Philosophy

[Draconysius]

I miss the days when one could actually have an intelligent conversation on gNet. Nowadays it's nothing but asenine games with no beginning or end, what-are-you-doing threads which should really be called "How cool do you think I am?"... standard forum fare. Anyway, I'd like to start out with the subject of reincarnation.

I feel that reincarnation makes complete sense. The most obvious evidence is deja vu, the feeling that one has experienced something before. There's far more evidence by my account though, but I'll have to tread into Pagan spirituality for that. My wife has told me of several of my past lives, and everything that happened to me then can account for something in my current life. For instance, I've always felt drawn to England, and I come to find out that I've lived many lives there. Any thoughts on past lives or reincarnation?

[Saya]

I'm Buddhist, but I don't strictly believe in reincarnation, I can't remember anything and I wouldn't trust any memories if I did. But from a scientific standpoint, matter is never created or destroyed, it can only be converted to energy. And energy isn't created or destroyed, but can only be converted to matter. So from that point, the matter that makes me, used to be something else, so then physically at least, I used to be something else. All the bits and pieces of me came from difference sources I'm sure, but from that standpoint "I" as a physical being was always there, in pieces, and then something happened to bring it all together, and when I die, I'll break up into pieces again and become different things.

[dead_dreams]

Originally Posted by Saya

I'm Buddhist, but I don't strictly believe in reincarnation, I can't remember anything and I wouldn't trust any memories if I did. But from a scientific standpoint, matter is never created or destroyed, it can only be converted to energy. And energy isn't created or destroyed, but can only be converted to matter. So from that point, the matter that makes me, used to be something else, so then physically at least, I used to be something else. All the bits and pieces of me came from difference sources I'm sure, but from that standpoint "I" as a physical being was always there, in pieces, and then something happened to bring it all together, and when I die, I'll break up into pieces again and become different things.

So what you're saying is that, "matter cannot be destroyed or created, it is simply converted into energy. And that energy itself cannot be created or destroyed, but is converted into matter."

A fine example of that statement is as follows:
conversion of uranium(m) into a nuclear power(e) and then the conversion into waste(m).

If I'am wrong, correct me.

[TheSomnambulist]

Well, there are arguments concerning whether deja vu is caused by the brain itself or perhaps the eyes, though some people do believe it to be a remembrance of past lives. Obviously, I really couldn't say, as no one else seems to know either.

I do get such feelings though, an aching remembrance as though I've had such a thing happen to me. I remember it coming to me strongly when I read the ending of A Tale of Two Cities. Actually, I get the feeling quite often when I've looked at some tragic ending, which once led me to wonder if perhaps in all of my past lives (if we do indeed have past lives) I have died some horrible death. I've wondered whether life is about trying to better ourselves each time we live and to try to find a way to avoid our past mistakes.

While reincarnation and past lives do seem to be very possible to me, I'm not sure that I'm completely ready to assign myself to such a belief yet until I feel more certain about it. I'd say it is the belief that I hold in highest regard though, concerning death and the afterlife.

May I ask how your wife knows about your past lives?

[Saya]

The uranium gets partly turned into energy and partly into waste, nothing is created or destroyed in the process.

Here's a wiki for you on the laws of conservation of matter ^_^
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_...vation_of_mass

[Godslayer Jillian]

How is believing in reincarnation not entirely arbitrary?

[Noirette]

Originally Posted by TheSomnambulist

Well, there are arguments concerning whether deja vu is caused by the brain itself or perhaps the eyes, though some people do believe it to be a remembrance of past lives. Obviously, I really couldn't say, as no one else seems to know either.

If I'm not mistaken, deja vu is caused by a little confusion in our brain, when the fresh events are considered as a part of the long-term memory, and then causes you a feeling same as when you hear a familiar word. Some kind of "hey, that's familiar, I heard it before, somewhere." but when it comes to events it causes to some confusion, since it obvious that you can't experience exactly the same situstion twice.


Some people ,though, explain the deja vu feeling as an experiance that you have dreamt about, and then the sitution is familiar to you.

[Beneath the Shadows]

Originally Posted by Draconysius

I feel that reincarnation makes complete sense. The most obvious evidence is deja vu, the feeling that one has experienced something before.

I don't think that deja vu is related to reincarnation. I've had some really strong deja vu experiences in which not only do I feel that I'm experience something again, but I actually have memory of those events... despite the fact that those memories include things that couldn't have happened before. Such as doing something with someone I had just met hours before. (These experiences can be counted on a single hand.)

