Again, meditating on all the random people I see around me throughout a day and wondering what's their motivation. Why are they doing this? Why do they do what they do? And no matter what I can imagine, my own response is that I certainly do not want whatever they have. I don't want their motivation or reason why they strive for whatever they do. I don't want to be them.
I don't want to leave a body. I don't want to leave a body that someone, I don't know who, might be asked to come identify. I don't want to leave any physical evidence of my gross bodily existence. I don't want any identification with a body suggesting that was me, when it certainly wasn't. Whatever physical remains I may leave wasn't me nor anything anyone should identify as me. I desperately do not want to leave a body.
While I was in the U.S., I read the book Old Souls: Compelling Evidence From Children Who Remember Their Past Lives. I wish the author used the word "testimony" in the title instead of "evidence". As testimony, it is compelling. As evidence, it's easy or possible to discount. It doesn't prove anything. The author of the book is a journalist who accompanies a professor, whose main body of work is focused on gathering testimony of children who claim they remember their previous life, on what may be his final rounds of gathering such testimony.
The approach is as scientific as it gets for the topic, with numerous checks to weed out "tainted" testimony. The criteria for credibility is pretty strict, and that's what makes the testimony compelling. If there's a risk of susceptibility to suggestion in a case, it's not given much weight. That goes to my criticism of the film Unmistaken Child, where it's shown that a child remembers his past life as a high ranking lama, but it's not discounted that the memories were suggested by the people around him. In fact, as Tibetan literature is replete with cases of past life remembrances, I liked that this book doesn't even have a hint of mention of Tibet. It's such a part of Tibetan culture that it is all suspect and not even worth mentioning. That's how strict the criteria are in this book.
I liked that there is consistency in the cases: all of the children's testimonies recall a violent or unnatural death. To me, that suggests that if an experience is traumatic enough, the psychic or karmic imprint can survive the destruction of one physical construct of a person and can carry over despite a new physical brain constructed in another body.
The theory might go that we generally don't remember past lives because the information is lost with the dissolution of: first, our physical bodies and brains at the death of our physical selves; and then second, our consciousness, our true selves, our enlightened selves, our selves that is the basic energy of the universe from whence we come, which generally is not part of the software that is naturally installed when sperm hits egg and a new biological being is created with a completely new brain architecture.
Actual memories are all erased. What generally does carry over is karma – the deep-seated, ingrained habits and personality of what we've done and who we were that characterized our behavior and being. But we generally can't attribute those things to anything in our new life (unless we consider reincarnation). It's just who we are, but it's still pretty plastic and can be countered by our new environment and personality.
What this book suggests is that a violent death, or a death with a heavy impression, can carry over more readily because of that severe, psychic imprint. You tend to remember the shit that happens to you in death as well as life. In general, perhaps suicides also fall into this category. Suicides are often accompanied by tragic circumstances or extreme negative emotions. Hm. I don't remember any of the cases in the book as being suicides, but that's not fatal. There are any number of reasons on this slippery topic why suicides weren't part of the sample.
If I commit suicide, it won't be tragic and I hope to have tamed my negativity. If I commit suicide, I imagine euphoria. The idea of dying still makes me happy in a way that I can't explain.
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