Before doing any further research, they contacted Tucker. Tucker did a controlled test with the boy, who was five. He showed him eight pairs of photos. For two of the pairs, the boy made no choice. In the remaining six, he chose correctly. She remembered much of the town having been destroyed by a fire and often talked of wanting to go home. Nicole had described strange memories of her previous life. She said there were trees floating in the water. She said horses walked down the streets.
They discovered that wild horses wandered through the streets of the town. As her plane was lifting off from Nevada, Nicole burst into tears. Her mother asked if she really believed Virginia City was her home. Tucker is trying to investigate scientifically a question that has traditionally been the province of religion: what happens after we die? Most Buddhists, however, see it as central to the teachings on the suffering of samsara —the wheel of cyclic existence—and nirvana , the state of enlightenment in which one is free from the karma that drives rebirth although one may still choose to be reborn in order to follow the bodhisattva path of compassion.
The concept of reincarnation generally refers to the transmigration of an atman , or soul, from lifetime to lifetime. This is the Hindu view, and it is how reincarnation is generally understood in the West. Instead, Buddhism teaches the doctrine of anatman , or non-self, which says there is no permanent, unchanging entity such as a soul.
In reality, we are an ever-changing collection of consciousnesses, feelings, perceptions, and impulses that we struggle to hold together to maintain the illusion of a self. See also: The Buddhist Teachings on Rebirth. For Jim Tucker, though, the spiritual connections—Buddhist or otherwise—are incidental. Rebirth is just one component of a theory of consciousness that Tucker is working on.
We go into another dream. In Buddhism, reality is described as illusion, often compared to a sleeping dream. Maybe he would have made an interesting case. Memory is only one phenomenon associated with past lives, and memories alone are not enough to make a case. Many children have behaviors and emotions that seem closely related to their previous life. Emotionality is a signal of a strong case.
The more emotion a child shows when recalling a past life, the stronger their case tends to be. When talking about their past life, the child might talk in the first person, confuse past and present, and get upset. Sometimes they try to run away. At age two, he started talking about crashing his plane while on a bombing mission over England.
When he learned to draw, he drew swastikas and eagles. He goose-stepped and did the Nazi salute. He wanted to live in Germany, and had an unusual taste for sausages and thick soups. In some cases, these emotions manifest in symptoms that look like post-traumatic stress disorder, but without any obvious trauma in this life. In the cases where the PP died unnaturally, more than a third of the children had phobias related to the mode of death.
Among the children whose PP died by drowning, a majority were afraid of water. Positive attributes can also carry over, seemingly. In almost one in ten cases, parents report that their child has an unusual skill related to the previous life.
A two-year-old boy named Hunter remembered verifiable details from a past life as a famous pro golfer. Hunter took toy golf clubs everywhere he went. He started golf lessons three years ahead of the minimum age, and his instructors called him a prodigy. By age seven, he had competed in fifty junior tournaments, winning forty-one.
Ian Stevenson reported two hundred such cases in his monograph Reincarnation and Biology , including several in which a child who remembered having been shot had a small, round birthmark matching a bullet entrance wound and, on the other side of their body, a larger, irregularly-shaped birthmark matching a bullet exit wound.
Ryan, a boy from Oklahoma left, with his mother and Jim Tucker remembered many details about a life as a Hollywood movie extra and agent.
After investigation, the details matched the life of a man named Marty Martyn right , who died in Patrick, born in the Midwest in , had several notable birthmarks. One was the notion that only a few were able to leave this cycle and become part of the divine. Another was that the aim was, indeed, to become part of something.
According to Gautama, everyone, regardless of their place of birth, is capable of exiting the cycle of reincarnation. In one image, consciousness is like a flame being passed from candle to candle. After enlightenment, no more candles will be lit. Buddhism, then, began in part as a new set of views about reincarnation. And throughout its history, Buddhists have debated and expanded the potential for what reincarnation entails.
For example, in Tibet, probably beginning in the 13th century , the doctrine of rebirth took a significant twist: it was used to identify the consciousness of a deceased monk in a newborn child, and thus grant to that child the religious and political title of the previous monk. This is the background for what became the tradition of the Dalai Lamas. More recently, Buddhists, as well as outsiders seeking to modernise Buddhism, have continued to reinterpret the doctrine of reincarnation for their own times.
From the midth century , as the theory of evolution developed, thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson began to suggest that the doctrine of transmigration was an intimation of the understanding of the transmutation of species.
I would it were; but men and women are only half human. And I was a rock. I was the minerals in the water … gas, sunshine, water, fungi, and plants.
It also expresses a genuine sense of interdependence between humans and their environment. R eincarnation has also been used to think about politics. He more likely had in mind the ideas of transmigration that one can find in Pythagoras and Plato.
But he was closer to the Buddhist critique of Brahmanism than anything else, because the Platonic system — like the Brahmanic one — had no particular end: people could reincarnate forever. It also means thinking seriously about the failure of any doctrine to realise its mission. Consider, as an example, the work of the writer and scholar Robert Wright and his popular book Why Buddhism Is True According to Wright, Buddhism is true because it understands something very specific about the effect of natural selection on the human condition.
Namely, that evolution is driven by fleeting pleasure. Humans seek satisfaction through eating and copulating, only to find that the pleasure from these activities is remarkably evanescent. And yet, nevertheless, we get up and try to find satisfaction through them every day. Wright says that this is a neat trick of natural selection, which is driven simply by the blind will of the species to continue.
The trouble is that this cycle of pleasure, satisfaction and dissatisfaction is, well, rather unsatisfying. And this is what Buddhism understands and what mindfulness meditation can help cure. To perpetually pursue satisfaction is suffering. To become aware of this process and gain distance from it through mindfulness provides relief. Early in his book, Wright makes a qualification about what he thinks is true in Buddhism.
First, in the sense that every human bears traces of historical processes that happened long before any of us were alive. Second, in that humans are driven by a fundamental process of the endless reincarnation of pleasure.
Thus evolution, for example, solved the problem of how to keep the species going by creating other problems of survival for that very species — whether through epidemics of obesity or the greed for pleasure that leads people to pillage and destroy others. And it would later become the devastating problem of many who followed Marx himself.
The hope of this reckoning is that we might better understand these conditions and awake from these nightmares. This is the point at which Gautama and Marx and many others agree : for there to be progress in ending suffering, some elements of the world — poverty, racism, hatred — simply must cease to be reincarnated.
The politics of reincarnation refuses to see the world as broken up into friends and enemies, victors and losers. The political demands to end negative reincarnations are, in part, made possible by the ethical view of human interdependence that reincarnation affords us. One of the ideas that we learn in the classical doctrine is that reincarnation links many of us across the histories of our being. Indeed, one of the most intriguing elements of the classical view is that not everything or everyone is actually connected.
But some people and things always remain separate. We might think of it as a kind of Pascalian wager. There are analogies in other traditions. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, Jesus said that all who fed or clothed or cared for him, when he was downtrodden, would go to heaven. Our lack of knowledge about our specific connections to the world should make us behave ethically toward the whole world. The politics of reincarnation that one can develop from this ethics refuses to see the world as broken up into friends and enemies, victors and losers.
Of course, there are ways to arrive at all of these thoughts without engaging reincarnation. The basic ideas can be formulated through any number of traditions. Or perhaps we see it in some modern Buddhist monasteries in the West, where histories of sexual harassment keep recurring. To take reincarnation seriously is to think about how we can end these histories of suffering.
0コメント