Also, most deja vu can be explained simply by the fact that people feel that they've done something before because they have done it before.

I do think that there's merit to the idea of reincarnation, however. Though not in that a single soul lives, dies, and then is born again. More along the lines of (this sounds cheesy, I know) the FF7 energy theory, where the energy of living things merges with the planet's energy, then splits again to become new life. This would explain why people who have memories of past lives can remember bits in pieces of those past lives, but never the whole.

[NightmareInShiningArmour]

What Saya said is plausible and makes sense to me. I think that everything was made up of little particles floating through space which formed together and expanded into our earth which then over time evolved.
That's one of the theories I play out whenever I silently debate it out in my head during my time alone.

I have had some strange deja vu experiences where I have a dream I faintly remember and anywhere from a few days to a year later a feeling just grips me and I feel like I've done exactly what I'm doing at that present time. Most of these, as BtS said, could not have happened before.

[CrimsonPythonidae]

Noirette, you are not mistaken about deja vu, what you said is correct. Funnily enough I only just heard it described last week. Handy.

[Draconysius]

Originally Posted by NightmareInShiningArmour

What Saya said is plausible and makes sense to me. I think that everything was made up of little particles floating through space which formed together and expanded into our earth which then over time evolved.
That's one of the theories I play out whenever I silently debate it out in my head during my time alone.

I have had some strange deja vu experiences where I have a dream I faintly remember and anywhere from a few days to a year later a feeling just grips me and I feel like I've done exactly what I'm doing at that present time. Most of these, as BtS said, could not have happened before.

If you take the whole matter-cannot-be-destroyed situation into account, then absolutely everything is connected, even human bodies. They dissolve into the ground, which becomes soil for food, which gets converted into semen and results in the human body itself.

[Raptor]

All the deja vu I've had usually comes from looking at something in an instant in a new place. Kind of the position of all the different objects I can see at once. And after awhile I usually realise it was from a dream.

I can't say I believe in reincarnation.

Originally Posted by dead_dreams

A fine example of that statement is as follows:
conversion of uranium(m) into a nuclear power(e) and then the conversion into waste(m).

Sort of, but the uranium doesn't all change into energy. The uranium (m) splits up into "waste" (m). There's a very small difference in mass between the start and the product, this difference is mass which has been converted into energy.

[MollyMac]

Originally Posted by Draconysius

If you take the whole matter-cannot-be-destroyed situation into account, then absolutely everything is connected, even human bodies. They dissolve into the ground, which becomes soil for food, which gets converted into semen and results in the human body itself.

Save that due to modern mortuary and embalming processes of the deceased for the comfort and viewing pleasure of the living, the bodies are rendered too toxic to be interred directly into the earth. They become a shimmering black slick of bone and tendon, not soil. The crypts keep the carcinogenic formaldehyde and pink dyes from entering the earth. The matter is trapped so it cannot contaminate the living. Ironic, isn't it- when decomposition is the main way we keep perpetuity.

[Draconysius]

Originally Posted by MollyMac

Save that due to modern mortuary and embalming processes of the deceased for the comfort and viewing pleasure of the living, the bodies are rendered too toxic to be interred directly into the earth. They become a shimmering black slick of bone and tendon, not soil. The crypts keep the carcinogenic formaldehyde and pink dyes from entering the earth. The matter is trapped so it cannot contaminate the living. Ironic, isn't it- when decomposition is the main way we keep perpetuity.

It's asenine. Has human vanity come to this? I mean, you're fucking dead! Get over it already.

[Geoluhread]

I just don't get this past life thing.

In the old times people were only hundreds, now we are billions, do we all have past lives only from those few hundreds?

[MollyMac]

Originally Posted by Draconysius

It's asenine. Has human vanity come to this? I mean, you're fucking dead! Get over it already.

I think it is less human vanity (Even pretty when I am dead) and more to comfort the living for one last look. I don't get it, they do not look peaceful or sleeping, they look unnatural and weird. And now weird in a high school "eww" way, they look somehow off, not right... like they are blur or smudge and should not be where ther are. And as if the body knows it is not in a natural state of the life cycle and that it never will be again. It wil lonyl ever be in a box because a mortician convinced the family that for $3,700.00 the one last look will somehow help them sleep better at night and not be stuck with that ghastly image of their loved ones warped into something obscene. Forever in a box, never again in the earth, they will remain potential energy, never kinetic. Forever nothing more than in a box

[RavenHallows.]

