Welcome to Dhamma Wheel.nituardistf wrote: ↑Wed Aug 07, 2019 12:13 pmi disagree. if one has not attained stream entry, why bother talking about arahantship?
With which post are you disagreeing?
the great rebirth debate
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Dhammanando
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Re: the great rebirth debate
With which post are you disagreeing?
“Keep to your own pastures, bhikkhus, walk in the haunts where your fathers roamed.
If ye thus walk in them, Māra will find no lodgement, Māra will find no foothold.”
— Cakkavattisīhanāda Sutta
If ye thus walk in them, Māra will find no lodgement, Māra will find no foothold.”
— Cakkavattisīhanāda Sutta
Re: the great rebirth debate
I have been on both sides of this debate, and sometimes still veer from one to the other.
A lot of people, in my view struggle with it because they think rebirth means the person you are now will be reborn in a different form. That somehow bits of it will come through. This, in my understanding, is not the case. Everything about your personality, all of your memories and so forth are obliterated at death. In every sense of our common understanding death is the end of our existence.
However the part of us that knows we exist. The Buddho. The part that knows 'it is hot' but does not itself get hot. The undifferentiated awareness that is what you really mean when you say 'I am', which is not a person. The screen onto which the experience of our lives is projected. This is what takes on another form. This is not a person, it is more fundamental than that. It's more like space or something.
If we take this awareness to be the screen, and the person to be the projection upon the screen. There is absolutely nothing from one film that survives into the next. It's gone. But the screen is the same. The screen is not the mind either, it's behind that. More fundamental than that. When you die you are gone, and you are not reborn. Life is over for you. But then another film starts on the screen...
A lot of people, in my view struggle with it because they think rebirth means the person you are now will be reborn in a different form. That somehow bits of it will come through. This, in my understanding, is not the case. Everything about your personality, all of your memories and so forth are obliterated at death. In every sense of our common understanding death is the end of our existence.
However the part of us that knows we exist. The Buddho. The part that knows 'it is hot' but does not itself get hot. The undifferentiated awareness that is what you really mean when you say 'I am', which is not a person. The screen onto which the experience of our lives is projected. This is what takes on another form. This is not a person, it is more fundamental than that. It's more like space or something.
If we take this awareness to be the screen, and the person to be the projection upon the screen. There is absolutely nothing from one film that survives into the next. It's gone. But the screen is the same. The screen is not the mind either, it's behind that. More fundamental than that. When you die you are gone, and you are not reborn. Life is over for you. But then another film starts on the screen...
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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cappuccino
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Re: the great rebirth debate
Just another day, just another life.
Same thing.
Same thing.
To be continued . . .
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