On a zero to ten scale, zero being absolute certainty that it is not true and ten being absolute certainty that it is true, where would put your belief in some sort of rebirth or reincarnation or any other form of life after death.

I'd say I'm about a 3.  I think that it is definitely possible, but more likely a myth.

Why not just go visit in a dream/vision/meditation yourself and do experiments (like talking to your dream people) to gather evidence for yourself of either outcome or even the spanning space of possible outcomes? That way it's less of an extrinsic belief and more experience of how your own cosmology is constructed.

As practicing Buddhists we know from our personal experience that there's no permanent self, right? Given that, why is this even a question? Why does this matter?

Curious.

Also 3.

Ah, beliefs...

zero


​​​​​​​"life after death" is a contradiction in terms

   You know, chris, the vast majority of practicing buddhists in the world fully believe in reincarnation. 

   

all beliefs are false, including this one...

Hi, terry.

i know that what you said is the case, but I don't really think the vast majority of the worlds Buddhists are meditation practitioners, are they? Anyway, whatever folks believe,  was just curious about why the question matters to anyone. 

aren't they?

is prayer "meditation?"

or repeating nembutsu?

is "practicing buddhism" even about meditation?

even "pragmatic dharma," is that limited to meditation?

​​​​​​​

and while buddhism is a big tent, I prefer open sky

aloha, chris!

No-self does not preclude experience after death in my experience.  Rather it can act as pointer towards the nature of our post life existence - what is experience like beyond the sense of solid self tied to a physical body?  

As post 2 suggested, my own experiences in dreams, meditation, OOBE, etc have given me very high "belief" (rather more insight based on experience) that death is not an end and rather a transition, that spiritual experience is likely much greater than what we can perceive here on Earth, regardless of how enlightened we get.

And to give a concrete example, once while practicing obe / lucid dreaming, I very naturally stood up out of my body, floated through the door of my room, through a wall, out the door, and down my street under skies teeming with stars.

IMO Buddhists make discussion around death overly complicated to get around whole self vs soul issue, "the flame of this candle lights the next", etc.  Really though in my experience, not-life could very well just equal non-physical experience (as story above).

​​​​​​​11

How I know:

Very smart scientists were convinced by scientific evidence that the brain, made of matter, cannot produce consciousness: 

https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/eminent_researchers


Empirical evidence that the personality continues to exist after the death of the physical body.
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/summary_of_evidence


My personal experiences communicating with spirits:

Taking classes at a Spiritualist church:
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/psi_experience

What it is like to communicate with spirits:
https://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/10/what-is-it-like-to-communicate-with.html

​​​​​​​
For those who are interested, Leslie Flint was one of the best mediums ever. 
https://www.leslieflint.com

Free e-books:

A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife
https://www.victorzammit.com/book/4thedition/index.html

Your Eternal Self
http://www.ebook.youreternalself.com/chapter1textlink.htm

I am, hence God exists. 

I am not, hence Santa doesn't exist. 

When I am, there is only I am referring back to no one. 
When I continue, there is only I continuing referring back to no one. 
When I speak to spirits there is only speaking to spirits referring back to no one. 

Hence when I am, God exists, refering back to no one. 

one. 

no. 

??? 

Are we in a simulation?
https://www.my-big-toe.com/
If so, then this guy has tons of cool stuff to know about it...including the whole death transition, etc....
~D

My answer is yes, we're all in a simulation of our own mind's making.

​​​​​​​

xkcd Comic - TRAPPED!!!!!!


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Help, help! I'm beliving my beliefs!!!

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How come?
Buddha said you cannot point to solid self in your experience. If you investigate experience and cannot point to it you confirmed that. This isn't yet confirming solid/permanent self doesn't exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebirth_(Buddhism)

Ouch!

There are more plausible interpretations of the Buddhist scriptures that say "rebirth" refers to our moment-to-moment arising and passing away of the sense of all objects, including the self. This interpretation squares with my personal experience. I get why so many folks prefer the literal rebirth interpretation. Reincarnation is very appealing, but belief is required.

I dont believe in 'life' ... and I dont believe in 'death'.

Let along life after death.
The question itself is inconseqential and .... well!

Rebirth might be seen as a matter of perspective.

"I" am reborn in every living thing. This body called terry, that body called chris, is in and out of consciousness and is born and dies as all things arise and pass away.

"Incarnate" means literally donning the meat robe. We don many robes in one life, One life.

​​​​​​​Beliefs are fine if not clung to.

