So just in regards to the question on non-self and reincarnation, there's a good book that is of interest in regards to this issue of non-self.
It's certainly not for a seven-year-old, but the Mahasi Sayadaw's book, Discourse on Non-Self.
And in there, he actually...
expands on what Paan Yenny said made me think of it because he says there's at least three types of self I think there may be more but I can remember three of them one is the self that as you say that is that controls the controlling self, the lord self this is samyatta and then there is the
the self that is permanent.
Some people postulate a self that controls.
Some people postulate a self that is permanent.
Some people postulate the self that experiences, as the one who experiences.
And I think there are other examples.
It's definitely a book worth reading and a little bit difficult and repetitive to go through because he's going through each aspect, but it's very much in line with the meditation practice.
Now I remember what I wanted to say about reincarnation.
Albert Einstein was once asked about the theory of relativity.
He became very famous for the theory of relativity, and apparently he was asked by an interviewer, by a reporter, to explain relativity in a few sentences.
And he looked at the guy and he said, you know,
Even if you had a solid grounding in theoretical physics, it would take me a couple of days to explain the theory of relativity to you.
And this is the profundity of his realization, that it's not something that an ordinary person can understand.
And we're so deeply grounded in delusions, really, from a physics point of view, in our biological and genetic
predisposition that we can't understand thing we're not programmed to understand reality so we can give a similar answer you know a seven-year-old it's very rare that would be very rare to find a seven-year-old who could have any idea
about reincarnation.
So it's not something that you ask.
The question was, can you please explain reincarnation like you're a seven-year-old?
If you're a seven-year-old, there's not much we could do to explain the workings of reality.
If you mean to give the simplest explanation of it possible, I can do that.
I'm not sure that it's going to help you.
And I think only intensive practice will help you to understand what I'm even talking about.
But it's that reality is what you're experiencing right now.
Reality is your seeing, your hearing, your smelling, your tasting, your feeling and thinking.
So ask yourself whether that's going to cease when you die.
And you should be able to see that that's an uncertainty.
You don't really know.
The best way to go about asking that question and investing in that question is first to give up all of your predisposed knowledge, all of your ideas about, you know, I saw that person die and therefore death is the end.
I saw that they're not thinking anymore.
Give that all up.
Give up all of your...
All of the scientific observations that people have had and all of the experiments and so on that have been done that actually have evidence on both sides.
All this investigation into past life memories and so on could also be used on the other side.
But give that all up.
Give up even the knowledge that people do die.
And just ask yourself, or investigate this idea of death, whether it's possible that this could happen in the future.
You'll see that actually there's no aspect of experience that could admit of such a thing.
And so the strange thing would be that if it did cease, and that was the profundity of what the Buddha found, is that he found a way by which this experience ceases.
And it's not death.
It's nibbana.
But the point was already made that we don't believe in reincarnation.
We simply don't believe in death.
The experience continues on as long as there is craving in the mind.
I did a video on this.
You can look it up.
Nature of Reality.
I think we've talked about this on the Ask.SriMangala forum.
So the information is out there from our point of view, my point of view.