Do you believe in reicarnation?

Question

do you believe that we live, die and reincarnate again and again? do you think that we have lived numerous past lives?

Answer 1

Jesus taught reincarnation. read matthew 11-14/15 & matthew 17-10/13 Jesus was speaking of John the baptist being Elias reincarnated. I have had several experiences that convince me that I am the life of the body an i lived before i had this body and i will live after it is Gone. This is the only way that Karma,cause & effect makes sense. I believe the catholic church has concealed many things such as this. From 365 AD when the bible was compiled.

Answer 2

Reincarnation is just another form of religious-based wishful thinking, like any other concept of the afterlife.

Also, it has its logical problems. Whether humans can come back as other life forms or only as other humans, reincarnation runs into problems when you take into account the current growth of the human population and, over the long term (since life began on Earth), the growth and increase of life in general.

Who we are--our memories, skills, experiences, and personality--is encoded in the physical structure of the neurons in our brain: their connections and spacings. This we know for a fact. When we die, these physical fine structures decay and are lost. Thus even if humans did have souls (which there is exactly zero evidence for), such souls would not have any of the characteristics that define our identity. They would be _from_ us, but wouldn't _be_ us, no more so than a shed skin flake or a fallen hair. Because everything that gave us our identity and defined who we were as individuals, would be rotting inside our dead skulls. Sorry if this sounds morose, but them's the facts.

Even from a theological point of view, would you want reincarnation to be true? Just think: when you have a child of your own someday, whose soul would inhabit its body? It might be the soul of some deceased sleazy politician, or a dog, or even worse, an evangelical xtian. You wouldn't know where that soul might have come from!

All religions use some form of afterlife in order to give comfort against the finality of death, as well as a means to enforce their morality by telling believers that how they behave in this life will determine their standing in the next. The notion that death is not final, that life continues afterwards, has a powerful emotional appeal, but in the end, it's only wishful thinking. And the idea of using one's standing in the afterlife or next life as a threat or incentive to behave in this life, is really a childish sort of morality; a morally mature person is good for the sake of being good, not for the sake of being rewarded in heaven or with a better next life.

This life is all we have, so it's important we make the most of it, and not waste it on fantastical thinking and false hopes. Value what you've got, and your life will be fulfilling.

Answer 3

I believe what ever I want to believe.
I believe in a never ending life, a never starting life, a life that is.
I sometimes get the feeling that I have lived many physical lives, I get visions and flashbacks from many different places which are not here, which all led me to believe that life is bigger then a one time run. Its kind of hard to imagine how the whole reincarnation thingy works so I take for what it is, a never ending life.

Answer 4

No, I don't believe in reincarnation - at least not in any kind of literal, supernatural sense. Religious concepts like this are almost always metaphors gone bad. They start off as an allegory for some psychological truth. People get confused, take them literally, and they become popularized superstitions that get passed down from generation to generation.

The Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - are especially prone to this. Typically you don't see this kind of metaphor corruption as much in the East, because the East often, (although not always), puts more emphasis on the psychological elements of religion, rather than the supernatural. However, reincarnation is a great example of an Eastern metaphor gone bad. (Others would be karma and chakras.)

Reincarnation, I believe, has to do with how our selves are constructed over time. In Eastern thought, there's no stable self that exists in time, there are just a series of successive selves, constantly giving birth to a new self from one moment to the next. Who you were at 5 led to who you were at 6, which led to who you were at 10, which led to who you were at 15, and so on. Who you are today is a product of all those previous selves you've been over the years. I believe this is what reincarnation was originally about.

I've done a lot of Buddhist meditation, and what I've noticed is that I have a lot of old memories surface in a very vivid fashion. They tend to be key moments in my past, often painful events, that were important in shaping who I am today. I can't say that the people in those memories are "me", because I'm a completely different person today. Those selves were, in a sense, "past lives." The folks who came up with the reincarnation concept were also doing a lot of meditation (or yoga), and I imagine they would have had similar kinds of "past life regressions" occurring (i.e. memory flashbacks).

When you look at reincarnation in this way, one can also see how the concept of karma might be interpreted in a psychological, non-supernatural sense. What you did yesterday affects who you are today. We all have a karmic debt in the sense that our selves are the sum total of all our previous thoughts and actions. How much joy or suffering we experience in life has a lot to do with what kind of self we've constructed with the time we've had. In other words, identity is our karmic debt.

We can "burn bad karma" by thinking different thoughts and making different choices (i.e. reshaping our identity). When we do good things, think good thoughts, the reward is instantaneous - in a small way, we've just made our selves a little easier to live with, and we're that much closer to joy. Likewise, when we do bad things, think bad thoughts, the punishment is instanteous - in a small way, we've just made our selves a little harder to live with, and we're that much more miserable.

Answer 5

Dear Prema Swaroopa,
Just you see a mango tree or a banana or coconut tree.Each one you plant, and each one comes from a seed so also we reborn/ reincarnate according our Karmas and Vasanans.We born,grow,die.When we leave this phyisical body,we reborn with our last thought what we had in our mind. may be our sole (Jeeva)go away from present body,but the mind never die.We continue with our last thought to another body to work out our Karmas.You just see there are ten Avatharas of Vishnu which he taking (incarnations) diffrent body to protect the rightesness means Dharma.So we always reborn again again. To stop this birth and death we should meditate and break the circle. That is we practising Dieffrent kind of Yogas according our temperment.
WE CAN COUNT THE SEEDS IN A FRUIT.ONLY GOD CAN COUNT THE FRUITS IN ONE SEED.
With Prem & Om,
Swami Krishnananda.

Answer 6

Reincarnation could be real, yes, because I have had dreams as a little kid about being a blonde chick from the mid - 19th century. I liked to shop then just as now.

Answer 7

Yes I do. I belive we go through every stage of being, from fire, wind and water and earth, through plants, through animals, and lastly, human. Then we reincarnate again and again as humans, but if in our human lives we do something that is not worthy of th eintelligence of a human, we get kicked down to an animal body to learn something we ought to have learned then.

Answer 8

I believe we live several lives. I believe we live, we die (go to the other side) and I believe eventually we are born again, repeatedly. Not forever and ever, but a few times. I believe our spirit judges how many lives we live.

Answer 9

as much as i'd love to believe that, i don't. i find the idea of hell and heaven to be more believable. if reincarnation was real, then wouldn't that mean that there is only a certain number of souls since we were all once somebody else?

Answer 10

So Claudia R, what animal's body were u reincarnated into in ur past life, and what weed are we gonna see u reincarnated as in the future. psshhhh...there is no such thing as reincarnation, God isn't stupid, people.