Believe in buddha?

from 101 zen stories, paul reps


95. A Letter to a Dying Man

Bassui wrote the following letter to one of his disciples who was about to die:
​​​​​​​
The essence of your mind is not born so it will never die. It is not an existence,
which is perishable. It is not an emptiness,
which is a mere void. It has neither color nor form. It enjoys no pleasures and suffers no pain.
'I know you are very ill. Like a good Zen student, you are facing that sickness squarely. You may not know exactly who
is suffering, but question yourself: What is the essence of this mind? Think only of this. You will need no more. Covet
nothing. Your end which is endless is as a snowflake dissolving in the pure air.' 

so, being reborn is the consolation prize for failing to attain nirvana...

a participation trophy, every player gets one...

I would say 8. Why not 10 because I have not verified this for myself, yet.

Why 8 is a little too long to explain but in line with what some have already said here. There are quite compelling evidence out there. 

I am at a 11 though if the question would be whether the Pali Canon Buddha (Nikayas) taught it and meant it literally.  The wording of the Buddha when he talks about it, like "I have seen beings who, upon the dissolution of the body, after death, have re-appeared in such or such destination based on their actions (kamma)." Or when a certain disciple would die and he would say which world, as devas for example, they had been reborn. Such language, and many other passages, preclude the interpretation that he meant it as a mind-monment to mind-moment rebirth. However, although I see the moment-to-moment rebirth as a later interpretation than what we read in the Nikayas, I find it intuitively and psychologically sensical and useful. We have many versions of our "selves" that come and go throughout a single day. We cannot say one of them is our real self, because it comes and goes according to circumstances we don't control. 

This being said, I also believe one can gain the promissed results of the practice irrespective of whether one believes in rebirth or not. So although discussions around such belief may be fun for some, it isn't necessarily pragmatic as far as practice is concerned. 

One more thing about the Nikayas; the belief in annihilation after death was seen as one way one holds a view of self: a self that comes to be when we're born and annihilates when we die. 

from the rubaiyat of omar khayyam:


​​​​​​​XXVI.

 Oh, come with old Khayyam, and leave the Wise
 To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies;
   One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies;
 The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.


LIII.

 With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man's knead,
 And then of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
   Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote
 What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read.
  

I would say that, first, this falls under the general heading of The Future. The future, whether five minutes from now, fifty years from now, or a next life after death, exists only in the imagination. Imagination regarding the future can be useful (super handy while driving for example) but it is also helpful to remember that it is imagination, not an actual thing. Next, this falls under the heading of Thoughts About The Self. Thoughts about the self change so often and so easily that they can't be relied on. One moment we are great people, the next we are idiots or monsters. One day we have squandered every opportunity and amounted to nothing, the next we are living our best lives. Which one gets to live the next life that might be coming?

Thinking about this by way of analogy, a child at the age of ten might want to be a firefighter or an astronaut. This can be a wonderful thing. It gives joy in the present moment and gives meaning to the unfolding changes they experience. It doesn't greatly matter if the job actually materializes because, even if it does, the person doing that job won't be the ten-year-old child, which is to say, the ten-year-old child will never know.

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I want to be a buddha when I grow up.

It's all water under the bridge now. 

 Right now there's an animal, which is really a machine made out of atoms, conventionally called Tom. Because of physics, stuff happens in the animal-machine's brain, and at the same time, experiences arise. Someday, the animal-machine called Tom, all of the atoms will be taken apart from all the other atoms and there will be no sign of it anymore. But there will be other animal-machines, and physics will be doing stuff and elecricity and chemicals will be moving in their brains, and experiences will be arising, and to those animal-machines, it's going to feel like all those experiences are happening to "me". So, is there life after death? You're experiencing life after death right now. Remember, the Buddha searched backward in his lives and was never able to find any beginning. Life after death is the utterly normal state of affairs.
 

Uncertain. Assumptions. 

For those who believe in rebirth... ​​​​​​​

Recollections of past lives are not a proof for the existence of past lives, even if those recollections represent true experiences of real people from the past.

Maybe the brain is like a radar that can pick up matching "frequencies", that is, telepathically see others' memories stored in collective unconscious / quantum neural interconnectedness. Once you pick up those memories, they feel like they are "yours" because they are in the 1st person perspective, and they seem relevant to you precisely because your mind didn't catch them randomly - there was some kind of "hook", some kind od psychological similarity that makes those experiences seem like they are causally related to yours.

Sounds crazy? IMHO, Pali Canon ideas about rebirth sound much much more crazy.

Even with the memory transference hypothesis there's the further issue of what makes you a discrete entity. With transpersonal exchange you aren't you anymore but an admixture of previous you and the bit of the other person's past life. So the meaning of what is yours doesn't make sense anymore as a discrete entity as your type has changed to an admixture entity. There are other radar type experiences that aren't past life too like sharing thoughts with a living person meditating nearby. If the radar hypothesis is true it would mean we are admixtures of other contemporary people in addition to past people.

