Alesh Vyhnal:
...For me it is also difficult to accept the reality of reincarnation. ..This concept of reincarnations would make sense to me only if there were periods of my existence perhaps in some special realm in which I would recall all my previous existences.
The Buddha taught (again, as per the Theravada Pali Canon) “
punabbhava”, literally “again recurrent becoming”, or “recurrent becoming”, which gets translated and morphed into “rebirth” or “reincarnation”, which in turn triggers generally skeptical interpretations, and disbelief on the part of Westerns, especially those of the “secular” persuasion.
In it’s original context (according to my understanding, which is s/w informed though I wouldn’t say authoritative) he was speaking about the continual recurrence of patterns of human behavior and perception, conditioned and passed along down through history. The patterns come to life in every individual, and are sustained by
tanha, or craving, the thirst of wanting beyond what’s given, fueling “becoming” as action striving to fulfill that wanting and fashion some desired “identity”. In his analysis, the “person” and it’s “self” are expedient constructs of the
mind (individual and collective), “reality” on what he calls the mundane plane. (Same “reality” as in your first sentence quoted above.) Personal self is “real” in a practical sense – similar, to my mind, as the levels of “self” outlined in Antonio Damasio’s book “
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain”.
But what the Buddha found and offered was the possibility of developing mental skills and transformations such that the individual could experience release from the bounds of that mundane experience pattern centered on one’s self, from its inevitable correlate “suffering” (
dukkha, perhaps better translated as dissatisfaction, sooner or later, or stress). An important dimension of the experience being “release” from the delusion of the personal “self” as substantial and enduring, something ontological, so to speak.
Everyone experiences the recurring patterns, learned from parents, all other associates, and likely to a degree inherent genetically, and mistakes them as belonging to, or consisting in an individual “self”. Similarly, in the Buddha’s “first knowledge” (in the legend of the night of his “awakening”), where he reviewed eons of “past lives”, i.e. saw back into the stream of recurring experience patterns, intentions and actions, and the conditioning that sustain them – not “lives” that he’d personally lived in the modern literal sense, but the behaviors and perceptions of human living that are available to view and analyze with training. The “second knowledge” of this awakening process involved observing how people in general (and in the present) form intentions and actions and how this conditions results (
kamma, aka karma) and further behaviors,
ad infinitum. Then as the “third knowledge”, he analyzed, generalized and abstracted the principles of how that all functions, to the degree of seeing a way of training and reshaping the mind (i.e. it’s behavior) such that it can “know” (in the sense of
gnostic experiencing) and “see” (in the sense of reflectively understanding) precisely what is going on, i.e. “awaken” to it, with no delusion. “Seeing” (
vipassana) exhaustively how conditioning functions, opens the mind to “touching” the “unconditioned”; stilling it’s conditioned (mundane) activity (
samadhi) allows it a taste of how to operate free of causing itself further
kamma – consequences of deluded intention to further “becoming”. These last two issues being of necessity s/w fuzzy, perhaps “mystical”, as they allude to the experience of Nibbana, or non-mundane, “transcendental” level of experience, which is beyond verbal description – can only be experienced.
No big surprise that the “secular” attitude tends to dismiss the possibility of such a dimension of human experience, as “metaphysical”, “paranormal” or “supra-normal powers” (
iddhi) etc. Authors such as Robert Wright, Stephen Batchelor, Leigh Brasington, Sam Harris, Donald Hoffman, etc. have little alternative than to focus on ameliorative models, such as the psychological, the
eudaimonia (“human fulfillment”), social transformation, etc. Which correlates with a s/t subtle, s/t not so subtle dismissal of the core monastic tradition, especially with it’s total renunciation of things like becoming a famous and successful writer, teacher, or in general a popular “authority” as to what the Buddha “really” meant. The delusion that you can have your cake and eat it too.
Of course, these are just my views here, perhaps a “metaphorical diversion”.