[MilStdJunkie]

Yeah, I don't buy the "remembering past lives" business, but "life after death" seems like a physical certainty if you're not necessarily attached to the "self"[1]. I suppose it's sort of how life works, on our planet anyway, for the last two billion years when we invented sex to outpace the viruses. Some sort of sentient planetary slime mold might have different ideas.

One thing that's interesting is that Indian philosophy of the 800-400 BCE era had a concept congruous to the Greek atomos, the kanu. One of the neat things about kanu is that it knows where it's been, in a moral sense. This was posited as one explanation for reincarnation, all your bits fly around according to these moral laws, creating new points of awareness. Bad people burn all their energy whoring around, drinking, eating, so the kanu don't have a place to go (pigs, lower castes, etc), but good people spread their lives around, and kanu get higher life forms to coalesce into (brahmins, nice people, gods, etc). Obviously there's no morals at the Planck length, but it's an interesting notion.

Auschwitz ashes in our lungs, tears of Christ in our blood. One of Buddha's "memories" of past lives was as a man who sacrificed himself to feed a starving tiger and cubs. I've always thought that locking corpses in eternal tupperware was a little creepy.

Always keep in mind, though, at the heart of a lot of Indian philosophy is a certain brutality. I mean, the word for heaven is "non-existence"; as an old professor of mine[2] once quipped, "that's a perfectly reasonable posture if you've ever been to Bangalore". The entire notion of "higher" and "lower" life forms - including different kinds of PEOPLE - sort of gives away the game. Important to remember that AAALLL of these old systems were built to justify the civilization they emerged from, and it wasn't always purty.

[1] Whatever that is. Some sort of recursive system that simulates outcomes for a given range of choices? That seems way too pat.

[2] Who was also a minister, so there's that. He already believed in a Big Rock Candy Mountain with fluffy beards and chubby wingbabies.

[denton-scratch]

Regarding "the self": Buddhism is seriously conflicted about that idea. The self is said to be illusory, but we constantly apply all of our energies to defending it. Why do they go on so much about it, if it isn't real?

It's been described to me as a pathetic, insignificant thing, absolutely in need of a defender. Western (or I should say, english-speaking) Buddhist teachers call it "ego", but I'm pretty sure that's wrong, in that Freud and Jung coined the term "ego" (they had different definitions, but it's not the self from Buddhism that either of them defined).

[MilStdJunkie]

For traditional Buddhists, the experience of "self" or atta is considered an illusion, like a mirage, or perhaps a rainbow. The argument is that the phenomenological world is impermanent and formless, so the things that we experience via the senses are not representative of the "real stuff" out there. The self is built on these, so itself is also impermanent, and not an eternal quality. It's not bad exactly - later traditions posit that these aggregates or skandas of the self are the root of personality - but clinging to the impermanent self or samsaric phenomenon is, well, the root of suffering. And Buddha's all about suffering; if hypocrisy was Christ's kryptonite, then suffering is definitely the Shakya Buddha's. There's also another word for "self" that identifies with a sort of universal self, which is actually eternal, but it's also completely incomprehensible, by definition of its being infinite. And there's a whole bunch of later traditions. It's a lot to unpack.

I'd recommend picking up a good survey, some I remember as an undergrad were :

The First Cities, D. Hamblin

The Wonder that was India, A. Bassam

Indian Atheism, D. Chattopadhyaya, who also did a survey on Lokayata, an early Materialist movement in the subcontinent.

[cthulha]

It's a useful shared illusion, but not 'real' once you reach a certain level of meditative concentration.

If you look at a bicycle wheel in motion, you don't see the spokes. If you and everyone you knew had only ever seen wheels in motion, you'd talk about a semi transparent field from the centre to the rim. You would all describe the same phenomena.

I was at a meditation retreat, and I caught a glimpse of the spokes. That's how I've explained it to others.

Does the self seem real? Yes. Is it a useful construct? Can we predict it and manipulate it? Yes. Once you've followed the meditation practices, do you see that it's an illusion? That was absolutely my experience.

Which is a round about way of saying, the conflict you perceive in Buddhism is rooted in the ongoing struggle to perceive the nature of the self, and to notice when your practice becomes entangled in its illusions.