Buddhism has always appealed to me because it's such a flexible and varied religion and also because rather than starting with a story about creation it skips this step and shoots straight for understanding the world as it is.
Buddhists believe that you accumulate both positive and negative karma in your life and that as you cycle through reincarnation, you pay off the good karma by being born into fortunate circumstances, or visa versa. They set up a hierarchy of being on which humans rank just below gods - which they believe we cycle through. The hierarchy doesn't make much sense to me because I think there's a high likelihood that there is other life out there, potentially at a much higher karma level than we are. The whole idea of reincarnation is a bit hard for me to accept, but let's set that aside for a minute and look at what makes sense about their model.
So on the entropy topic, we've been discussing whether the world is tending toward order or not. Perhaps this is too black and white of a model; the Buddhist theory takes the natural system swings into account by placing ones self in eternal disequilibrium, stuck in the system of swinging from good lives to bad ones. I think there's something to be said for that kind of an explanation.
They suggest that the number of beings in the universe is constant and that we are reincarnated from that pool. But if the big bang is true - there was no life at that point, which causes a bit of a problem. And if life takes a while to develop, as it did on earth, then it seems like life would not be constant at all. Perhaps one could theorize that the universe of beings only exists in the time after the big bang and potentially before the next one (astronomers thing the universe will collapse back on itself, right?) ?
Also in Buddhist theory is the distinction between ones mind an the world around it, with ones mind acting as a light to cast meaning on the world around. Buddhists seek to separate the consciousness from the world during meditation. Ultimately, through this means, Buddhists seek to free themselves from the karma cycle through such techniques, achieving "enlightenment" in which they experience neither extreme pleasure nor extreme anger/sadness. If anyone has experimented heavily with meditation, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and on where one's emotional life as an enlightened being might fall on the scale of normal human emotions. For me, it's a bit tough to want to seek that end because I like the lows and highs of life - a lot of art extols this and I think there's a lot to be said for it.
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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
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2 comments:
"They suggest that the number of beings in the universe is constant and that we are reincarnated from that pool. But if the big bang is true - there was no life at that point, which causes a bit of a problem. And if life takes a while to develop, as it did on earth, then it seems like life would not be constant at all. Perhaps one could theorize that the universe of beings only exists in the time after the big bang and potentially before the next one (astronomers thing the universe will collapse back on itself, right?)"
Some do, some don't. As far as I understand it, the jury is pretty firmly out on what's going to happen there.
One point about life taking a while to develop: while life on Earth is generally increasing right now*, are we so sure that it's not going to end up going away? Maybe if/when much of the life on Earth dies (say something smashes into us before NASA can get a good count of all the near-Earth asteroids), it will get reincarnated in another galaxy where there isn't any life at all yet. You'd still be constrained by the big bang as a starting point for when life could start developing in one place before passing on to another, but we can only see so far at present, and there may be whole other universes that have been doing their thing much longer than we have. One concept floating around popular cosmological discussions is that our universe would fit into the head of a pin in another one, and there is just no way for us to see that from our current perspective. This sort of setup would mean that the life that is slowly getting going here could have spent its past life in somewhere much, much older and bigger where you could look down at our universe with a really good microscope. A little bit like Heaven, isn't it? The beings in that larger universe would need to be reincarnated from somewhere, too, but of course we don't know if that broader universe was created by a big bang or not.
I also like that these Buddhists go straight to the problem of describing how things work, but could you provide any detail on how some of them do go about explaining how it started?
Also, why is anyone so sure that the number of beings in the universe is constant?
*or is it? Have there been times in the past with more individual organisms? You recently discussed how our activities are killing off many species.
Hey folks,
I think Milton raises a good point about reincarnation not being limited to humans. Part of Buddhism, as I understand it, is that all life forms are part of the cycle of reincarnation. When they explain this concept to kids, however, they usually stick to examples of "good" human and "bad" human lives that we alternate between because this is easier to understand.
Also, I think with any religion, we have to take as a given that if an individual was taking notes on what some supernatural or omniscient force or person was trying to explain, a lot was likely lost in translation from enlightened language to worldly language. If a person thousands of years ago heard the Buddha say "all living things cycle..." they probably would have limited their examples of what this meant to the world around them. Buddha, or the divine inspiration from which Buddha may have drawn his wisdom, may very well have meant "all living things in all galaxies cycle," but why would someone thousands of years ago assume this to be the meaning behind his words? They didn't know there was life beyond this world, let alone beyond this galaxy. We run into this problem of "divine translation errors" all the time with the Bible, and that's why we have revisions (new testaments, if you will :P). We're way overdue for one, I think.
On the meditation note, I have to say that mindfulness meditation (a type of meditation where you try to accept everything coming into you at once, rather than a type where you try to "rise above" human senses) has been unbelievably powerful for me. I do feel connected to something larger and more meaningful than myself when I meditate, and it empowers me to see the world around me differently for a very short time. You could say it seems this "force" guides me momentarily. It runs counter to the Buddhist model, however, in that I *do* feel extremes during meditation. I feel extreme love, a swelling of my chest in a way. I don't, to this day, know what the hell that is, but it's real and it's strong. Body temperature also tends to fluctuate during meditation, reaching incredible highs in specific parts of the body that seem to be swelling (consistent with what people have found in "monk experiments" where they ask Tibetan monks to sit in freezing or burning hot rooms and record their body temperatures to be unaffected by their surroundings).
Honestly, I think Buddhism is true, but in shorter time frames. I think people "reincarnate" within their lifetimes -- experiencing understanding through a cycle of personal pain and general empathy with those who have felt their pain. Studies on "grit" (or the personality trait of being able to "stick it out") have found that folks who have lots of grit have two things in common: tough pasts and giving personalities. Folks with grit also have happier, "good" lives, in part because of the lessons learned by the "bad" lives/experiences they've had. Perhaps that's a more reasonable model of reincarnation -- and perhaps that's another divine mis-translation. (that's obviously a more controversial statement -- but just a thought :D)
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