Now that is a proper shower thought.
This made me think of a movie I really enjoy called Wristcutters: A Love Story
This is my favorite movie, I love to see a shout out in the wild
I watched it again last night and it was still as good as I remember.
Added this one to my watch-list. Thanks. This is the kind of stuff I scroll Lemmy for!
Its a very good strange movie. The odd music was very addictive when i first watched it as a teenager.
This is an incredible film. It’s probably a 9/10 or 10/10 for me.
I watched it again last night and it was still as good as I remember.
Such an under rated movie
Never heard of it! Will check it out. Ty 4 the recommendation!
Then commit suicide until you hit that rich birth lottery.
Until you hit a happy brain lottery, anyway.
I like to think that if reincarnation is real, the reason it can’t be verified is because the universe is so vast, the likelihood of reincarnating as something on Earth is super miniscule. Even if you could only come back as something intelligent like a human, if there are other intelligent life forms in the universe, the odds of coming back as a human on Earth would be super small.
Which is why I always interpret the mere concept of reincarnation as a product of our own selfish assumption that we as a species matter in the grander picture.
As if we’re so important…
And here I was thinking reincarnation was a among same species like if you’re born a titmouse you can only be reincarnated as another titmouse then again how would that work as evolution comes around like how much can a cardinal mutate before it’s no longer a cardinal
We’re pretty important. Maybe not so much to some aliens 4 galaxies over, but we’re important to us and the reason is pretty much real magic. Qualia is a huge deal.
I’ll offer this (even though I fully believe life is prevalent in the universe): Who says you have to be reincarnated in chronological order? You could be reincarnated a dinosaur. A microbe in the primordial soup. A lizard 100 years from now. An armored fish.
So the odds of landing on “human” are pretty small.
If microbes were in play for reincarnation, their sheer numbers would make it almost inevitable that you’d reincarnate as one
Does anything say you have to be a higher life form?
If you’re going back in time it’s possible you can end up in different time lines like maybe you could rencarnate into a timeline where Stalin never came into power because you caused him to become the dictator he’s known as today or maybe you could rencarnate as Adolfs mother and have to raise your child knowing the monster he will become shit that actually sounds like a good novel I want to read
I think with reincarnation you don’t get to have any knowledge of anything other than your current existence.
I once showerly thought that reincarnation could not even be tied to entities that we would consider sapient. A bit like Leibniz’idea of a monad.
For instance over could be trapped for millennia as a copper atom, solidified in an asteroid. So when you get to be in an animal form it is something fantastically rare and wonderful. And when you get a human body is the most exhilarating thing ever!
If more people were too believe that, life wouldn’t be treated with the disdain we often put on it.
If it it were real, your new memories would simply over write the old ones as your newborn senses develop.
I can’t even imagine being in the same dimension. If the universe is space and everything is made of space than there must be universes between universes.
Could lead to weird issues. Imagine if Germany attacked France and stole their homes. Then the French commit group suicide and reincarnate into children of their German conquerors. Then as their parents die, they inherit their own land back.
I do want to add that being reincarnated does mean you failed the test, that’s how Hinduism works. To escape being reincarnated, you have to become enlightened (from there you go to Nirvana which is not described with much detail).
Here’s a detail: it smells like teen spirit.
That’s Buddhism not Hinduism. Buddhists try to escape samsara, Hindus try to do well at it
Thank you for the correction.
This is why my Buddhist ass isn’t a very good Buddhist lol. I appreciate the parts that help get through life, but the whole thing falls apart at the random cruelty of the universe and the non-random cruelty of humanity.
Ascribing any purpose to all of the suffering/stress of living is, frankly, bullshit in any religion. I don’t blame people for clinging to karma as an idea to explain such things, any more than I blame the whole “God’s plan” principle when things are theistic more directly. People sometimes need a pretty lie to get through the next horrible thing.
But I don’t, and can’t buy into it. To believe that any structure or entity would do the things that happen just as natural phenomena would drive me insane trying to find a way to destroy it. That’s not covering the fact that humans do even worse things, regularly, and that’s an even bigger sign of any intelligence of the universe being a cruel and hopeless monster.
Arguably Siddharth’s concept of karma was more of a physics thing than a moral thing. He made friends with the low of society and talked smack about the priestly caste. Believing in rebirth and at the same time not accepting that punishment here is for sins of the last lifetime.
Karma is deed done. If I break your farm you don’t have food. That’s karma. That doesn’t mean I get punished for what I did that doesn’t mean you get a reward to make up for it.
Can you explain deeper about the Buddhism thing? Like I didn’t think it ascribed anything to anything. I thought enlightenment was realizing that things generally suck, but you can only enjoy the things that don’t suck, because the rest of it sucks. So live in the moment now, and enjoy what doesn’t suck while you can.
I’m probably the wrong guy to ask, but I’ll try.
The principal comes down to the idea of impermanence.
Nothing is forever. Not the good, not the bad, not the meh. Change is impossible to prevent as well. At most, you delay change.
As you learn to stop holding on to any given moment, instead living it, the edges get worn away. This doesn’t mean that you don’t experience pain, stress, dissonance; you do. But you learn to accept them as temporary and abide as they flow away.
But, part of that is accepting that anything else will also flow away with time. That’s the part of it all that is hard, but makes it work as a way of getting through life. You start appreciating the good more when it’s there, it becomes more real, more memorable because instead of clinging to it, or dreading its loss, it becomes a sort of timeless experience.
