence for interplanetary rebirth/reincarnation. There have been times when a researcher has come up with a theory that turned out to be true, which was a quite large leap ahead of past knowledge, and which wasn't arrived at in a step by step way.


Do you have an example?

That implies that the scientific discovery may have been knowledge the scientist remembered from past lifetimes on another planet.
No it doesn't, that's just a huge leap in logic.
Again, all that isn't enough for a formal proof that there is interplanetary reincarnation, but it is enough to hold the existence of interplanetary rebirth as a hypothesis with some support for it.
It's weak and flimsy at best
“Knowing that this body is just like foam,
understanding it has the nature of a mirage,
cutting off Māra’s flower-tipped arrows,
one should go beyond the King of Death’s sight.”
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

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The work on some children's natural memories still continues at U. of Virginia. By "natural" is meant not hypnotically induced, which are not reliable.

Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

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Nicholas Weeks wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 4:55 pm The work on some children's natural memories still continues at U. of Virginia. By "natural" is meant not hypnotically induced, which are not reliable.

https://www.youtube.com/....
"natural memories"? ... what are "unnatural memories"? Say people were talking that I may have been gautama in one of my previous lives and have been talking about gautama's life in my presence, too. Then spontaneously I have memories of my previous life as gautama ... are these memories then "natural" or "unnatural"? :shrug:
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

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SteRo wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:26 pm
Nicholas Weeks wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 4:55 pm The work on some children's natural memories still continues at U. of Virginia. By "natural" is meant not hypnotically induced, which are not reliable.

https://www.youtube.com/....
"natural memories"? ... what are "unnatural memories"? Say people were talking that I may have been gautama in one of my previous lives and have been talking about gautama's life in my presence, too. Then spontaneously I have memories of my previous life as gautama ... are these memories then "natural" or "unnatural"? :shrug:
Your example is "unnatural". The U. of V. strictures on what are spontaneous utterances from the kids, & were not influences from anywhere or anyone else are good. Watch the video.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

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Nicholas Weeks wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:42 pm
SteRo wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 5:26 pm
Nicholas Weeks wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 4:55 pm The work on some children's natural memories still continues at U. of Virginia. By "natural" is meant not hypnotically induced, which are not reliable.

https://www.youtube.com/....
"natural memories"? ... what are "unnatural memories"? Say people were talking that I may have been gautama in one of my previous lives and have been talking about gautama's life in my presence, too. Then spontaneously I have memories of my previous life as gautama ... are these memories then "natural" or "unnatural"? :shrug:
Your example is "unnatural". The U. of V. strictures on what are spontaneous utterances from the kids, & were not influences from anywhere or anyone else are good. Watch the video.
I won't watch the video because I am not a believer. If you can provide scientific evidence then this evidence is welcome.
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Nicholas Weeks
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

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SteRo wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 6:05 pm
I won't watch the video because I am not a believer. If you can provide scientific evidence then this evidence is welcome.
The video provides evidence. Have no idea what you do or do not believe, nor do I care.
Good and evil have no fixed form. It's as easy to turn from doing bad to doing good as it is to flip over the hand from the back to the palm. It's simply up to us to do it. Master Hsuan Hua.
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

Post by SteRo »

Nicholas Weeks wrote: Sat Apr 09, 2022 6:14 pm ... nor do I care.
Fine, we've found a commonality. :sage:

Verbal expressions of mental fabrications may be a good source for a video but these do not come under "scientific evidence".
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Post by sunnat »

With regard to different modes of memory imprinting, transmission, (cellular, genome, chemical or other) and keeping in mind what others wrote, what about this:

The cell that became you was the primordial ova in your mother's ovary formed when she was a foetus in her mother's uterus. The ova that became your mother was formed in your grandmother when she was a foetus in your great grandmother and so on and on and on back thorough many generations of mothers. So, an imprinted memory may span multiple generations.

Another point is that life is a huge sequence of events of a constantly changing being. Many of those events can be seen as belonging to an other in a long sequence of others.
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

Post by Bundokji »

One thing about human reports of rebirth is that it is always of past lives as humans. This is in contrast with Buddhist cosmology where rebirth can take place in other realms.

Do we have reports of being reborn from the animal realm, such as memories of being a horse, or bird?
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Post by sunnat »

There is a story where Buddha is in an Eagles egg. Another eagle claims seniority because his egg was laid first but Buddha points out that he first broke out of the egg so it sounds like a teaching metaphor. My only such memory is as a white tiger, followed by being born and soon dead in the middle of a battlefield which may very well be a birth memory with acquired image drapery.
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Post by sunnat »

There is another seldom talked about, let alone mentioned, idea. Basically it amounts to this :

Traumas, like birth, are primary unpleasant feelings that are stored, or rather suppressed, deep in the psyche.

Life then becomes primarily about managing the early acquired defensive pose in order to remain ignorant.

These traumas then are replayed again and again, looking for a way out but always blocked and thus manifesting as the ongoing ills of a being throughout life. Birth, as a sequential replay here and now, becomes in a sense an internal enemy to suppress and therefore must be re-experienced continuously, again and again.

This defensive pose ultimately starts to disintegrate and the underlying sensations become more and more intense and the defense more frantic until insanity or death.

What Buddha, and others like Christ, found is that in order to be ultimately free from this internalised trauma is that one has to 'be born again' in the fullest sense of that phrase. What Buddha did was to map out the right path to this full self realisation and to ultimate liberation from these traumas. In this way one can see ones birth as a continually repeated event felt in fragments again and again, many thousands of times throughout one's life. A very significant feature of this defensive posture with regards to the underlying birth trauma is the dressing up the trauma memories with imagery and ideas encountered in this life. For example, let's say that during one's birth a leg got caught in a difficult pose but eventually straightened out. Much later in life one may be sleeping and dreaming that a crocodile creeps up and grabs hold of the leg and with fright waking with a pain in the leg. That could be seen as an example of a deeply buried birth trauma leaking into dream consciousness where it is 'imagined away'.
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Re: Evidence for rebirth

Post by Alex123 »

Aloka wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2014 12:50 am I read this on the Secular Buddhist website a few minutes ago. Its from an essay called "A Secular Evaluation of Rebirth" by someone called Doug Smith
...

Few things I hope are true:


1st) The numbers of years ago such and such occurred is probably embellished or metaphorical.
2nd) It may have happened on another planet.

Because, I calculated that Buddha Kassapa probably lived, if we go literal, 572 MILLION years ago. We don't have evidence that there were any land based animals at that time. Just pancake like sea animals something like below:

Image

So obviously there couldn't be any humanoid beings, arms, legs, potters, climbing up the mountain and throwing the ladder away. Venus might have been habitable back then...

3rd) As for language and customs of previous lives:
The Buddha might have framed his experiences in the way that his listeners would understand him. So this, isn't an issue for me. Insistence that it had to happen on this planet earth and literal, long, timescales would be.


IMHO.
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