This might be an interesting topic, because many of the recent posts seem to want very much to change other people's beliefs.
Basically, when it comes to my beliefs about meditation and other spiritual subjects, I've watched those beliefs change and evolve over the years, and there seems to be a pattern to when they change and when they don't. Before I started TM, I probably believed that it was impossible for thought to stop. There had really never been a time, other than deep sleep, when my thoughts *did* stop. Therefore believing that they couldn't stop while awake made sense. Then came TM, and I found that thoughts indeed stopped, first for short periods of time, and then for longer and longer periods of time. And then an intellectual model was supplied to me for *how* they stopped. It was all because of the effortless, donchaknow. And that same intel- lectual model went further and said that effort- lessness was the ONLY way that thoughts could stop and transcendence occur. And, since the only thing I knew in terms of meditation was TM, I bought that one hook, line, and sinker, and believed it. And then I learned other forms of meditation, forms that were based on concentration. And what I found was that *contrary* to the TM dogma, thoughts stopped not only as often as they did in TM, they tended to stop more often, and for longer periods of time. So my belief about the nature of meditation changed, because my *experience* had changed. I could no longer pretend that the TM model was true, and had to find a more comprehensive model, one that had no problem with transcendence occurring as the result of *both* effort and effortlessness. But would my belief ever have changed if my exper- ience hadn't? To this day we see people here who have never experienced any other form of meditation than TM, and who will swear on a stack of bibles that the ONLY way to transcend is via effortlessness. That belief of theirs will probably *never* change, because their "experience pool" has never broadened and never will. I would suggest that a similar thing might be rele- vant to belief in reincarnation. For those who have no personal memories of past lives or of the Bardo between death and rebirth, belief in reincarnation is a Purely Intellectual Belief. It's just a theory. They may have an intuitive feel for the "correctness" or the "incorrectness" of the theory, but they don't have any *experience* with which to validate their belief or disbelief. I do. That experience may be, as Curtis and Stu have suggested, illusory. But it's *my* experience. Others can only speculate about it and come up with theories to either support my belief or theories to try to shoot down the belief and pooh-pooh it. But for me, a belief in reincarnation makes the most sense to me because it "covers the bases" of my many personal experiences over the years better than any other theory. None of the other "rational explanations" presented here, or that I have read elsewhere, deal with all of the things I have experienced as well and in as Occam's Razor a manner as reincarnation does. So until they do, I see no real need to change my belief that reincarnation might just be a real phenomenon. It's not as if this belief *affects* much in my life. I don't change anything I do or anything I don't do based on believing in reincarnation. And I don't even care much if it winds up not being true when I die. As I've said many times now, if that happens, I won't be there any more to be disappointed. I guess all I'm saying is that the fundamentalists who declare that only their theory is correct may simply not have had the breadth of experience that the people they consider fools have had. If I had not had the kinds of experiences I've had, a belief in reincarnation might be for me a Purely Intellectual Belief, the way it appears to be for them. But that's not the case. Reincarnation makes sense to me because it is consistent with experiences that long predated ever hearing about it as a theory.
