lorenzop wrote: ↑Sun Dec 17, 2023 10:13 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Dec 17, 2023 5:12 pm
Alright, so at least you are saying here the knowledge that a
future ticket will be written for your car at an expired meter influences your current decision of where and how to park. Due to
thinking experience, you can anticipate diverse intentional influences - such as the legislators who made the parking laws, the meter maid who administers the laws, the people who constructed the meter to accept money in a certain way, etc. - which structure the consequences for your present action of 'parking the car', and modify your action in the here-and-now accordingly. Of course, you don't think through all those influences every time you park, but condense them all into a useful idea like 'the parking meter expiring gets me a ticket'. That condensed idea only bears
meaning for you, however, in relation to the whole spectrum of influences you learned through experience. The same exact principle could be applied to the 'value of education' and 'smoking and eating sugar is bad for my health'.
Now what if the diverse influences that structure the consequences of your actions are not only limited to the sphere of nature and culture during life on Earth, but are also present across the threshold of death (karma)? What if the natural and cultural laws that modulate your actions during life are
reflections of the karmic laws across the threshold of death? This is naturally the only possibility for a monist idealism, but you don't even have to believe it's true. It's enough to see that, IF it is true, then remaining ignorant of the karmic laws that are fashioned after death (between incarnations) will greatly limit your potential for free, informed, and healthy actions during life. We could be right this moment inhaling polluted air and ingesting toxic substances from the soul-spirit environment that becomes our more exclusive dwelling after death, none the wiser.
That is the value of learning the lawful and continuous structure of our incarnational rhythms, not to mention how this knowledge can help us harmonize our activities with the karmic flows of our fellow beings so we are not constantly at each other's throats. It is
not about accumulating isolated factoids about past lives out of sheer curiosity - we only feel it is so because we are so used to doing that in our normal life, or failing to think through
how we arrived at our idea of 'ticket for expired parking meter', that we can hardly imagine a different sort of pragmatic, holistic knowledge.
I'm not disagreeing with you - especially with your use of conditionals (your ifs). I've been suggesting similar thoughts.
We can go on and on about IF this is true, IF that is true, etc.
A practical individual, for example one engaged in service, meditation, devotion to Christ, etc; a practical individual would have to think 2x before spending time in an endeavor with low chance of success - if success is even possible.
Did Christ mention anything about the value of learning about past\future lives? Did Buddha? No, it's a wasteful use of time.
Ok, but the idea that 'we can go on and on about the IF', 'low chance of success if success is even possible', once again asserts that the IF is
unknowable. You say it is "knowable" but when we dig deeper, "knowable" for you means what Cleric indicated, "I can speculate and play it safe with the mental pictures in my head, but anything beyond that is impossible". The way we use 'knowable' is like the fact that you know every time you go to sleep you will wake up the next day (barring very unlikely circumstances), and what you did the day before will have some lawful effect on your experiences the next day. Where you placed the items in your house the day before will govern where they are found the next day, or the actions you took towards other people will feed back into how they act toward you in the following days.
Imagine you go up to some kid and tell him, "smoking and eating candy is unhealthy, this can be known from experience." The kid responds, "sure I can take your word for it and act as if it is unhealthy, but these are just mental pictures in my head... whether smoking and eating candy is unhealthy will always remain a big IF that I can choose to heed or not, but experience will never lead me to any inner certainty on this issue. When I am really stressed out and my friends offer me a pack of smokes, I will just be
practical and do what brings me relief at the time." In that case, you would rightly conclude the kid simply doesn't understand that certain things are knowable once we put time and effort into learning them and that our whole idea of what is 'practical' changes as we become better informed adults, with more expansive view of the interconnections between inner states and outer consequences.
On the question of the Christ and Buddha, I would offer the below. I don't want to get distracted into what the great teachers
said we should do, because the modern path is about
knowing what we can and should do independently of any teachers. Even the great teachings only remain as mental pictures unless we can find the corresponding inner realities within ourselves. It is also interesting that Christ didn't mention anything about
not learning the karmic laws that extend across incarnations. You would think a great Master would have something to say about that if he wanted his disciples for millennia to come to know "it's a wasteful use of time".
The prince sat in meditation through the night. During the first watch of the night, he had a vision of all of his past lives, recollecting his place of birth, name, caste, and even the food he had eaten. During the second watch of the night, he saw how beings rise and fall through the cycle of rebirth as a consequence of their past deeds. In the third watch of the night, the hours before dawn, he was liberated. Accounts differ as to precisely what it was that he understood. According to some versions it was the four truths: of suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the path to the cessation of suffering. According to others it was the sequence of dependent origination: how ignorance leads to action and eventually to birth, aging, and death, and how when ignorance is destroyed, so also are birth, aging, and death. Regardless of their differences, all accounts agree that on this night he became a buddha, an awakened one who had roused himself from the slumber of ignorance and extended his knowledge throughout the universe.