I personally find reincarnation very logical, yet may I insert a thought from a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, what if souls drift to outer space?

I'm not really concrete certain in what I think will happen after one dies, I mean, we shall all know one day anyway, won't we? Yet what made me not fear death anymore is a little phrase by a classmate of mine, after she had listened to my ideas on the topic, it was ''Well, once you're dead, it won't matter anymore, now will it?'' That's what I believe in.
I think that there will most certainly be something, for I find the factor that makes us who we are is too immencely strong to just fade away. Yet I believe that in some way, all the mistakes you've made, all you've left behind, it won't actually matter anymore once you're dead.
Then again, there is only one way to really know and we all will one day.

[Mir]

Originally Posted by Geoluhread

I just don't get this past life thing.

In the old times people were only hundreds, now we are billions, do we all have past lives only from those few hundreds?

If you think about it, the increase in humans has come at the expense of many, many other species that have faded away, and are now extinct. We could easily have been reincarnated from a species that is extinct now.

However, I do not believe in reincarnation. I align myself purely with existentialist thought.

[Geoluhread]

Thanks Mir
The reason i asked is because i want to gather as much information as possible to determine where i stand from this

Another question,
Does that mean that ALL souls or lives existed with the first existance of species, or can it be that some people are born with no past lives?

Just curious to know ^_^

[TheSomnambulist]

Originally Posted by Noirette

If I'm not mistaken, deja vu is caused by a little confusion in our brain, when the fresh events are considered as a part of the long-term memory, and then causes you a feeling same as when you hear a familiar word. Some kind of "hey, that's familiar, I heard it before, somewhere." but when it comes to events it causes to some confusion, since it obvious that you can't experience exactly the same situstion twice.


Some people ,though, explain the deja vu feeling as an experiance that you have dreamt about, and then the sitution is familiar to you.

Yes, that is one theory. Yet I thought that another was going around, concerning the way sometimes both eyes perceive an event at slightly different times, and how information recieved in one eye could be recorded as a memory while the same information arrives later in the second eye, causing a false memory that is in actuality the same memory.

[Saya]

Originally Posted by Geoluhread

Thanks Mir
The reason i asked is because i want to gather as much information as possible to determine where i stand from this

Another question,
Does that mean that ALL souls or lives existed with the first existance of species, or can it be that some people are born with no past lives?

Just curious to know ^_^

I think that depends on exactly what you believe. In Buddhism, it was generally thought that the universe always was, so we always were and always will be. Although Buddha rejected the idea of a permanent self or soul, we are merely beings of change ^_^

@ MollyMac, what about the ashes after cremation? I figure the embalming fluid and all would be burned up with the body, but I'm just curious, most of my family members who died were cremated and its what i want for myself when I die.

[Saya]

Ah! Sorry, I forgot to add something there, and the edit button is gone.

Even if someone is contained underground when they die, they still leave matter behind. Whenever you scratch yourself, thousands of skin cells come off and fall to the ground. You shed a lot of hair, you cut your hair. And there's always the toilet in which you dispose bits of you >.> So already, there's pieces of what was apart of you everywhere, and little incarnations of that. Also if you have children, they have half your dna code! And you have a whole line of dna code from your ancestors in all of your cells. So in a way they are still apart of you.

So I guess my view of reincarnation isn't the linear kind, where your soul goes from life to life, but more like that each life is like fireworks, going out in all sorts of directions. Even everything you do leaves a little trace of yourself on the world.

[honeythorn]

Originally Posted by Saya

always was, so we always were and always will be.

GOOOOORRRRMENGHAAAAAST!!!!!!

[MollyMac]

Most of the bodies that are cremated aren't embalmed. The ones that are though, frankly, it's irresponsible to commit those back into the ground unless you know what chemical were used in the embalming and how they react to fire (ie- is fire a catalyst for a reaction, if so, how?)

But that also assumes that the ashes you get back are the ones you anticipate.

But you can argue that the fire to the corpse alters the energy as well, turning the potential energy into kinetice via catalyst, just the grist, ash and bones remain as your tangible matter

[Saya]

Here a lot of bodies are treated first for a wake, I don't know if thats the same as embalming. We'd have the wake one night and a night or two afterwards they will be cremated and the actual funeral is held. Or in the case of my aunt, who died in Ontario, she had her wake, was cremated, and then a year later was brought here to be buried.