A person’s identity is never affected by consequences. We can’t change who we are nor can anyone or anything else.rossum;14840433 [QUOTE said:]Actions have consequences. The consequences are not always immediate.
The simplest and most economical explanation is that such memories are of other person’s lives. Occam’s Razor…Yes and no. The actions of previous links can be remembered, with some effort. However many people do not have total recall of what they have done in their current life, let alone in their previous lives. The technique for remembering past lives starts with recalling, in reverse order, your current life.
The legal definition presupposes a permanent identity regardless of nationality or any other consideration.We are discussing the religious/philosophical nature of a person, not the legal definition. I am a UK national, so legally I am a subject of Her Majesty the Queen. That legal definition does not apply to citizens of America.
Here we disagree. A fixed identity is a reification, a projection of our unchanging internal model onto the changing external world. Such projection is an error and leads to suffering. We expect things to stay the same and we are upset when they change: “but you loved me when we married”.A person’s identity is never affected by consequences.
Yes we can. Within Christianity conversion and repentance are obvious example of a person changing. At an even more fundamental level, a human soul has to change from unsaved to saved for salvation to be possible. For a Catholic, baptism has an effect on the soul; it changes the soul.We can’t change who we are nor can anyone or anything else.
Yes, we know that we are subject to change. Our memories are however held inside our brains.Are your memories part of you? Your memories today are not the same as your memories yesterday – today you can remember what you had for breakfast this morning. Your body changes, your knowledge changes, your memories change. You are not the same you even when you are alive. Being the “same” implies no differences and it is obvious that there are differences over time. In Buddhism everything changes, including ourselves. To paraphrase Heraclitus, "You can never step in the same river twice because it is not the same river and you are not the same you.
How an immaterial thing, gandhabbas, could affect our destiny? How it could possibly interact with matter to affect things, like remembering?There is. A human is formed from three (name removed by moderator)uts: sperm and egg are the material (name removed by moderator)uts; a gandhabba is the non-material (name removed by moderator)ut carrying accumulated karma and memories from the previous life. However the gandhabba is not a permanent soul. It will not carry over into your next life; that will be a different gandhabba with different memories and different accumulated karma. Like everything else, gandhabbas are impermanent.
Buddhism emphasises change over stasis. Any stasis we think we see is an illusion, either our own internal projection or slow-moving change.
A quote from ‘Funes the Memorious’ by Borges:
Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front).
rossum
That is above my pay grade. You will have to ask a theologian ( or Buddhologian?)How an immaterial thing, gandhabbas, could affect our destiny? How it could possibly interact with matter to affect things, like remembering?
This hypothesis violates the principle of parsimony. The simplest and most economical explanation is that such memories are of other person’s lives. Occam’s Razor…A person’s identity is never affected by consequences. We can’t change who we are nor can anyone or anything else.
We are discussing the religious/philosophical nature of a person, not the legal definition. I am a UK national, so legally I am a subject of Her Majesty the Queen. That legal definition does not apply to citizens of America.The legal definition presupposes a permanent identity regardless of nationality or any other consideration.Here we disagree. A fixed identity is a reification, a projection of our unchanging internal model onto the changing external world. Such projection is an error and leads to suffering. We expect things to stay the same and we are upset when they change: “but you loved me when we married”.The legal definition presupposes a permanent identity regardless of nationality or any other consideration.
The legal definition is not arbitrary but based on the fact that we never lose our identity or change into another person. Otherwise we wouldn’t be responsible for what we did one second ago! We should be given a different name whenever we cease to be the same person or we shouldn’t be given a name at all! The concept of responsibility becomes meaningless if we are constantly becoming different individuals.
Conversion and repentance certainly don’t imply that we are utterly transformed in every respect and cease to be the same individual we were before. In fact time and space are totally irrelevant to our personal existence. You are “rossum” regardless of everything else. There has not been, is not or ever will be another “rossum”! You are unique in the history of mankind and should be proud of the fact instead of trying to multiply yourself into a chain of different individuals in order to conform to a Buddhist doctrine…Yes we can. Within Christianity conversion and repentance are obvious example of a person changing. At an even more fundamental level, a human soul has to change from unsaved to saved for salvation to be possible. For a Catholic, baptism has an effect on the soul; it changes the soul.
Baptism changes the soul to some extent but not entirely! If it did the past would be irrelevant and so would the future. Nothing would make sense because we would be atomised into a series of unrelated souls whose bodies and souls would have no significance whatsoever - and the ultimate result would be total extinction. …