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Mahendran:
As I see, a ghandhabba would enter if that material form is useful to it. Makes no difference. Same case with human or other IVF-fertilized embryos.
More importantly, you distinguish between a gandhabba and a living being, as a gandhabba enters into (an already- existing) being – which is and has been my core question: namely, what is the ultimate, non-divisible nature of a being?- that which persists throughout timeless samsara, IS now in a human gandhabba or in a being in a deva or brahma realm, and will be the essence of the ‘one’ who finally attains Nibbana? It must be necessarily one and the same , though ‘ ever-changing’in gathi or charachter, but this is only its changing personality, so to speak; the individuality, an identity, is persistent throughout, otherwise there will no connection between the one who suffers, the one who strives and the one who attains. In short, we are concerned with the ULTIMATE nature of a being. Does a being issue out of Being or Be-ness?
If beings, in their individual essence, have no beginning (as per Buddhadhamma) then not even Being or Be-ness need exist (as their source) !! This makes matters simpler. In Mahāyāna it is called the Alayavijnana, the storehouse of (primordial and UNdifferentiated) consciousness, or the repository of consciousness, out of which issue forth individual sparks, as it were, of seperate units of it which accumulate ‘charachter’ for themselves shaping their individuality, and at the same time rendering that Alayavijnana itself increasingly self-conscious.
I have had no satisfactory answer to this yet – and I have been through Vedanta, Theosophy, the Gita , the Upanishads, several so-called modern masters, and now Buddhadhamma. I can go into all that here, but I will not as that will only bring up more questions.
y not
Hello Lal:
Thanks for your reply.
This question, along with some others, arise out of inconsistency of the words and terms applied to convey an idea, or the loose or vague use of them – the ‘sweep’ is too wide.
Your #3 has the whole in true perspective, and is as much I can make out myself. But you will recall that in the gandhabba posts it is stated, and more than once, quite simply that the gandhabba exits only in human and animal realm, which statement, taking the gandhabba (again in #3) ‘So, they (Brahmas) have ONLY their gandhabba;’is not consistent. And statements like (again in #3) ‘So, they have ONLY their gandhabba; no other physical body. Yet they can see and listen’ imply that they ARE NOT the gandhabba in actual fact’ THEY only have it; like when I say ‘I have skin, bones, head, arms’ implies, correctly, that I AM not those, I only have them. As stated, it means: They (whatever they may ultimately consist of) HAVE their gandhabba! Why not say flatly ‘ So, they ‘ARE’ ONLY their gandhabba’ rather than ‘have?
This is where language may create difficulties when one goes deep into the details. Or is that ‘too deep’? I remember my parents and elders ‘correcting’ me saying ‘Oh, you are too complicated. Keep things simple. I do not know. It is so ‘ whenever I asked existential or philosophical questions.
y not
Embodied!
‘– What I’m trying to convey that this actual body is but temporarily such “YOU”.’
Yes indeed, we are agreed on that.I expanded on your.. ‘ i’m a gandhabba that is using this very body to type’,saying that you cannot be ONLY the gandhabba, for that will not be there when you are in the higher realms.
Do you get me now, or would it be I who is not getting you? !!!
Embodied:
Is there then no ‘gathi or asava’ in the 29 realms other than the human and animal ones? – for in those 29 realms there is no gandhabba. So the gandhabba can only ‘incorporate’ ,as it were, the gathi and asava when
‘one’ (whatever constitutes that, gathi/asava or some other’identity’,or gathi/asava in addition to some other identity)is in the human(or animal) realm.
Who or what will you be then once in the deva or brahma realms?? Something that is present in you now will have to be present there, for otherwise there is no continuity.I had written a post to some lenght about the self/no-self topic, but I am unable to locate it for your reference.
y not
Donna:
These are the instructions. I am in no doubt that you cannot find
better ones.…especially at the very start ‘ Get into a calm and stable mindset’.
