I evolved from no claim at all, as before scientology I did not believe
> in reincarnation, to a strong claim when I began running past lives in
> Scientology, then to a weak claim when I found myself with conflicting
> past identities which made me realize that past life recall was not
> reliable and did not prove anything (for example I have two different
> versions of my last death: one killed at war by a gun, another one
> killed when my plane crashed at sea.)

     1.) If you limit yourself to linear lifetimes on this Earth,
like died in 1945 WW II, you will probably go wrong.  There are many
millions of parallel and not so parallel universes to get born into,
in many different time spans.

     Living a last life on Earth is possible but indicates high
introversion.

     2) The key is recognition.  Clarity, intensity, detail in the
memory are not clues of ownership, only recognition.  You have LOTS of
memories to get lost in, some implanted, some borrowed, some stolen, a
zillion zillion BT memories, only those that are yours will you
absolutely recognize as yours.

     A good way to tell for example is you have a memory of a
building, ask yourself what is behind the building.  If you don't
know, then its probably not your memory.  If you know behind the
building, in the basement, all around the building, 12 blocks away
etc, then the picture is probably yours.

> So I am currently an adept of the weaker claim, as I have arguments
> from both sides. For example our apparent dependency upon a brain seems
> to invalidate our existence as souls separated from the body, but
> millions of past life stories floating around seem to validate the
> claim of reincarnation.

     Shows a lack of confront of the thetan's desire to BE mortal,
and to thus become something that is.

     It is an unfathomable degradation until one finally spans it.

     If you are being a body, not just in a body, but BEING a body,
then all you will be able to be do or have is body things, including
body memories.  And as the body's brain dies, so will you, until
you exteriorize.

>
> > At the same time, it has none of the philosophical drawbacks:
> > 1) the problem of whether there are individual souls as opposed to
> > no souls at all or a universal soul instead,
> > 2) the problem of whether, if there are individual souls, they
> > reincarnate in the same way that the stronger claim asserts,
>
> In fact the main question seems to be more: what is a soul exactly? Do
> souls exist?

    Does anything exist?  If so, what is it that knows this with
certainty?

    What doubts that it doubts?

    That is the soul.  The awareness OF AWARENESS unit.


> It depends upon the definition of the soul. If I say that the soul is
> the support of this feeling to be and to exist, and is the support of
> my concepts and ideas, yes I am a soul certainly. Because I know that I
> exist, I have ideas and concepts.

     That which knows it exists is the soul.  You are doing better
than most on Earth at this time.

>
> But what is not demonstrated is whether the soul could exist without a
> supporting body. That would be the main question in fact.

    You have a problem that results from not having cleared
out your false 'certainties'.  As long as you continue to believe
in false certainties, true certainties can not be perceived.

    You want to know if the soul can live with out a body, but
what evidence to you have that the body exists and is not a dream?

    I would spend a LOT of time going over that evidence until you see you
have none, and once you reach the 50/50 mark that the external universe
may or may not be a dream, you will be open enough to start having some
serious divine ascension experiences. The slightest false certainty
however, such as the PU exists as other than dream, and they will hold you
below the 50/50 mark, and the asenscion experiences will not come to you.

>
> Now my ideas and concepts, once expressed in the physical universe,
> reach some kind of immortality, as they can be still in existence
> beyond the death of my body. To this degree ideas are a static,
> according to the definition of a static in Scientology: they don't
> depend upon a particular time or upon a dedicated physical support.
> They can also reside in the mind (or souls?) of another people.
>
> That would be a "weak definition" of soul, not so strong as the
> classical definition of spiritual substance, but with a higher level of
> certainty, a definition materialistic people could agree with.
>
> But another important question is whether an individual soul can exist
> alone.
>
> As an analogy, consider the example of the body: evidently an
> individual body cannot exist alone. It is but a link in a long chain or
> protoplasm. We cannot consider our own body without considering that it
> was manufactured by other bodies, that as babies we were unable to
> survive if not fed by our parents. So an individual body cannot exist
> alone, so when we study a body we have to study mankind as a whole,
> otherwise we study something which cannot exist.
>
> It seems that something similar occurs on the spiritual level. If I am
> trying to exist as a pure individual (for example a pure OT), I would
> have to remove everything coming from others: I have to remove
> language, knowledge, the product of interactions with others,
> eventually there would be almost nothing left.
>
> So it seems that on the spiritual level too, we cannot exist alone. We
> are part of a whole collaborative network.
>
> So is-it really possible to consider that a soul can exist alone, as
> when we try to become pure individual souls the end product would be
> but an idiot?
>
> Of course we could dream of some upper state where we know everything
> without having to learn it. But if so, this means that we know
> perfectly every other soul around. A perfect duplication of other
> beings would mean BE these other beings around.
>
> So that is my current dominant hypothesis, that if souls exist beyond
> the death of the body, they form a continuum where every soul is
> pervading every other soul, as that is already the case in our current
> condition, where every idea is pervading the whole mankind, and that is
> more and more true as there are more and more instantaneous
> communication lines such as the internet and the telephone.
>
> It has to be noted that this impulse to pervade is very strong in many
> people. For example there are currently millions or illegal copies of
> songs and pieces of software, from persons who are normally quite
> honest and ethical, but who seem to consider that they have a natural
> right to pervade and to copy. That is maybe the worldly manifestation
> of deeper laws on the spiritual level.
>
> Best,
> --
> Curiosus
> http://www.geocities.com/curiosus_2005
>

Sun Jun 18 00:29:14 EDT 2006