The only truly eternal thing is change, so you accept change.
Believe it or not, once you internalize all of that, the bad things in life start to have their own beauty. I’m not saying they become pleasant; being stuck in traffic or having a limb amputated still suck hard. What happens is that such things become just a minor part of life. The threshold for where things go from unpleasant to traumatic shifts.
You learn to accept grief, in particular, and doing so helps reduce the suffering of it. You’ve lost something, probably something very important. But because you aren’t clinging to it, and let yourself really grieve fully, without trying to escape it or numb it, it becomes a form of grace.
Enlightenment is a different thing, tbh. That’s more about the spiritual side of things, and I don’t really hold on to that part. It’s window dressing for me.
This isn’t to say that you reach some magic place, btw. As long as you’re connected to life, there will be the reality that we are products of hormones and that’s all processed by a few pounds of electrified cells in our skulls. Traumas can happen, no matter how you look at them. You’re going to have “suffering” in the sense that the concept is used in Buddhism, no matter what. It’s a process, a way of moving through life, not a transformation into an internally isolated being that never feels.
Also, “suffering” within the Buddhist concept isn’t exactly the best word. It implies that the problems of life have to be major for it to relate. This isn’t the case; it really can be about the minor stresses too. Being stuck in traffic is stressful, it causes dissonance and pain. But, when viewed as impermanent, and lived, that stress is reduced and smoothed out. You accept it and just keep going without eating a hole in your gut.
Not OC, but an important tenet of Buddhism as you probably know is known as the “First Noble Truth,” which states that “life is suffering.” The second through fourth noble truths basically tell us to cease attachment and desire and to live a life based on “right living” to avoid the problems caused by attachment and suffering.
I think this is where OC has an issue and I agree because sometimes being a human sucks and you need some escapes from that suffering. I consider myself a Buddhist as well, and while many Buddhists will talk of the “middle way” between living a conventional life and living a life that tries to get rid of all attachments, I find myself mostly leaning toward the conventional ways of alleviating suffering like playing video games and smoking weed.
Tldr: living like a monk isn’t easy (or something I want) but the Buddhist worldview helps me make sense of the world so I use it.
The book of sixes (A.N. on the pali language English society) is a pretty painful read but it goes through it pretty well. Or you could start with the heart and diamond sutra
Aw man, that sucks.
Frankly I came to dislike the very idea of karma as i realised it’s basically just an excuse to keep people in their place, like “you deserve this because you were shitty in your previous life”. No i wasn’t.
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I guess it depends on what outcome you were hoping for.
One of the book series I really liked is “Odd Thomas”, and a recurring theme is this life is boot camp for the challenges you’ll face in the next. This showerthought is right in line with that: clearly some people need to repeat boot camp
Man, I love that series. The last book, I cried off and on all day when I finished it. Just beautiful.
I’ve read through a couple times now and always appreciate it … except my library never seems to have them all or not the “next one”.
It’s been a few years and I don’t think I ever checked for the ebook at my library …… you may have given me my weekend plan
To quote Contrapoints: the wheel of samsara is my stomping ground.
Well presumably there are a finite number of souls since the celestial powers that be fight over them and there is not much point in fighting over an infinite resource in a domain that is outside of our sense of time.
Which would mean that as earth time goes on the population would be more and more those that commit suicide. Introverts and depressed people. Might explain some of the data we are seeing.
I mean yes, but it wouldn’t explain population growth
100 billion humans have lived so far. Maybe the souls got sent into storage?
“Shit this one was so lonely it killed itself early”
“Hey I got an idea let’s keep it away until there are a lot more people around. That way it won’t be so lonely. It will have some friends”
In a long enough timeline the world will have a 10s of billions of people with an average density of Hong Kong full of the most introverted depressed humans of all time. On the bright side those humans won’t fear hell
That depends on how time works. Could be a single soul/consciousness experiencing every single life one after another (or simultaneously; who knows what we’re capable of if there’s more to us than just these bodies).
As an introvert, I’ve never felt like my own suicide would solve any problems.
I wasn’t trying to talk smack about you or people like you. I was referencing the correlation between people with big social circles having a lower rate compared to people who do not.
And yet I get it. I would rather have 5 or so people I would do anything for compared to 50 people who sorta like me.
I wasn’t trying to talk smack about you or people like you.
I didn’t take it that way. Just wanted to stick my oar in. 😉
With no tutelage whatsoever
Wasn’t that the point of reincarnation in the first place? Like you keep dying until you hit Nirvana. And you fuck up badly you get bumped back to snail.
Okay but what if our souls only have a finite lifespan. You pull the reset trigger and gotta start all over, but now you only have 20 years left.
- Cool idea for a book or a movie
- Club 27 resolution
- Unreleased X-Files episode
- Stillbirth and early neonatal deaths theoretical explanation
pulls the trigger 20 more times
You okay buddy?
Ha! All good, thanks
I’m not sure I like the analogy here. Why would a teacher let a student retake a test they walked out on without finishing? It’s one thing to fail, and try again, but you have to complete the test first.
They’d be retaking the entire class by being reincarnated.
I feel like in this analogy, a near-death experience would be more like being given opportunity for a test retake.
They didn’t walk out. It’s just how they chose to complete the test. Nobody fails.
OP, why is suicide the only way to fail? Rape, murder, torture, those all receive passing scores?
Suicide is more like not turning up to the exam and taking it later.