Question is: are you able to do it? I am saying this not to discourage you in any way. I hope you do, I hope all do. It is only that on one occassion in particular in my life when I just had to get soemthing across to somebody I felt I should NOT go ahead and do so, yet something was pushing me irresistibly, even against my will, to go ahead. I was being pulled in two opposite directions, and I felt that I would not be able to calm down UNLESS I went ahead. All the while I was trembling. Honest. A ‘calm and stable mindset’ was light millenia away.So we all are here to learn and I may not be that much of ‘a positive role model’- in this case at least. That is however my experience, and I though that I should share it.
y not
Indeed, what IS a ‘person’ ? It changes all the time, not only during a lifetime but during the course of innumerable lifetimes – so much is clear.
Now, a ‘person’, an ever-changing ‘person’ is in samsara from beginingless time, that is to say, there never was a time when the person was not. I use the word ‘person’to adhere to the title of the topic under discussion-it may be called an entity, an individuality, a being, a self, a Self, a lifestream – the ‘world’ has chosen the word ‘self’to denote it, but it does not matter.
Let us now substitute this word’ person’ with the word ‘I’. ‘I’ have been in samsara from beginingless time; that is, something in me or around me or in some way connected with me has withstood and survived all the changes during that time to find I-self here and now typing a post about I-self. This I-self is now striving to rid I-self forever of suffering by attaining release, Nibbana ,forever after. I-self stands now mid-way in Eternity with beginningless samasara in the past, the attainment of Nibbana being the mid-point, and endless time in Nibbana afterwards. Granted that there is constant change in a being, still how then is eternal existence denied to a being? Is not this I-self who has been so long in samsara the same I-self who is now striving to get out of it and who will in time be out of it forever if he succeeeds?
One thing we can admit straightaway: there is eternality as far as at least the past is concerned. The very idea of ‘eternality in the past’ should not be a cause for amazement at all, for we are used to it when we conceive of cardinal numbers as infinite. We start off with the number 1, so we do have a beginning but no end – this is ‘infinity in the future’ or ‘eternality in the future’ The terms infinity and eternity , that is begininglessness and endlessness in space and in time are to me one concept. If we now conceive of the series of numbers starting with -1, -2 etc, then too we have infinity, this time extending the imaginaty series of numbers infinitely backwards from 0. It is the same. This would then illustrate our time in samsara.
The reason why ‘there is no discernible beginning to life’, why
‘living beings have gone through innumerable birth-rebirth processes without a conceivable beginning’ is that if it were otherwise then existence would have had to arise out of non-existence, Being from non-Being. And non-existence itself does not exist. It is only a concept. Only existence exists. And because Beings cannot have come into existence at any point in time, then Time itself cannot have had a beginning. In fact this was the first ‘fact of existence’ that I remember contemplating when I was still a boy, that and the Infinity of Space, and what MUST follow from those two concepts taken as one – the criterion by which I judge the validity of a theory or concept. Anything inconsistent with it can only be partially or temporarily true.hello Donna!
I do not give much for these videos on social media. I did try to listen to some lenght, but could not: the first thing I ask myself before anybody even starts talking is: why is this person taking the time to say all this? To what purpose? What is his/her first or true objective? You will find that 99,99% of the time the motive is selfish; it is either money or fame or both, if not totally then partly, or better still, to a large extent. I am particularly on my guard when any of what I call the 3 P’s have something to say; politicians, priests and professional people.
Like most others I have had my share of the treatment you are getting, so I understand and sympathize with you. I am past working age now but will tell you how I used to go about it. First of all I always felt that you cannot change people just like that; second, that I never ‘return in kind’ that which I know is wrong to do or say. (‘If they are like that, well, I won’t allow MYSELF to be like that’ attitude) Particularly if you are a quiet person, speak only when it is necessary to do so, get about your work as best you can without bothering about what others are doing, people tend to think you are easy prey because they know you are not the kind of person to hit back. And they are right! So equanimity is the word. Yes, you need inner strenght. You know that it will not last anyway..AND there must be a reason unknown to them and to yourself too why they are acting like that.
