Does anyone here believe in reincarnation?

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That's great, I just don't believe that my vocabulary is the conversation stopper. I'm pretty sure I could say it in 3rd or 4th grade vocabulary and it wouldn't help much, it's much more likely the foreignness of the ideas themselves.

Are you committing to the belief in re-incarnation?...
Or are you simply advancing the principle of openmindedness?...

I think I have a solution, wonder if it will catch on and be included in a dictionary...

Futh - An event that did occur but cannot be confirmed.
"You don't know what the futh is because you weren't there"

Okay, so there is some confusion I can clear up.

My first post when I mentioned something you had said, about aspies having special interests that they'd become super-proficient in and then have little interest or proficiency on plenty of other topics - that was what I was bringing up, and just riffing on it with some of my own observations along that line.

I think where I may have seemed to get disagreeable is when you asked:


A lot of people ask questions like 'are you an atheist or a theist?' or things along that line to pigeonhole a person and their position. One of the first things I said in this thread is yes - I do believe there's sufficient evidence that its a real thing. I also agreed with much of the pessimism offered in the thread earlier - ie. that reincarnation in a lot of obvious ways sucks, that it's not a very good wish fulfillment vehicle unless a person really hasn't thought through what kind of world we live in and how little things are likely to change between now and the next time they drop in.

To maybe give some short and prefabbed statement - I'm an existentialist (probably not quite a nihilist but I'm sympathetic to life seeming bad enough to justify it) and similarly I'm not a reductive materialist and I have had enough 'supernatural' experience that - for my own life - it would take more credulity to weave together a reductive materialist explanation of much of what I've seen, what has happened to me, or what's dropped in to visit me occasionally. I do practice ceremonial magic at the points of my life where it seems appropriate, I've studied with a couple fraternal mystic orders for about five years (took a year break for work recently), and I did spend about three or four years trying to hone in on the best writers and thinkers on the topic and reading as much content as I could so I've spent enough time with the subject where I feel like I've been able to cut away a lot of the BS, see what's underneath it, and I'm also very interested in tying the existence of such things back to the world we experience and trying to make sense of how it all lines up and what it is we can do with it that betters our lives.

As far as advancing open-mindedness, that has a time and a place when people haven't figured out how to politely disagree, just that this isn't what I was doing. It's one thing to say 'You have no evidence, I have no evidence, you believe x, I believe y - lets just admit that we think differently' and sometimes you need to do that. I'm coming from a place where I don't get any impression that most of the people who interpret everything but reductive materialism as inferior, wrong, superstitious, backward-thinking, etc. have really spent time to familiarize themselves with the evidence to the contrary. I'm at least glad I haven't heard the 'prove it!' request in a long time because there's no sincerity to it, any attempt to 'prove it' just meets dismissals (no sign that whatever evidence was given even got looked at), if you bring up one study or one bit of science it's 'just one thing' in favor, you could bring up several things and the conversation will probably just end rather than progress, the plural of anecdote is not evidence and yet there's no quantity limit of what counts as anecdote (tens of thousands or even millions is still that), so in a lot of ways it seems like a willful impasse. It almost seems like the tactic a person would use whose worldview is on the edge of breaking down and they're still stuck in denial or 'circle the wagons' mode.

I'd add as well - I'm not out to force people to be intellectually honest, I can't, I would at least love to engage with people who want to try their hand at such but at the same time I'm equally too pessimistic about human nature (especially for what I've seen online in the last 20 years I've been on, looking at what's real in the news politically, etc.) to believe that it's possible for good arguments to make much of a dent. I think Sam Harris might be coming to realize this to some extent, ie. that Sam Harris is helpless to resist a good argument but that's just him - most people are made of sturdier stuff when it comes to picking and choosing what evidence they'll listen to. If there are people who want to think critically about these things I'd love to talk to them, I also try to offer - when I write about these things - the best lead by example of how you can accept them to various degrees and still think critically/skeptically about their content.

That said - I have to wonder sometimes if it's possible that I just have no clue how much I'm asking of people with that. It could be that I'm asking the impossible, that I am something of an intellectual freak and that almost anything I will say would just cause more confusion rather than any recognition (it would be bizarre for me to be alone in being able to think about these things in certain ways but not impossible). I notice I tend not to get much feedback so I can't tell what effect it has. Regardless though I'd also rather test the concepts that I work with, see what kinds of high quality criticism they get, and to the extent that they've stood the test of time and scrutiny I like to share my ideas because if almost no one else is saying these things, and if true they seem deeply salient/important, then I can't think of a particularly good reason not to talk about them.

Life is what you make it.

I don't believe there is such thing as "self-actualization." I believe we can come close, though.

People who believe in self-actualization, taking the initiative, and relying on personal merit rather than "luck" tend to believe this.

I'm still waiting for someone whom I knew before they died to walk up to me in their newly-incarnated human identity and tell me something that only the two of us would know. Then I will believe wholeheartedly in reincarnation.

Until then, to me it is just a barely-testable hypothesis at best.

I'm still waiting for someone whom I knew before they died to walk up to me in their newly-incarnated human identity and tell me something that only the two of us would know. Then I will believe wholeheartedly in reincarnation.

I don't believe there is such thing as "self-actualization." I believe we can come close, though.

I believe in personal initiative, and "relying on merit"---but, all too often, I'm too lazy to take the initiative, or to do something meritorious.

I firmly believe that life is "what you make it."

You're setting the bar way too low. Buddha should have to come visit you in your bedroom.

You're setting the bar way too low. Buddha should have to come visit you in your bedroom.