@Shamana: again, my experience and research contradicts some of the Buddhadharma. This is not me being malicious or spoilt or weak-willed, and
your own failure to experience past-life regression does not invalidate those cases which do exist. That's, frankly, insultingly solipsistic. And just because there are a lot of obviously false ones (like your example of lots of women thinking they were Cleopatra) does not give the lie to the true ones. You are, for a supposedly practiced and trained Buddhist, immensely prideful at times.
Remember the parable of the novice who stares at the master's hand when the master is pointing at the moon. Remember that "all the dharma are empty." Remember that Buddha himself supposedly said not to believe what offends your reason and your conscience. Well, Shamana, one king hell mountain of a lot of religious dogma that's accreted around Buddhism over the last 2500-odd years offends my reason and my conscience, and I've got the empirical evidence to back that up.
You're also conflating the Hindu concept of reincarnation with what is properly termed rebirth in Buddhism. The
entire point of the Buddhist doctrine of anatman or nonself is that, in direct contrast to the Hindu idea that there is a spark of essential being that continues between lives, Buddhism believes that there is no permanent, first-order "self" and it's just the skandhas or aggregates that continue onward. The analogy I've seen is something like lighting a new candle from the flame of an old one about to go out.
Which, incidentally, brings up some other questions, such as:
- "If reincarnation doesn't happen and what happens is instead rebirth as described above, in what sense is it "still you" from one life to another?"
- "Building on that, what's even the point of rebirth into a lower realm as punishment or a higher realm as reward if what's being reborn is not, technically, self-existent or "actually you" any longer?"
- "Karma is a natural law, like gravity or the inverse-square law of electromagnetic radiation. This means it is a description of some underlying aspect of reality, and is grounded in and supervenes on that reality. Where did it come from and what grounds it? What is "enforcing" karma?"
I would never think to compare my knowledge of specific doctrine with yours, but then again, I'd never think to out-wiki Wikipedia with my own brain either. What you know is less important than whether it's true or not.
@GeorgeJL: Edt: thought one of Shamana's posts was one of yours, sorry :/
