Friday, September 2, 2022

195 - Cycle of Transmigration

 

【輪廻転生、rinne tenshou】
['rinne' (pronounced rin-ne) refers to Samsara (the cycle of life and death), and 'tenshou' means transmigration or reincarnation in the Buddhist sense.]

It refers to the idea that after a living creature dies, it is reincarnated again as another human being or as an animal.
Originally, it was the view of life according to the Upanishadic philosophy of India, considered the oldest philosophy in the world, and later adopted by Buddhism.

In the Buddhist world, it is said that when we die, we repeat the cycle of life and death (Samsara) in the Three Realms (Trailokya) of the Six Paths (Shadgati), depending on our actions before death.
Both the Three Realms and the Six Paths are worlds in which human beings repeatedly reincarnate.
The Three Realms are the enslaving "Desire Realm", the materially limiting "Form Realm", and the spiritual world of the "Formless Realm".
The Six Paths refer to six worlds: Hell (Naraka), where people are punished for their sins during life; Hungry Ghosts (Preta), the world of hunger and desire; Animal, the world of beasts; Shura (Asura), the world of eternal conflict; Human, the world of people; and Heaven (Deva), the world of the gods.

However, because people who repeat Samsara in the world of the Three Realms and Six Paths cannot escape suffering forever, Buddhism teaches that there is a new world, the eternal "Pure Land", that transcends Samsara, and that in order to enter this Pure Land, people must do good deeds while they are alive.

An extension of the concept of reincarnation is what we would call a "previous life".
The idea of what kind of person we were before we were born is incredibly intriguing.
According to some studies, the nature of a person in previous and present lives may not be necessarily the same, but conversely, habits and idiosyncrasies from previous lives may be inherited. There is also "past-life hypnosis," in which a person's previous life is recalled through hypnosis and similar means.
Seemingly, the people under this hypnosis had vivid memories of past events that they were unaware of. 
However, it is also believed that the hypnotic memories of past lives are merely sensory memories (information in the brain that is seen or heard at a certain moment but not consciously considered a memory) that are evoked by hypnosis, and that they are very similar to the symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder.


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