Keep memories after death?

[3bob]

Oh cool thread! I figured a while back that it was my ego that was doing a lot of the "killing" from a conceptual standpoint (really I'm doing it to myself and other people and the world) and I figured myself and other people and the world simultaneously alive and dead all at the same time. Yes I know it seems weird but it's a sort of another version of the above, which I like a lot better. So paradoxically if you can drop the ego off itself faster then you get to be more "alive" or maybe just less "dead" ;-) Ok, I'm rambling

 

Hello Kate,

I think another another way to say something along these lines is more awake... for it's truth is beyond the dance or interplay of alive and dead.

 

Btw, met Mr. Ego the other day and he was one really tricked out and sly dude, we could all use some help from beyond when dealing with him/her.

Edited June 15, 2010 by 3bob

[Birch]

Hey Bob!

 

Nice!

 

"we could all use some help from beyond when dealing with him."

 

In my case, "help from beyond" is actually my everyday life and all the people in it. I guess I might see and talk to more of them than might be "normal" for other folks but I've noticed that life has this way of running into me (or I'm smashing into it, or both?)

 

And in fact, at some other juncture, I figured that my lifestyle was directly related to K. If K wants to be up and running in the world, will she go hang with hermits, or people that meet and talk with a lot of people? Yeah, I know, it sounds silly. But I can't help but wonder

 

I guess internet would do it too. Waddya think?

[3bob]

Hey Bob!

 

Nice!

 

"we could all use some help from beyond when dealing with him."

 

In my case, "help from beyond" is actually my everyday life and all the people in it. I guess I might see and talk to more of them than might be "normal" for other folks but I've noticed that life has this way of running into me (or I'm smashing into it, or both?)

 

And in fact, at some other juncture, I figured that my lifestyle was directly related to K. If K wants to be up and running in the world, will she go hang with hermits, or people that meet and talk with a lot of people? Yeah, I know, it sounds silly. But I can't help but wonder

 

I guess internet would do it too. Waddya think?

 

"In my case, "help from beyond" is actually my everyday life and all the people in it". Kate

 

I think this is an excellent point you've made! And a good reminder that the "beyond" so to speak is also working right here with us 24/7. (just a matter of tuning in...

[C T]

.. .. ..

Nothing to counter argue with really. There are many plausible, often seamless explanations that point to the validity of Rebirth, some of which you have come up with here, for example.

 

Having said that, i do have a number of Buddhist friends (you might know a few yourself? ) who prefer to remain non-committal on this subject, citing, among others, these points that some might find to be reasonable considerations:

 

The idea that there is an absence of a uniform doctrine of Rebirth in the tradition as a whole. At best, what is offered up is mostly fragmented information, with each tradition/school/sect having their own interpretation of the mechanics involved, thus lacking any solid foundation and coherence.

 

If its a doctrinal fact, then why do Buddhists from different cultures allow in cultural influences to shape their thoughts on the matter? If its really that vital a doctrine, shouldn't it be above any man-made, glossy, superficial tints?

 

Lastly, they ask why, even after more than 2500 years since the Buddha first spoke about attaining the insight that enabled Him to see all His past lives, nothing has really been built upon since then in regards to Rebirth. One would think that at the very least, there ought to exist now a stronger body of verifiable data and/or empirical evidence so that the ambiguity surrounding Rebirth and Reincarnation could be put to rest once and for all, or have lessened to a greater degree at least. In other words, they cannot understand why, for a philosophy that claims to be so profound, so full of truth, to this day, has yet to offer any concrete and practicable mechanical structure (about the processes of Rebirth) for followers to work with, so that fundamental doubts and pitfalls could be side-stepped, in the process saving a lot of speculative, energy-sapping homework and cushion time. What is available now seems only to serve in compounding the discrepancies already found floating around the subject.

 

For those that deliberated on the points in question, they concluded that unless and until all the various schools can come to a clear, universal agreement as to what exactly constitutes Rebirth, how it happens in relation to Interdependent Origination, what is that which is reborn, all this, with sufficiently relevant, even basic evidence offered up in support, they would choose in the meantime to remain as they are: open, non-committed, and for some, with a degree of skepticism thrown in. Fair enough, i thought...

[Ninpo-me-this-ninjutsu-me-that]

This is assuming that souls are bound by time and space.

 

Rawn Clark, a high level practitioner of Franz Bardon's system (his website here: http://www.abardoncompanion.com/index.html) has an "eight temples meditation project". Basically, he has constructed eight different temples for different sections of the kabbalah in an astral/mental sphere, and he and students travel there to conduct lessons and rituals. You can read the details of it on the website, but one thing he noted was this:

 

When he and his students did the meditation project, other people arrived at the project from the future.

 

Basically what he did was each month they focused on a different temple. He'd send out a packet of info, then two weeks later they'd do the ritual and write back to him of their experience, he would compile that, send it out to all his students with info on the next ritual, and by that time they'd have a couple weeks to reflect upon the material for the next meditation. Then Rawn Clark put up the meditations online, so anyone visiting the site wishing to do the meditations could do so.

 

And if you read the meditations at a later date, decided to try them out, and showed up for the meditation, you would not be there alone, you would be there with everyone else as they were going through it the first time.

 

Trippy, right?

 

There is a two part video about imagining the 10th dimension:

 

Part 1

 

Part 2

 

In explaining the fourth dimension, he talks about how humans would be one long snake type thing, where our whole lives, from infancy to adulthood to death, would all be seen at one time. But since we are third dimensional beings, we are only able to perceive cross sections of the dimension above us. Thus, we experience our lives sequentially. But that's an illusion, because really we're already there.

