I watched it again last night and it was still as good as I remember.

Its a very good strange movie. The odd music was very addictive when i first watched it as a teenager.

I watched it again last night and it was still as good as I remember.

And here I was thinking reincarnation was a among same species like if you're born a titmouse you can only be reincarnated as another titmouse then again how would that work as evolution comes around like how much can a cardinal mutate before it's no longer a cardinal

If microbes were in play for reincarnation, their sheer numbers would make it almost inevitable that you’d reincarnate as one

If you're going back in time it's possible you can end up in different time lines like maybe you could rencarnate into a timeline where Stalin never came into power because you caused him to become the dictator he's known as today or maybe you could rencarnate as Adolfs mother and have to raise your child knowing the monster he will become shit that actually sounds like a good novel I want to read

I'm probably the wrong guy to ask, but I'll try.

The principal comes down to the idea of impermanence.

Nothing is forever. Not the good, not the bad, not the meh. Change is impossible to prevent as well. At most, you delay change.

As you learn to stop holding on to any given moment, instead living it, the edges get worn away. This doesn't mean that you don't experience pain, stress, dissonance; you do. But you learn to accept them as temporary and abide as they flow away.

But, part of that is accepting that anything else will also flow away with time. That's the part of it all that is hard, but makes it work as a way of getting through life. You start appreciating the good more when it's there, it becomes more real, more memorable because instead of clinging to it, or dreading its loss, it becomes a sort of timeless experience.

The only truly eternal thing is change, so you accept change.

Believe it or not, once you internalize all of that, the bad things in life start to have their own beauty. I'm not saying they become pleasant; being stuck in traffic or having a limb amputated still suck hard. What happens is that such things become just a minor part of life. The threshold for where things go from unpleasant to traumatic shifts.

You learn to accept grief, in particular, and doing so helps reduce the suffering of it. You've lost something, probably something very important. But because you aren't clinging to it, and let yourself really grieve fully, without trying to escape it or numb it, it becomes a form of grace.

Enlightenment is a different thing, tbh. That's more about the spiritual side of things, and I don't really hold on to that part. It's window dressing for me.

This isn't to say that you reach some magic place, btw. As long as you're connected to life, there will be the reality that we are products of hormones and that's all processed by a few pounds of electrified cells in our skulls. Traumas can happen, no matter how you look at them. You're going to have "suffering" in the sense that the concept is used in Buddhism, no matter what. It's a process, a way of moving through life, not a transformation into an internally isolated being that never feels.

Also, "suffering" within the Buddhist concept isn't exactly the best word. It implies that the problems of life have to be major for it to relate. This isn't the case; it really can be about the minor stresses too. Being stuck in traffic is stressful, it causes dissonance and pain. But, when viewed as impermanent, and lived, that stress is reduced and smoothed out. You accept it and just keep going without eating a hole in your gut.

Not OC, but an important tenet of Buddhism as you probably know is known as the "First Noble Truth," which states that "life is suffering." The second through fourth noble truths basically tell us to cease attachment and desire and to live a life based on "right living" to avoid the problems caused by attachment and suffering.

I think this is where OC has an issue and I agree because sometimes being a human sucks and you need some escapes from that suffering. I consider myself a Buddhist as well, and while many Buddhists will talk of the "middle way" between living a conventional life and living a life that tries to get rid of all attachments, I find myself mostly leaning toward the conventional ways of alleviating suffering like playing video games and smoking weed.

Tldr: living like a monk isn't easy (or something I want) but the Buddhist worldview helps me make sense of the world so I use it.

100 billion humans have lived so far. Maybe the souls got sent into storage?

"Shit this one was so lonely it killed itself early"

"Hey I got an idea let's keep it away until there are a lot more people around. That way it won't be so lonely. It will have some friends"

In a long enough timeline the world will have a 10s of billions of people with an average density of Hong Kong full of the most introverted depressed humans of all time. On the bright side those humans won't fear hell

That depends on how time works. Could be a single soul/consciousness experiencing every single life one after another (or simultaneously; who knows what we're capable of if there's more to us than just these bodies).

You okay buddy?