Past lives present
I know I talked about past lives before...
Okay.....well for this one...its more complicated..
First of all...I know some of you definately don't believe in them....so you guys just try and suspend disbelief for a little while and think about this as if your in a game or something where this is true for the following..
I've been thinking alot about this..
There are people I've met in this life..who I instantly knew . without getting to know them.
I mean details of their life yes i didn't know that, but everything else, yes.
And there are people who made me uneasy in certain ways from the start, without there being a real obviouos reason why...
Well, okay here goes..
If you did believe in past lives etc:
If you found out or knew that someone who you loved or cared about now had done something really horrific to you in a past life, a recent one, what would you do. would you treat it as if they were a differant person becauase they were in a differant body and had a differant name etc and differant upbringing education..or would you feel uncomfortable around them because of it.
in other words, if one believes in that stuff, is it like one continuous life, or is it like going to sleep and dreaming waking up and going to sleep again?
death could be waking up or going to sleep...tho i tend to think its waking up.
If people have the same spirit etc....than are they still capable of what they were in prior lives?or is it based on the culture they live in , whats acceptable....
for instance....
That's quite some suspeding-of-disbelief for me; I suppose you can imagine I'd be inclined to call it "psychological".
However. Maybe it's like recycling. I mean, we're all made of stuff that's been around for a long time. In a way, our bodies are, among other things, made of what our parents ate and ultimately just cosmic junk.
Same principle for spirits maybe? Like a blade being melted and made into a cup--or even several cups or other things (after all, earth didn't start out with billions of humans on it, not to mention other animals; where _do_ their spirits come from?), new things that have no blade-ness about them except to whoever _knows_ what they were before.
I think the hindus or buddhists (beats me, right now) believe in something like this--the "parts" of a spirit reassembled in such a way as to form a really new person; not to mention that the circumstances are different. Everyone probably has the potential to do something horrific given the right (or wrong, rather) errrr.... "motivation"/pressure/upbringing/circumstances/stuff ...?
In any case, if I was that person, I'd try to help you find out no matter what I believe in. Maybe you should talk to them about it?
Past & Present
To answer your hypothetical or indeed real question - It depends on whether you received revenge/justice - call it what you will for the wrong done to you at the time. If you haven't you've got to consider how much the current person is responsible to the current you. It may be a case of letting things go and moving on - It's rather like the case recently put by black lobbyists to the US Government - should today's black folks be compenstated for the era of slavery? If so - who do you compensate and how much do you give them?
And is it a one off payment?
Justric
Unregistered User
(8/27/02 11:05 pm) Reply
Disbelief
I can't believe you asked me to suspend my disbelief...after all, it's often I DO have to believe in!
At any rate, to the question at hand...um...I can't honestly say.
I would like to say and think that there may have been reasons. Did I deserve it? Was it for the greater good? Was it to protect a loved one? Does the current version of this person know of what they may have done and the motivations behind it? Was it REALLY all that terrible, or at least would it be still considered terrible in this day and age? Or visa versa even...perhaps it was something socially acceptable (albeit left unspoken of) for the time.
Too many factors for me just to give a guess on how I'd react. I have nothing to compare it to that I can conciously think of at the moment.
vedy vedy interesting...
I really like what you said there Ally.
I am not sure what I would do if i knew i had done something awful to someone in another life....(and i mean really awful) I mean, its not like one can make up for it...all one can do is love the person now...which is the conclusion i reached as far as what if someone else did something to me that was horrible etc etc...
I would certainly never tell them, because nothing they did would ever be enough in they're eyes.
this is all pretty hypthetical..well kinda..lol
star-crossed souls
Like a property surveyor, your conclusions depend on the premises. If a soul is just a personality then there may be some consistency in its actions from life to life. But I expect everyone here has had experiences which influenced their personality.
I would see a reincarnated "soul" as indistinguishable in practice from your genetic makeup; the fundamental part of you that cannot be changed. But that just leads to the nature vs nurture debate and human nature is a startling material. As far as I can see it's almost inconcievably malleable by cultural context, yet recognisable bubbles keep popping to the surface. I believe everyone has the potential to choose to do evil. If you apply that to reincarnation, I don't think it follows that because a soul did evil in one life it will in another.
(In reading and replying, kindly make allowances for the fact that it's mid-afternoon, I'm yet a stranger to my bed and I haven't had coffee yet. Thanks.)
yet another bloody postscript
And to take the soul/gene analogy to it's natural conclusion, you could say we're partial reincarnations of all our ancestors.
Interesting..
Yeah...I tend to agree with that, the soul being that uniquely 'you' essence but what surrounds it such as out layers of personality is greatly molded by events and circumstance....I know most of my reactionary attitudes and defenses act the way they do because of experiences. I do also feel that some of the feeling of having been deeply and completely betrayed by many people carries over from another life or lives. I've always had it, as far back as i can remember. and later on there were reflections of it in this life...which at the time I was kinda bewildered why they didn't suprise me (traumatize but not suprise me) i just kinda accepted them as what was bound to happen when i trusted a large amount of people or knew alot of people.....even tho i'd never really had that experience before in this life...of a huge number of people going from friends to enemies all at once...based on hear say...
