So how does reincarnation work in Taoist theory?

[Michael Sternbach]

I should stay with mathematics and meditation....

 

Whenever I start working with religions and their doctrines, I am put in a place where I am made to use words and categories which relate to things outside of my experience. Sometimes I can obliquely access the ideas through the periphery of my current experiences. Most of the time, though, I am made to either deal with ontologically unique things (and no abstract systems can supply relevant information---as abstract systems can only trace outlines of things and project onto different tokens of an acceptable type) or I am made to use pre-existing self-consistent systems. And, unfortunately, many pre-existing and self-consistent systems are not bare-bones constructions; quite often there are overloaded operators and/or operands in the system.

 

And, given the remoteness from direct experience, I can't always discern what is overloaded and what is simply outside of my range of experience.....

 

Reading this post overloaded me a little...

[Michael Sternbach]

Haha....

 

It is me expressing my frustration because I probably gave too much attention and credit to the judaeo-christian writers. And yet, despite that, I still don't feel completely justified throwing them away when dealing with issues of the afterlife.

 

I believe that all the great metaphysical traditions have glimpsed an aspect of the truth; each holds at least a piece of the jigsaw.

 

Being a Hermeticist, I am also a strong believer in analogies. Thus, in my book, the life cycle of an individual can be likened to the life cycle of the whole Universe.

 

And regarding the latter, the theory that impressed me most so far is Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC), a brainchild of the famous physicist Roger Penrose. In a nutshell, it postulates that after a mind boggling number of years (something like 10¹⁰⁰), all the protons in our Universe will have decayed, the black holes will have evaporated etc, so there will be nothing left but light (or EM energy). Time and space will lose any meaning in such a Universe; they can also be modelled as at once infinitely expanded and contracted to a point. And the latter is nothing other than a singularity. It bangs and, voilà - a new Universe begins (or a new Aeon in a continuing story).

 

Now that's pure metaphysics for you. Penrose & Co. actually nodded when, on a congress I attended, I dared to mention parallels between CCC and mystical systems like Hinduism and the Kabbalah - while at the same time they emphasized that such considerations are beyond the scope of (their) science (what a surprise).

 

Now applied to the question at hand, you have at the end of an incarnation (be it of a Universe or a human being) both:

 

• A state of timelessness/eternity, a return to the Mind of God as it were (as assumed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition).
• A return to a new physical existence (as suggested in Hinduism and Buddhism).

I should also mention that gravity waves generated by the collision of black holes etc in a Universe nearing its end - despite its eventual complete annihilation and return to the state of infinite light (the "opening of Shiva's eye" ) - will "inform" the structuring of the matter in its subsequrent incarnation. So here's your karma...

 

I am not saying that Penrose's cosmological model is all inclusive and provides all the answers, but I find it inspiring, to say the least.

 

Thoughts?

[Michael Sternbach]

I would say that science is just not advanced enough to keep up with metaphysics. But this doesn't need to keep us from applying or creating scientific models regarding metaphysical perceptions, as long as we remember that they are models - not everlasting perfect explanations. Surely, we must be careful not to let our ideas obscure our view of living reality. The search for truth is an open-ended endeavour.

[Marblehead]

I would say that science is just not advanced enough to keep up with metaphysics.

Isn't that great?!?!?

 

I experience enough anxiety talking with Brian when he goes quantum on me.