 

Let's extrapolate that out, and assume that past lives and reincarnations are real. There is no separation. We are our past incarnations and future incarnations simultaneously, but since we are limited in our perceptions we view them sequentially. Furthermore, since various astral/mental dimensions are not bound by time, we experience things when we experience them.

 

So why do we have to come up with an explanation for a higher population? More souls? Maybe more souls are incarnated. Or maybe people are incarnated into multiple bodies simultaneously, but we perceive only one at a time due to our limited senses.

 

Robert Bruce talks about some very mind bending things in his book "Astral Dynamics" when it comes to making a double that you can project and running into it. I won't go into it because my post is already pretty far out, but it's just another example of how, well, the universe is really a mind flip.

 

I'm very interested in parallel lifetimes, so I found your post an interesting read.

 

I've had a few wild experiences down that path, some which scared the crap out of me. It's good to note that some experiences could be noted as illusion, yet seemingly as real as this physical life, which leads to what I think someone else pointed out, the fact that here is no more 'real' either.

 

I do hold to the no time theory, and it has been proven in a sense. Which means everything is effecting us in some way at this moment. The human brain simply filters out certain information in oder to maintain a focus on this reality, otherwise we might all go bananas or be enlightened.

 

I've had some recall of some things I've done wrong in other lives(?)and frankly speaking I only wanna know so much! Let sleeping dogs lie is what I say, no matter they are in an adjacent space time continuum and not in the past

[Sloppy Zhang]

I'm very interested in parallel lifetimes, so I found your post an interesting read.

 

Glad you liked it

 

I've had a few wild experiences down that path, some which scared the crap out of me. It's good to note that some experiences could be noted as illusion, yet seemingly as real as this physical life, which leads to what I think someone else pointed out, the fact that here is no more 'real' either.

 

I do hold to the no time theory, and it has been proven in a sense. Which means everything is effecting us in some way at this moment. The human brain simply filters out certain information in oder to maintain a focus on this reality, otherwise we might all go bananas or be enlightened.

 

Yeah, what is "reality" and what's the difference between "bananas" and "enlightenment"?

 

I've had some recall of some things I've done wrong in other lives(?)and frankly speaking I only wanna know so much! Let sleeping dogs lie is what I say, no matter they are in an adjacent space time continuum and not in the past

 

While I've never tried any past life regressions, I have read a few methods for doing so from a few people. One of them that I came across had a fairly typical method where you would mentally go down this hallway full of doors, and each doorway would open to a new past life. Some doorways would be bright and shining, while others would be dim. A dim door represents a memory in which you have learned the lesson, worked out the karma, know what you need to know, etc. A bright doorway involves you seeing memories that are leading you to your present situation- baggage you still carry with you.

 

So maybe some dogs you need to let lie, and maybe some dogs are all sprawled out on your couch when you wanna watch tv

[3bob]

(throwing another loop into the mix)

 

Excerpt from "A New Model of he Universe". (page 494)

 

"There would be no possibility of thinking of the evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving men to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there. This explains where those people disappear who have remembered their past lives. From the ordinary point of view this sounds like an absurdity. But the idea of reincarnation contains this absurdity, or this possibility.

 

In order to admit the possibility of reincarnation into the past, it becomes necessary to presume plurality of existence, or again co-existence, that is to say, it becomes necessary to suppose that life of man, while repeating according to the law of eternal recurrence at one "place in time", if it can be put thus, simultaneously occurs at another "place in time". Moreover, it can be said with almost complete certainty that a man, even approaching the super-human state will not be conscious of that simultaneity of lives; and will remember one life or the life at one "place in time" as past and feel the other as present.

 

In the conditions of three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time, plurality of existence is impossible. But under the conditions of six-dimensional space-time it is quite natural, because in it "every point of time touches every point of space" and "everything is everywhere and always". In the space-time represented by two intersecting triangles there is nothing strange or impossible in the plurality of existence. And even an approach to these conditions creates for a man the possibility to "go the way of all the earth", to "be gathered to his fathers", which enables him to influence his ancestors or their contemporaries, gradually to change and to make more favorable the conditions of his birth and gradually to surround himself with people who also "remember". (skipped some of the quote here...)

 

...The privilege of the position of reincarnating into the past for the man who remembers what he has learned in his past life is explained by the fact that he knows the results, knows what has sprung from the actions of the people of the time into which he reincarnates. This does not of course mean that everything or many things can be altered by one man being reincarnated into the past. The possibilities of altering external events are very small, but they must exist. If in every moment there were only one possibility we should live in a world of absolute predetermination, and nothing could be altered. But "moments" differ from one another very greatly in this respect. There are moments with only one possibility; there are moments with several possibilities; and there are moments with many and varied possibilities.

 

-(skipped some sentences here)

 

...But in the case of reincarnation into the past this question is much simpler because only that man can reincarnate who has already attained great consciousness and power. By this means, that is, by means of the reincarnation into the past of people who have reached a certain degree of inner development, a reverse current is created in the midst of the stream of life, this reverse current is the evolutionary movement, the movement which gradually makes life better and nobler, and itself returns enriched to the source from which it originated."

 

P.D.Ouspensky completed most of this in 1914, and revised it in the 1930's.

Edited June 15, 2010 by 3bob