I think that things operate on may levels at once...
that things live on by decaying and becoming part of the atmosphere and earth etc....and do the same i spirit...yet go on in soul....or spirit or whatever.lol..
I remember when I was a very small child...remembering stuff.....as one would remember what happened a week ago....as i got older it faded...as my memory in this life got longer.
zeddicu zul zorander
Unregistered User
(9/19/02 5:35 am) Reply
soul to soul
Well, working on the theory that we keep reincarnating because we have more to learn i would see the person whose past incarnation did badness upon me as sort of being rehabilitated. Besides maybe them hurting me in a past life could leave me with soul scars so maybe they are there to help heal me from whatever it was they did. Now on the other hand if they started to do it again i'd probably go bananas.
yep
I tend to agree with that.
specially the going bananas if they started to do it again part.lol. Thing is, I think that anything the person in the present life did that pissed you off would trigger those old feelings of betrayel and rage etc..
Yet I do believe that if they are in my life now it is to help heal me.now whether they do more harm than good with this is of course another story.I think that if I believe someone is out to harm me, even good stuff they do is taken the wrong way etc..
karma chameleon
Ever try to go back in history and try to find yourself? Just go library diving to find you and figure out why there's so much bad luck for you? You find a grainy old civil war photo in somebody's attic and sure enough there's you in the backround kicking a dog. Your leafing thru the Bible and it says,"....Michael of Jordan, the only cross-maker in Gallili..." Man, that would suck. "No wonder my neck is double jointed; I was Marie-Antoinette!"
heehee.
I think i have very loose joints in my whole body, thats what the doc once said. which is why i dislocated my knee twice ....i feel totally flexible even tho i never stretched much back then...and i get crazy when i dance...and i don't know something is straining till it pops out. (eek.)
*does wierd things with fingers and toes while waving them at screen*
so like
are you a cotorsionist and stuff, like do you do body popping on the dance floor *tongue in cheek* i bet your really good at robotic dancing type stuff and all the old hip hop dancing from the 80's. Maybe (not taking the piss now) you should get into shape shifting sounds like you have an advantage.
jointz
I take it you mean spliffz or reeferz? well i'm going to rub it in and let you know that me and my sister and her husband and some freindz are sat around with big fat spliffs watching Cate Blanchett in Gift on sky movies and it's the best African ganja from kenya and it'z loveleeeee
spliffy the contortion junkie.
*contorts face at you for a moment. Yes i guess i am one then. oh see now, my eyebrow's involved. *eyebrow tries to raise itself*
heh. well you may be tempting them but you aint tempting me. that was never my thing, tho i do love the aroma.not that i'd admit it if you were.
ganj is good
Not tryin' to tempt you pandifur it was ally i was gettin at. You allready told me you were'nt into the ganj so i would'nt bother. Me i love it 'the sacred herb' 'the black mans gift to the white man' if enough people smoked (or imbibed in other ways) the ganj then all wars would cease and people would be chilled out and not give a fiddlers @#%$ about the silly things they fall out about. Their minds would be more open and the politicians would be a thing of the past. In short the ganj is a special herb that mother earth has put here for the betterment of the planet as a whole. Did you know you can get more paper from a ganj plant than any other tree? and it will grow in poor soil conditions you can make clothes out of it, it has vast healing and calming properties. Also the legalization of ganj in the western world would end third world debt. In oil form it can be used to enter a state where a person can enter the underworld and commune with the ancestors. In some cultures they believe it to be the last earthly remnants of the dead.
In short thats why it's illegal (smells nice too)
Lord Jim
Unregistered User
(9/25/02 1:18 am) Reply
Maryjane's jailbait who fucks truck drivers
Yees.
No.
No. You see, I love ganja. I love the smell and the taste and the buzz of skunk. I love the physical sensations of crumbling it between my fingertips and then licking them before I wrap the skins. I love the late-night conversations with friends when you feel like you're talking from primeval, atrophied lobes of your brain. I love feeling numb fireworks of pleasureheat all over my body. I love the feeling of floating in liquid sensation. I love slipping into surreal rambling dreams without them feeling like dreams.
Over my life I'd estimate I've spent more money on draw than I have on books or food or rent or clothes. And if you smoke a decent amount of strong skunk (which is the only thing *worth* smoking), your motivation and willpower will be sapped for days. Now, I certainly am a very lazy man indeed. And I accept full responsibility for pissing my talents up the wall and running my life into the ground. But, frankly, bunning was one of my main ways of doing it. And after a little initial insight into psychological stuff I was blocking, it hasn't been rewarding at all beyond short-term gratification. I could have spent all that time dancing, reading books or writing them, cooking extravagant meals, falling in love, taking long country walks, running for office, whatever. If I were all that bothered about self-knowledge, I could have gone into @#%$ analysis with the time and money I've spent.
It's a very pleasurable stimulant, but let's not pretend it's the solution to all the world's problems. It's a very fun thing to do very intensely for very short periods. It will discourage you from ever doing anything practical. Regular indulgence will, over a period of time, inhibit you from engaging with reality and interacting with other people.
So, yeah, I've given it up. My bong is in my cupboard and my flatmates use my smiley-face ashtray for their cigarette filters. I probably will do it occasionally but it'll never be a daily ritual for me again. My life is just to full for me to spend all that time splashing about in pleasurepools in my own head.
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