Must say I don't have Dave's command of detail but tend to come from a pretty similar place on the question of what Buddhism says or does not say.

It's important to realise that as he says it's not a monolith. Not only do differing traditions have differing emphases there's also the fact that for example Tibetan Buddhism contains three different levels of teachings or views (or turnings of the wheel of Dharma) - the Hinayana which is mostly about worldly rules for behaviour, the Mahayana which introduces compassion and the emptiness or ultimate lack of fixedness of self and of this reality, and ultimately the Vajrayana which works with emptiness using faster but higher risk methods. These are essentially progressively more sophisticated teachings for persons of progressively higher awareness.

What we take from it is I think very conditioned by the culture and teaching of those we learn from, and how we relate to it.

The apparent tendency to focus on enlightenment and absolute reality is perhaps not accidental.

There's no denial in Buddhism of the existence of the 'afterlife' or the bardo type realities - it's known as the sambhogakya. (technically that's the form of body we assume in it) It's just that there's a view that excessive focus on the 'interesting' and sometimes very pleasant experiences which can arise from it (as discussed here)  can lead to our taking our eye off the ball to wallow in these. Or worse still can result in  use of some of the abilities which arise for negative purposes.

The ball being escape from samsara - the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.

I'm sure that the teachings on Buddha nature while using different language incorporate ideas of collective selves and the like - references to multiple location and the like frequently arise. Higher levels of consciousness assume collective awareness and awareness of past lives. But it's very clear that these are highly mutable realities depending on state of mind - our sense of somehow exploring a fixed afterlife reality would be regarded as mistaken.

Emptiness does not mean that for example this life or the afterlife is not real - just that it's not an absolute or a fixed reality that holds true regardless of mind state. Life (and the afterlife states) are all brought into being by mind, and as such are subject to continuous change - we cycle from relative (but somewhat unsatisfactory) happiness into unhappiness and back again under the influence of karma.

Some traditions teach that this life does not matter, but Tibetan Buddhism would say that this is in error. It teaches in fact that this is a trap - that the conditions of this life are an important driver of spiritual progress (harder conditions as experienced in potentially more negative rebirths make practice almot impossible, while too much comfort can remove the perceived need for escape), and that depending on how we live it we can do ourselves a lot of good, or a lot of karmic harm.

Buddhism would hold to a few basics which I think we risk losing touch with when chatting here:

1. Afterlife type experience does not of itself confer any ability whatsoever to escape the cycle of rebirth, or to ensure a fortuitous rebirth - the potentially very nasty implications of karma ensure  this. We can never assume that our next rebirth for example will even be in a human life that will support spiritual progress. Highly negative karma from past lives may ripen immediately after a spiritually successful life.

2. Realisation (ideally in this life given the risk of karmic reversals in the next) is the only way to transcend this. Hence the recognition that this is the state towrds which our effort must be oriented.

3. Meditation and ongoing spiritual practice are the only way to progress faster than would naturally be the case.

4. Grasping or striving after paranormal experience or even enlightenment will block progress on this path. Dabbling in the black arts (selfish use of higher consciousness and resulting abilities) will rapidly reverse it. Hence the very strong reluctance to discuss this sort of experience in detail in Buddhism and the tendency to acknowledge but downplay it - to do otherwise risks sending out the wrong message, causing a fixation on experience, and slowing our own progress.

5. Ditto for wrongly motivated intellectual discussion, or an excessive emphasis on intellectual learning for egotistical reasons. Cognitive understanding is important in as much as it prevents us from becoming frightened when faced with experience we don't understand, and helps us to maintain a correct  spiritual direction while accumulating as little additional negative karma as possible. But too much or indulged in for for pleasure simply becomes babble and a distraction from the practice that underpins all true progress.

That's not to say that higher awareness enabling the accessing of alternative realities is not a good thing, or presumably even that it cannot be used for the good. (although I worry a little about our dabbling in rescues) Higher awareness creates opening, the resulting extra wisdom and compassion helps us to live from love and hence helps our progress along the way  - it's just that we need to be careful the experience does not become an end in itself.

