buddhism and confederation: karma, samsara and reincarnation

[flofrog]

here's an example of how karma works according to buddhist point if view.

it is a story about Sariputra, who saw a layman sitting in front of his house, eating a fish from the pond behind the house, holding his son in his lap. the dog was eating the fishbones and the man kicks the dog. with his clairvoyance Sariputra saw the law of karma in action so he comments:

“He eats his father’s flesh and kicks his mother away,
The enemy he killed he dandles on his lap,
The wife is gnawing at her husband’s bones,
Samsara can be such a farce.“

this is an example of how we stray away by karma.
our attachments, aversions, ignorance, biases and predispositions, positive or negative deeds all take part in molding our karma and, eventually, determine our next reborn, which can be anywhere in samsara. if we made lots of evil deeds then we gonna be reborn in hell realms, if we make lots of good ones then we will go in gods realm. the idea in buddhism is: 1. to realize true nature of things so you exhaust karma and no longer reborn meaninglessly and endlessly in samsara and 2. to use this realization in helping others out of samsara. in Tibetan buddhism they make boddhisattva vow - that is that you'll stay in samsara as long as it takes to liberate all sentient beings. to me this is obviously service-to-others path.

in regard that buddhism doesn't really recognize the soul that’s not the case from what i understand. what they say is our true self is not our ego. ego dies. our true self does not and it is our true self what reincarnates. the problem is that we doesn’t recognize our true self mistakenly thinking that it is our ego, our personality. Hatonn put it very clearly as well: “personality is an illusory self”. Tibetan master of meditation can say: “because i no longer am, i am everybody, i am everything”.

Thank you flow, so interesting.

So this is how I perceive the realms and Samsara, and again it’s my own personal perception. I see the realms as more of an allegory, and Samsara as a process of evolution. For example in one day we might visit the realms of the gods by choosing an act of abnegation, devotion to the plea of another entity while later in the day visiting the realm of hell if feeling a strong sense of jealousy or greed towards another being.

I totally agree with you about the STO of boddhisatvas who choose to be reborn to help. So I feel that in many ways there are strong parallels between Buddhism and the Ra material., but I think that definitions of words have to be precise, and we know how our language can be sometimes lacking in vocabulary as Don often regretted !! lol

I love Buddhism for its four noble truths and the eightfold path. I meditated for many years with a small group led by a Buddhist monk once a week and he would give us a Buddhist text for the following week to study and discuss before we would meditate, it was very instructive, and often quite hilarious. I stopped after close to ten years because I wanted to study Yogananda. I also stepped a bit aside because Buddhism considers humans as the only sentient beings, and... lol . I don’t I cinsider animals, trees, plants as sentient beings too ! But that is a very personal thing.

Also to me, the rebirth process in Buddhism seems more impersonal.

For many personal recasons too I am very moved by Ra, and by the dialogues of Aaron/Q’uo.

I wish you the best for your research which is very interesting