I'm somewhere < 3, too.

My cynical take: life after death is suspicious to me because it is so perfectly suited to the goals of any organized religion: to encourage ethical behavior and discourage nihilism ("your actions have meaningful future consequences, don't wreck our society") and to encourage people people to endure misery and injustice ("don't start a revolution, life will be better 'next time around'").

Nothing like proof-positive, of course. And there are plenty of other aspects of Buddhism that point to ethical behavior on its own merits. But it just feels a little suspect.

I'm also skeptical just from my own experience. The "see for yourself" aspect of Buddhist practice has worked out for me in every regard except this one. Not that I've experienced for myself every insight, every path, but everything so far jives with what I've read and heard. Reincarnation is the only (?) element where I haven't caught so much of a whiff of it in my own practice.

I'm also not particularly advanced, so this is mostly meaningless. But it does add to the suspicion.

In case you are interested in what Kenneth Folk and M. Taft have to say about this subject listen to this one  
Just to give you a clue, they explain how the fear of death or of oblivion can make folks go into all sorts of beliefs about life after death. 
https://deconstructingyourself.com/dy-003-masters-oblivion-guest-kenneth-folk.html

"They explain..."

No explanation needed. Fear of death is a massive motivation for many human foibles - accumulation of wealth, religious fervor, the building of monuments, having children, works of art, great books, debauchery, seeking fame, great adventures, medical experimentation, the consumption of massive amounts of vitamins, alcohol, and drugs. It's the definition of ubiquitous.

Those that make theories about 'death motivation and immortality thru works' are just trying to be immortal thru their theories surviving long after death.... lol ​​​​​​​.
​​​​​​​They should get a life.
~D

site:https://www.my-big-toe.com/forums reincarnation

There was a guy who did that really well... but he's dead now.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death  It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1974, two months after the author's death. 

No separate selves. Rather, interdependences.

Am I wrong to say that the very (not)experience of cessation/nirvana gives a totally chill out perspective/attitude towards death? 

Now, the act of dying or still being alive but going to die because of illness or bodily damage etc ... can give me creeps. As in, I wish a fast dying process rather than being in a prolonged agony of dying. And I wish to all a swift dying process. 

(writing over a glass of red wine) 

It's interesting how much time and energy humans devote to denying, fearing, or embracing death. We create stories to assuage the fear and engage in distractions to assuage the denial. If you've been present for death or the process that precedes death, the dying person seems to drop everything from before. I find that even more interesting. Being immediately confronted by death resolves the denial and the fear, leaving only the embrace.

That's the way it felt to me. When the I got rebooted after my first cessation, there was a impression that non-existance wasn't so bad, nothing to be feared in itself. 

Yeah it's interesting how we need to narcissistically feed the "I" and push away/compartmentalize the "death of the I". It makes sense in a very basic way, we gotta do stuff to live/thrive, but the extents we go to are... crazy. And the cause of a lot of needless suffering.

For me it was the experience of a unitive state before and after entering / exiting the non experience zone. More recently, after reading the Tibetan book of the dead, I've been trying the elemental dissolution visualization practice of the experience of approaching death rather than a fire kasina or jhanic progression.

Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Fear of death is based upon a totally biased, fabricated story about it. 

Eternal absence of all suffering? Sounds like something we can look foward to!

And from a non-self perspective there is no death because there is nobody to die:

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Clare Harner

We are perhaps the only species who feels the need to wrap biological imperatives in moral paper.

Animals have no moral difficulty muscling out the weak and dominating whomever can be forced or cajoled. No moral problem submitting when they lose.

No species hits the limits of growth with a planned slowdown so that individual members can enjoy happy individual lives. Species deplete their environments of the necessities of life as fast and as thoroughly as they can.

No species in the four billion year history of life has depleted their environment so fast and so thoroughly as ours. By the time we have grasped what a tipping point is we’ve blown past them all.

In the face of these facts, any of our former justifications for super predation have become senseless. 


Death has become something truly new and unprecedented. And imminent, for individuals, species, biosphere. We could make the permian extinction seem mild. 


What we need now is another noah.  Mere lifeboats won’t do.


This is truly facing death.

Yeah your words seem very familiar to me. I would describe it the same way. 

That's a bunch of nonsense. If you want to work on yourself to get rid of some senseless aversion and ill will, that's my recommendation for where to start.

​​​​​​​there's a river in egypt...

Make America great again! 

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