I hope I'm not misquoting here. A pair of books which together set out the three views associated with  these teachings pretty clearly are Indestructible Truth and Secret of the Vajra World by Reginald A. Ray. Published by Shambhala books.

It's in truth R hard have the experience or knowledge to argue the point from anything except a mostly theoretical view point - that's my situation anyway.

I came to Robert Monroe's books after having had a  (basic) Buddhist training and found them instructive and refreshing. Given what I said above I kept an eye out for indications in them that it's possible to control rebirth and so on.

Monroe actually seemed however to find that while he could easily experience alternate realities and meet those within them that there were (he didn't use these words) controlling forces at work.

He'd find souls, help them by suggestion to lift out of whatever mind made scenario they were stuck in, but invariably find that regardless of his intention they would disappear when they were drawn to whatever reality resonated with their consciousness. Individuals inhabiting self created realities at some of the higher focus levels also seemed after time to move on. He likewise spoke at length of the compulsive nature of the urge to rebirth - of its addictive compulsive quality.

It's not about propping up dogma for its own sake, but my immediate thought (given my training) was 'what else would you expect to happen - that's karma at work'. Put another way - regardless of what we might superficially think or hope  - when we find ourselves in the afterlife (where mind creates almost immediately) it'd presumably require the transcending our ego/our conditioning for it not to generate our experience.

There may of course be other ways of interpreting what he said, but Monroe to my mind seemed to say little that was at variance with the Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan book of the dead which describes the death and rebirth experience in the bardos, and is especially graphic in its explanation of the overwhelming way karma kicks in after some time for most to propel us into what is normally an uncontrolled rebirth)

That's only one view however, and a very old one that tends in one way to take quite a harsh view of these things. But above all else the reality of existence seems to be that events proceed according to it's own rules - regardless of our normally selfish interest or wish that it was otherwise. No more, no less. There's nothing personal in this, but it can seem hard.

If it's untrue (and it's difficult to see how we can avoid the consequences of our state of consciousness) I guess the million dollar question is what actually does happen? What is the mechanism that determines rebirth and/or the possibility of moving on elsewhere??

I'm really sorry if this rains on anybodies parade, but I guess it's about the most fundamental question there is......

Hi Bets- The "Translation Button" is to wait a while (up to five minutes) and after the Tibetan, the translator comes in and gives you the English version.

Vajra - Buddhism and the Buddhist explanation is not the only possible perspective that can validly describe the situation we're in. But it is a good way to get the basic picture. If I have understood rightly, the point is to be compassionate because we are going through a process in which we get feedback. Good feedback is from helping others, and for hassling others we get hassles ourselves. This is educational, but, as Recoverer put it, if we depend only on the reincarnation cycle alone, we'll be doing this for a very long time. However, that's the core of Theraveda. Nothing gets wasted - but it might get very old.

That we have an everyday world, plus a spirit world, and when we go beyond that to look for where it came from, we find that the reality of everything sort of fades away into the stuff from which it arose by its innate self-creativity. That stuff has no definition, is not contingent, has no prior nature because, ultimately,  it has no present nature. All we find is potentiality, the notion that were there to be a manifestation, meaning some kind of extended existence that would be sensible, it could be infinite in extent, and would be non-contingent. (Bad description - take it liberally, please.)

Working to free a person stuck in a burning car after a freeway wreck is meritorious. In the same way, working to free a person stuck in memories of past events of their life, such as a car wreck, is a meritorious action.  In exactly the same way, working to free people stuck in the spirit world by glueing themselves into some situation through pride, fear, ignorance or whatever, is also a meritorious act. Or, in my practice, I work to free people from the memories and karmic entanglements of past lives that leak through into the present life.

