What if "Karma" and "Reincarnation" actually works backwards

What if "Karma" and "Reincarnation" actually works backwards from the traditional idea that good deeds and good life choices bring about a better next life?

What if instead the point of "Karma" and "Reincarnation" is to subject a soul to an ever increasing set of challenges. Like a cosmetic version of a 1980s video game; if you find a way to master this level you will find the next level to be even harder.

When a soul first starts out its journey its treated to an easy life full of resources and wealth; And as the soul progress its skills it's treated to more and more hardship in order to test and push the soul to become more versatile and strong.

The soul inhibiting Jeff Bezos' body is but a infinite and could never withstand a life in inner-city squalor.

Not until the soul has learned to endure the greatest hardships this plane of existence can create does it then move to the next.

a reply to: dandandat2

I think reincarnation is like a star. Our souls are supposedly made out of them from evilution. Religion bases right or wrong off the prospect of natures basic instinct.Science deems right from conclusions.

We can text on here. Is that not another immature form of life?

a reply to: dandandat2

If true, this level is damn impossible... I think I've respawned in this one hundreds of times.

a reply to: dandandat2

Interesting thoughts Dan. So are you suggesting that each life is a progression towards some escape hatch? Not that a good life lived means an easier life in the next incarnation but rather that there is some form of progression that each life steps toward? A life that stumbles does not revert to a previous level but rather has the challange you mention just repeated in the next life until that challange is achived and then on to the next and the next and the next?

a reply to: dandandat2

Interesting idea.

Are you familiar with the 12 houses in astrology?

The basic idea is that the first house is the least evolved and that the houses become more and more evolved the higher they go, more complicated, more challenging. The twelfth house is the most evolved house. Jesus being crucified is 12th house stuff.

Link for reference: The 12 houses

I don't know if that helps or not, lol. Just something about it seemed familiar.

a reply to: geezlouise

The basic idea is that the first house is the least evolved and that the houses become more and more evolved the higher they go, more complicated, more challenging.

The Zodiac is circular. No house is higher than any other.

It's also bunk.

a reply to: dandandat2


Yeah. What if? So what?

Game over. Dude. Unless you have a pocket full of quarters.

a reply to: Phage

It's like a cycle yeah, not unlike an ouroboros.

The first house is self, newborn, new beginning. "The second house is the house of all things tangible, your five senses and basic sensory experiences." Introducing the idea of an external material world outside of your self. The third house is where we begin to move outside of ourselves just slight and interact with the people, places, and things that are all around us." Aka now the self tries to communicate/make a connection with that outside materialistic world. And so on and so forth. The last house is like an enlightened af self battling ones darkest demons and also being equipped with the ability to conquer them as well.

Just an idea.

a reply to: geezlouise

Maybe you should read your source a little more closely. There is no progression of any sort involved.

The cusp of your 10th house is located at the tippy-top of your chart

It's just astrology. It predicts you mood depending on where the planets are. And it's bunk.

a reply to: Phage

LOL. Why are you being so cute?



Nighty night now.

a reply to: Phage

This is how the Chinese Zodiac animals found their place.
www.bbc.co.uk...

Notice that the rat came first......by cheating.

Yes that makes very good sense. A saying... "'When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it.'". You wouldn't think a soul nearer the end of its journey would want to experience being rich.

My soul must be near Buddhahood if thats the case

originally posted by: TerryMcGuire
a reply to: dandandat2

Interesting thoughts Dan. So are you suggesting that each life is a progression towards some escape hatch? Not that a good life lived means an easier life in the next incarnation but rather that there is some form of progression that each life steps toward? A life that stumbles does not revert to a previous level but rather has the challange you mention just repeated in the next life until that challange is achived and then on to the next and the next and the next?

Yea, that is what I was trying to describe.

a reply to: dandandat2

Here is how I see it:

The Western mind, having been informed by Christianity, views the end goal as eternity in an I-Thou relationship. The ego(I) can exist as immortal.

The Eastern mind views annihilation of ego as the goal. No more self/ego/I.

If you take these extreme opposites and think to fuse them together, they cancel each other out. You are left with nothing.