…. ‘but am I wasting my time trying to change others? Should I just find a new job? And has anyone found a moral place to work?’ My answers are: yes, I don’t know, no. 1) Others will change, if they do, in their own time, through their own experiences, not when you want them to.2) I do not know whether you should change your job because 3) a place to work will be in the same world, in the mostly immoral world. I ,for one, had not found a moral place to work.
Wait and see what others have to say on here. There are a few in this immoral world who speak and act without any personal motive whatsoever. They are few- and you are in the right place.y not
Hello Inflib:
Thank you for your comments. I am not on facebook. I have internet and a mobile only because they have become absolutely necessary.
I have always sensed that the best approach is to steer clear of anything to do with the occult, even in the remotest sense of the word.I remember reading H.P Blavatsky’s words in this regard: ‘Once the door is open, it is open to all,and one never knows who will be the next to enter.( Madame Blavatsky was a late 19th century Thesophist who had been trained by ‘Masters’ in Tibet). Of course, Lal has expounded it in the light of Buddhadhamma.
So let us be grateful and more than grateful that the Teaching has been made available to us.y not
Lal:
By ‘This world of 31 realms is very complex. While most of us are not exposed to beings in other realms, there are some who can communicate with beings in other realms’ I understand that by ‘world’ you mean, in line with Buddhadhamma, this Universe or any other, not merely this planet Earth.
I asked Inflib those questions as I too have had experiences that MAY have involved ‘other beings’ , though nothing of a malevolent nature at all, or they could have been just intuition – though the nature and source of THAT is not known to me with any degree of certainty.
On three seperate instances I had forseen events that occured within days, and the details tallied so pefectly that chance is totally out of the question.What was most remarkable about this was the TOTAL CONVICTION that things would turn out exactly as I had forseen, as if those events had already taken place. In the first two cases I was fully awake; in the third I was mid-way between the waking and the sleeping state.
Another unrelated instance was when I was about to wake up; mentally I was ‘here’, I had come back, but noticed that my body had been taken over by someone else.I felt bewildered for some time. When I had the determination, by authority, so to speak, and asserted forecfully: ‘that is MY body’, I slipped in and opened my eyes.I sensed myself actually slipping in.
In all of this no other visible or audible being was involved. Some may have had similar experiences.
The one case where I was truly baffled was when I walked into this bar. I was about 25 and still drank then. A man of Middle-Eastern origin was reading the palms of the customers there. He was relating them their past with many details .Nothing about the future. Since I was the stranger there, I waited until all were done, then I asked the palmist to read my hand. He had a look at my hand and put it down after only two or three seconds. I asked: ‘well?’. He just shook his head. What he ‘saw’I do not know, or perhaps he had had enough of it by that time !Hello Infilb:
What beings? Do you know that? From another dimension of this, ,or from another planet? Goes too for the ‘beings with good intentions’
y not
Tobias G:
Rephrasing: A was hurt by B in some past life; now A hurts B; in some future life it will be B’s turn to hurt A. Will it ever stop? ….other
than through: “hate does not cease by hate at any time; hate ceases only by love”, bringing to naught both both kamma vipaka and kamma beeja.And
how did the hate arise in the first place, without a cause for it?Hi Johnny_Lim:
Very relevant Lal’s: “But it depends on whether one has done those investigations in past lives” Some things are easy to grasp not by
sheer coincidence, nor even because of intelligence, however phenomenal. Since my teenage years I remember ‘ticking mental boxes’ whenever I came across words like rebirth, reincarnation, past lives, sentient life on other planets, extraterrstrials ,the necessity that effects must follow causes even in the moral or ethical sense, not just in the material world around us. There was no need to reason out anything at all, just the KNOWING : yes, it IS so.
Here on Puredhamma I am getting more of it.y not