Based on that, I look up to Bruce as a guiding light of compassion. If we cut through the rhetoric to the core of the bodhisattvic attitude, we find precisely what Bruce has been doing - saving people from their own ignorance. Freeing them from their own internal fires. Or, for that matter, we also have the "Church of Don" and innumerable other acts by which people are assisting their fellow beings. Providing that we keep that attitude, rather than trying to make personal ego gratification from it, we are doing that which will assist us. In analogy, if you look backwards up the line of causality to the "beam of light" from which people have been split off by the prism of experience, we can see that as we help others, we directly improve our own natures and setting as well.

Hi Lights-
Crudely, Phenomena are the stuff of the world as we know them by name and form (nama rupa), while noumna are their nature-in-themselves which are emptiness.
I really like your "sphere" of inverted space. Ha! Take a world surrounded by emptiness, turn it inside out and there we are. That's neat! 

I usually think of space as being defined by the implicit relationships of extended matter - your model captures that quite nicely as well.

Recoverer- We seem to be so invested in the details and words that we often miss the point that all of us somehow carry the fundamental understanding of what is actually going on. I think that it's perhaps a good time to point out that your explanation is at least as good as mine, and that every other explanation that captures the same sense is also equally good. Unfortunately, we don;t always recognize that - and words are blunt tools - so we argue over trivia as opposed to agreeing on basics. At any rate, there are many other explanatory systems that are valid, but that focus on other experiences - - For example Voodoo, in wich the spirits are viewed quite differently, but the goal is the same, to rest eternally with Papa Legba in Ife. (And with Chango et al. it sounds almost Christian ) - I like Buddhism because it's clear in many sticky places. But that doesn't detract from Jesus or any of the other manifestations of the Ultimate.

My thanks to everyone for a spirited encounter!
d

Hmmm - proof that in spirit we remain causally effective? - Back to the "free will" argument again?

The terms of the Bardo Thodol philosophy tell us to view spiritual phenomena as nothing but mental projections. That suggests that we have freedom to make that decision. In the same way, for somebody to get stuck in a situation due to their feelings, drives etc, implies that they have chosen the state in which we find them, since they evidently can make a subsequent choice to abandon it. This is an underlying assumption of soul retrieval.

My claim is that, as a minimum, when we operate from the point of Creation, then we are free, because that is a non-contingent state. I also feel that to the degree that we simply react to immediate worldly phenomena, we are determined, as our nature is contingent upon a combination of nature plus nurture. In between we might also make the claim that to the degree that we perceive and move toward a non-contingent state we have freed ourselves.

Then as we move from the extremes of isolation to the extreme of ultimate unity, it would seem that we also develop freedom. The spirit world is closer to the point of creation that is a position in the everyday world.  That implies that it is more free - providing that the prior assumptions are valid.

Cheating and feeding back information from nirvastarka samadhi we might observe that in that  samadhi we no longer have any connections of note to the everyday world, and we are totally involved with the creative activities by which everything, worldly or transcendent, gets defined. As such, we are "co-creative" with Godhead. But that simply says that if we escape the world we escape its contingencies, so it's circular.

Maybe we'll just have to wait and see?

d

Vajra-
That precise idea had occurred to me, so thanks for the reinforcement. Evidently, what we think about is what we perceive - at least on the mental level - and then as we start getting more interested and more involved - Whoops - here we are again!

As you say, the "final nirvana" seems to be a state in which we simply abandon thoughts to which we are attached or with which we identify, so that we remain forever in the state of oneness with the Creative Essence - Mind experiencing Itself, Being without the necessity for intervening "thought".

So now that we've resolved all the ultimate issues of the cosmos, what to do?  Personally, I'm moving today, so I'm surrounded by boxes and bales of packing stuff. As they say, chop wood, carry water.

dave

   I agree with a lot of your points on this thread Recoverer, yet i also agree with some of Vajra and Dave's..  Fortunately for you guys, i don't remember what i agree and disagree with from earlier reading, so no super long posts today.    If i didn't know better, i'd might have to tell myself to lay off the pot.