So if we skip all that and go with

"You are you for as long as you are.
Then the end.
You have reached it.
The goal.
That's it.
You win."

then we can live today and plan for the future.



There's an old saying that I just made up:

I am not you
you are not me
but together
we

---
It sounds better out loud.

There's this song, one that I really like. The writer says that it is about the death of ideas.

a reply to: dandandat2
This is my absolute favourite discussion about 'reincarnation'.......

It states that before looking into re-incarnation......look to see what incarnation is first....

Do you know what is going on now?

a reply to: pthena
The separate I or ego is just an idea that has to die.

The ego can't be annihilated..........it never was.

Watch "Adi Da Samraj: “There Is No Self Within”, 1973" on YouTube
youtu.be...

a reply to: dandandat2

Not until the soul has learned to endure the greatest hardships this plane of existence can create does it then move to the next.

What if a soul needs to repeat a challenge, say, a dozen times, might we think that it has little to no memory of the eleven times is has not succeeded? Should this scenario be I think that it would not have that memory as we have only a few stories of people who claim to have those memories. See where I'm going with this ?

There are these stories if, how to put this, miracle kids who have proven knowledge of the life of some dead person for a few years until they themselves grow up. There are a few of those I have read. Likewise there are many examples of people who seem pulled to this or that that seems to express familiarity with some other life or time or place? Right? But mostly we live, and mostly here is ''way mostly'', without knowledge or even attraction to any other life than our present life.

This then would mean that for the vast majority of anyone's lives, make that ''everyone's'' lives we go though those lives unconscious of what is really happening to us. A baker a book salesman, a soldier, what ever , does those things we do and somehow, that challenge holds over from one life to the next until it is met. I think that coincides with what you are suggesting.

The next question I arrive at is the nature of these ''challenges''. Who or what sets them. Do you think they might be set by some kind of unconscious and automatic law or function of existence? Might they be conscious challenges established by a larger ''soul'' that is an accumulation of all those previous lives looking to continue on this path of progression.

This leads me to consider that maybe these challenges are not challenges so much as goals. These challenges or goals seem to be met for the most part unconsciously from this standpoint.

I think I might have gone on rambling here trying to get to a thought that has eluded me. Maybe next time.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

that has to die

And it will, never fear, when I die.

Some people do these daily simulations of death, they call it meditation, death of all ideation, the nothing which is left is "real". That's what they say.

But why? If a person has truly reached the nothing, there would be no thing to get up and do it again (I will link the song at the end).

I will remind you of what I wrote just two days shy of a full year ago. I have done the Moksha thing all ready for real. There is nothing to gain by repeating it. Click Here

And Now:

And when the morning light
Comes streaming in
You'll get up and do it again
Amen

but

Out into the cool of the evening
Strolls the Pretender
He knows that all his hopes and dreams
Begin and end there

I suppose in Bahkti-Yoga, the point is not so much to endure everything, but rather to get back into a state of consciousness where Krishna (or whatever tradition recognizes the Supreme Personality of Godhead) will accept us back in the Spiritual World.
(This can also include many other deities in various traditions, as long as one recognizes them as expansions, intermediaries or agents of the Supreme Lord).

Although some paths that teach everything here is suffering may be right, there are also many fleeting pleasures and attachments.
Krishna won't force us to be eternal servants in a place we don't want to be.
There is also liberation in impersonal paths, although apparently without developing intense love for Krishna, the danger is one may become bored and lured back to the material world(s).

And now we have the Kali-Yuga, where time appears speeded up, and older forms of meditation more difficult, although chanting Hare Krishna, or just listening to the chant are very simple recommendations for our age.

But eventually every material world must come to an end - and then, what of the souls still in existence here?
Apparently it kinda freezes until it's all re-created, and then the karma and reincarnation starts again where it left off.
In that sense the cycle, or wheel of karma (without a spiritual intervention) can carry on forever.
A wheel has no beginning or end.
Just going round and round.

(But luckily there is intervention, in the sense that in every age Godhead descends to bring us the truth, and I believe many sages and prophets who could have been liberated return by choice to teach us more, at great risk of suffering to themselves, because taking birth here means being immediately covered by "maya" or material delusions.)