Where should one deal with things he hasn't experienced yet?
For example rebirth, heaven and hell, realms, psychic powers?
What do you think?
I think we shouldn't care about them.
I think I'm with you.
You should only deal with what you can experience.
I think that you have already experienced rebirth, you just don't remember.
That's clever.
Yeah, I mean, there's something to it.
How do you know you've experienced them if you don't remember?
Well, where did you come from?
There's no beginning to this cycle of life.
There's no beginning, but there is an end.
And we're clearly not at the end if we're still experiencing.
You just say that there is an end?
Yes, there is.
I don't understand how you can know that there is no beginning, but there is an end.
If you have faith, I guess.
I mean, I haven't experienced it personally.
That's the question.
That begs the question.
If you already have faith, then you need to experience something to think about it or to believe in it.
I mean, when I feel like on the path you start to see the results come pretty much become more and more evident and you start to see like the first three
first, second, and fourth, and then eventually you'll see the third.
So what you mean by the end, you're talking about Nibbana.
That's just to clarify.
It's not really an end of the universe because the universe keeps going on, but the end for that person is what you're talking about.
The cycle of rebirth.
All right.
The ending to the cycle of rebirth.
Yeah.
For one person.
There's no beginning.
Well, there's a potential end.
I think a curious thing, if I'm not mistaken, is that there's no guarantee that every being is going to reach nirvana.
There's an idea that perhaps beings are also infinite, which is interesting.
It's all kind of mind-blowing and gets us very much off the topic.
So you can see how ignoring all this stuff is...
can actually be useful.
What I don't like is when people get bigoted about it.
It seems to me where people will, as soon as anyone brings up rebirth, it just gets, oh, that's not Buddhism and so on.
Or when people talk about magic powers and say that's not Buddhism.
Well, maybe magical powers, you could have a point.
But the Buddha, you know, why then does the Buddha seem to, according to our scriptures, again and again and again, talk about these things?
You know, when the Buddha outlines the entire path, both remembering your past lives and gaining magical powers are a part of that, are every time.
a part of that path.
Every time the Buddha talks about it, when he condenses it, you'll see that they disappear.
But when he talks about the full and entire path, they seem to be very much a part of, you know, you can't say they're not a part of the Buddha's teaching because he teaches them.
You know, he obviously doesn't say they're the end, and he says quite often they're not the end, but he teaches them.
so we always try to make the point that you don't need these things and you don't have to think about them and if they're causing you problems well then you're focusing on you're barking up the wrong tree but they do have a place in Buddhism they're quite interesting and you know it might even be something to talk about them rebirth can be quite useful to help you to gain a more an understanding of reality that's more in line with reality
as opposed to the Western mindset of physical death equals death, which is totally out of line with experiential reality.
Are we okay with that?
Yeah.
I have nothing else to say.
Okay.
Let's quit.