Immanus:
As Lal keeps on repeating, going deep into these things is not profitable in itself. It is like trying to get all the details about the destination and to not set out on the journey. If you want to attain a deva bhava or a brahma bhava or Nibbana itself, then set out on the Path, even if you have only a glimpse of the destination. That will be enough. Kamma (PS)will see to it anyway.
It is alright to have an idea of other realms (if it were otherewise the Buddha would have made no reference to them; indeed, the workings of kamma necessitate their existence).
- ‘For a being born spontaneously, how do they conceptualize mother and father? Are there any equivalents to mother and father with opapatika births?’ –
From an early age I used to think that there must be some ‘place’ or ‘world’ where offspring are ‘born’ by methods other than by such coarse and messy ones like sexual intercourse.I had this idea that the combined ‘will’ of a couple at once brings about an offspring, you could say, as if by magic, and that the ‘charachter’ of the new-arrival is in essence the combined qualities of the’couple’, who ‘attract’ the newly-‘born’ by the intensity of the harmony with one another.
So from the very start the notion of opapatika birth did not in the least stike me as an ‘alien’ one when I first came across it in Buddhadhamma. I am not saying that the conditions there are like I imagined them – not in the least. It is just that I now realize that there could be more to it than ‘just my imagination’ – which, especially in the West, stands almost always for unreality and illusion.
y not