--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <fintlewoodle...@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "seventhray1" <steve.sundur@> wrote: > > Instead what we get is the dogma that iron-age Indians believed > it so it's true, and worse, now it gets mixed up with victorian > parlour room seances. Can no-one else spot the contradiction? You > can't have life after death AND re-incarnation, otherwise you'd > be talking to someone who's just been born. It makes no sense.
While I agree most heartily with the rest of your coffee rant, the above is based on a misunderstanding of the notion of reincarnation and the supposed mechanics thereof. I don't think that any tradition on the planet that believes in reincarnation believes that it's "instantaneous," and that the death of one body is followed by immediate incarnation in another. There's a "gap," discussed at length in Tibetan traditions, called the Bardo, a kind of self-defined purgatory in which the soul-in-transit works through some of its own lingering issues prior to rebirth. In the Tibetan tradition, this Bardo period can take a lot longer than nine months to go on -- sometimes years. Also, there is no perceived problem with a being *in the Bardo* appearing to the living on some astral or astral-like plane -- as a ghost, disembodied voice, etc. I am *not* declaring these things true. I'm "doing a Judy" and pointing out that the declaration above is a bit of a straw man, in that it's refuting reincarnation using a definition of it that no believer in reincarnation would ever put forward.