  But anyways, just want to quickly address something. 

Quote:


  I do agree with this, yet i would also point out that Sylvia or rather her Total self, still has to meet self here in the physical.  Karma doesn't get magically erased by graduation or what not, one still needs to meet what self put out in another physical experience.   

   A quick example, Cayce's source said that Joshua of the O.T., and 'Jesus' of the N.T. are part of the same Total self/Disk/I-There, and this source said look to Joshua's life to get a better understanding of Yeshua's.    Joshua was bit of a warrior leader/Priest type, and was involved in some warring.   Apparently in one incident, Joshua had some leaders from the other tribes, strung up on trees to die.     While Yeshua in his life, completed the ultimate graduation, he still had to meet self in his earthly experiences, and hence part of the reason of why he was crucified.   In a sense, he did overcome or transcend Karma, because he had enough self detachment, wisdom, and love to meet those experiences with grace, centeredness, and inner joy. 

  What we put out here in this dimension, we primarily meet here and to some extent in the nonphysical, what we put out in the nonphysical, we primarily meet in the nonphysical.  Sylvia's Total self, will most likely choose to experience a life where she experiences similar dynamics to what she put out to others.  And how much she chooses to take on, depends somewhat on how developed her Total self as a whole is, and what kind of personality gets developed from the overall matrix of self (Total self that is).

Good stuff guys. For sure we're unlikely to tie this territory down in words. I can see you are a cat fan Ah So -  always a good sign in a person....

Some responses. Yes, I've read Ultimate Journey R and RM's account of his 'I there'. Funnily enough it had never crossed my mind that an individual entity from the oversoul might re-incarnate more than once.

For no very good reason I'd simply presumed that each fresh incarnation was a new addition to it, and that the oversoul simply grew until realisation was achieved and it was time to head for the emitter and lift out to the next level. Although that begs the 'from where do they come' question, and would amount to a fairly free mapping of Buddhist ideas to Robert Monroe's.

I guess that when we access past lives we access members of the oversoul from suitable states of consciousness. Although I read somewhere recently (here?) that there's a view that what are interpreted as past lives are often snatches from the lives of others, or possibly from even in the future.

If we take it that the ego and its obscuration is stripped off/dies in the afterlife then it's not surprising that we quickly become beings of light after we get there. The problem seems to be as you say that the karma till exists, and pretty quickly kicks in to speed us back into another life where we get confronted by the consequences of our past actions.

For sure too it's probably true that getting all hung up on beliefs about multiple incarnations (or any other dogma) risks creating a self fulfilling future. My instincts are consequently to avoid heavily belief  driven scenarios like the more pious/dogma driven tendency in certain Buddhist groups and traditions.

In that vein one I'm cautious about is the Bodhisattva vow. Much like my little doubts about recovery activities i can't help thinking that maybe a vow to be reborn until such time as all sentinent beings achieve enlightenment may screw up the functioning of the oversoul. 

It kind of begs the question too of who or what takes such a vow, and how binding can it be? On the positive side you can see why if a Rinpoche is an enlightened person who keeps returning to help dig us out of the hole (one able to routinely draw in life on the wisdom and compassion of a completed oversoul) why they might have some fairly special abilities.

It still seems to me though that there are some fundamentals about reincarnation that it's maybe not possible to sidestep.

One factor that (in my optimistic moments I hope) possibly reduces the number of reincarnations required may be that some don't have too many glitches left to iron out to reach realisation. ( says he failing to notice the huge weight of karma poised ready to drop in as a result of genocide committed in a past life - bad joke)

I've for example heard Tibetan Rinpoches quoted as saying that while the Western mind is to Eastern perspectives incredibly turbulent that this very energy often contains the seeds of rapid progress too. That a lot of progress can be made in a single life in this very fast moving intellectual environment.

Here's hoping.....