Thinking about Buddhism

[Marcel]

The other night I was thinking again about how a person who was as caring and giving as my wife was supposed to suffer that much throughout her entire life. Christians might say that it was god's plan for her and that humans are not capable of understanding his way, but I'm not religious in any way.
My wife was always interested in Buddhism and I read about it every now and then. Last night I came to realize that this concept could explain her life's path as well as mine.
I have no way of knowing if this is actually true but I felt very calm and relaxed after I noticed that with Buddha's teachings in mind there could be a reason for all that happened.
It doesn't take away the pain of losing her but it softened the feelings of guilt and regret.
Not sure of what to make of it yet, but I guess I have to dig a bit deeper.

[loveboo]

3 hours ago, Marcel said:

Last night I came to realize that this concept could explain her life's path as well as mine

Can you elaborate on this concept?

I consider myself a Christian, as in, I believe in God.  And I believe that a lot of different religions that are monotheistic are worshiping the same God even if they have different names.  At the same time, I am far from a devout Christian.  This is something I've been reading a lot about since my wife passed.

My wife had Buddhist beliefs as well as her mother.  In fact, my distraught mother-in-law specifically requested that we perform a Buddhist ceremony as part of her memorial service.  My mother-in-law asked me if I would participate, I didn't hesitate.  The monks and other Buddhists prayed for her soul to go peacefully.  The ceremony also involved feeding her soul.  I was glad to be a part of it.

My mother-in-law is under the belief that because of the circumstances around my wife's passing (she passed away the day after delivering our baby girl), that her soul will stay with us on Earth because of her love for our baby.  I bought into the idea too.  While praying for my wife as a Christian, I also wanted to support the Buddhist beliefs.  I decided the best thing for our baby girl was for me to move back home with my parents near where both of my sisters live as they are mothers too so that I could get as much support for our baby as I could get while I grieve.  My in-laws decided to move back to live with my wife's younger sister in a different neighboring state.

On the day that we were to take the long drive back back to my hometown, I asked my family if I could take our baby to our apartment even for a few minutes.  An apartment full of baby things.  An apartment that my wife meticulously prepared to welcome a newborn.  The main reason I wanted to do this was just in case her soul was looking for her baby whom she was so looking forward to meeting and caring for as a new mother.  I wanted to bring the baby into the threshold of our apartment, just in case.

My sister-in-law is telling me that her mother is cooking every day.  She enjoyed cooking before so it's not a surprise.  But she also told me that my mother-in-law is providing my wife's soul with three meals a day.  She asked me if I could also leave out some food for my wife's soul as well because she thought maybe there was so much love between my wife, the baby, and I that her soul followed us instead.  And I have been leaving food for her.  I don't know, just in case.

Thanks for reading.  I'm really all about reading as much as I can as part of my grieving process.  It's given me something to do.

[Spengler]

I'm rather surprised, and even a bit startled to find this topic posted. As it happens, my dear wife embraced Buddhism. She asked for sanctuary in a ceremony with a Buddhist monk. Her belief brought her comfort and peace for a time. I believe, I would like to believe, that her understanding of Buddhism made her suffering and her passage easier.

 

I, myself, am not a Buddhist, but I find many of Buddhism's precepts fully compatible with my own beliefs and experiences.

[KayC]

16 hours ago, Marcel said:

Christians might say that it was god's plan for her and that humans are not capable of understanding his way, but I'm not religious in any way.

I have been a Christian all my adult life, but you won't hear me saying such a cliche!  We factor into what happens in our lives, so does randomness, luck of the draw, so to speak, at least in my way of looking at it.

 

[loveboo]

One thing I want to add to this topic (as if I didn't post enough in my first response), is to post a theory I have about the soul.

My background is technical.  I'm an engineer that solves problems.  Like many engineers, I excelled in math and science.  It gives me reassurance that 2 + 2 = 4 and that I can provide a proof for that.  I'm reading that a majority of the scientific community thinks that our soul is just chemicals and synapses in our brain and once our brain is no longer functioning, our soul would also just cease to exist.  (Although scientists studying near-death experiences seems to provide evidence otherwise.)

Reaching back into my high school and college times where I took physics classes. One of the very fundamental principles you learn in physics is the laws of conservation and you learn it through mechanics because it's easiest to understand when you can see and touch something like how a car moves forward and comes to a stop.  When you step on the accelerator in a car, the car is essentially converting gasoline into physical motion.  The gasoline, while it is used, is not lost.  It gets turned into a different form, kinetic energy.  Even when you want to stop a car, you press down on the brakes.  That kinetic energy gets turn into heat energy caused by friction in the brake pads.  Every energy is constantly being converted from one form to another, energy is never truly lost but conserved.

Now I would like to expand on that with my theory about the soul.  A soul is impossible to quantify.  We are only able to "see" it within a physical body when someone is living but then we "see" it come to a stop when they pass away just like we see a car coming to a stop.  We can't see the heat being generated when a car comes to a stop but we know it does and this heat dissipates into the atmosphere to find equilibrium.  I can't help but believe that the laws of conservation does not apply in the case of our soul as well even if we can't quantify or measure a soul being converted into a different form of energy.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to ever come up with this but if anyone else has read anything like this before, I'd love to find more information about this type of thought process.  Thanks.

[Sunflower2]

4 minutes ago, HPB said:

Mechanical/scientific thinking will not help.

and many people try to process grief mechanically and scientifically.  Wise words again.  You are sharing much of what I'm struggling with. 

6 minutes ago, HPB said:

I have no clue what "reality" we're living in, let alone what will be in the afterlife.

 I haven't shared but I experienced two NDE.  A random medical emergency. The love of my life died suddenly 5 weeks after. So I hear people talking and reading of NDE and afterlife.  I can't judge but I do shake my head. Perhaps I'm not there yet..  I  felt the passing and I could share adjectives but there wasn't any one waiting for me beyond.  I did share with Wayne and my mom that death was beautiful.  There was this calm and yes there was this warmth and this light. I told them I was fine where I was at that moment. I asked why they brought me back.

Not in a place to say much more. Yet what is so interesting is that my mother made the most beautiful transition.  Her home care staff and hospice even commented on this.   Wayne's death was sudden and when I found him he had this peaceful smile on his face. He even had fallen so gracefully in this relaxed position.  The medics and police even acknowledged this peace in his smile.  it did not bring me peace.  I was shocked and numb and shattered. He had no health issues that we were aware of and he was active.  Autopsy did reveal much of what the wife on the post you shared experienced.

with all that being said. I'm not looking for anyone to understand this or respond.  Yes, So much is simply unknown and mechanical /scientific thinking will not help! I too have no clue what reality is at this moment. I did find some afterlife info interesting but I'm on earth and I need to survive here in real time. 

[loveboo]

Oddly enough, I can only agree and disagree simultaneously about science and rational thinking not helping.  To me science just means "study of" and is governed by laws of nature, not all of which we know even exists or can study.  A lot of people say that science and religion (or whatever you want to call it) can't co-exist.  I actually think it does co-exist, we just haven't a clue how it does.  The mystery of life.

And my "mechanics" context was just an example, not that I think souls and life are mechanical at all.

[Marcel]

Lots of things to comment on so this will be long.
First I don't want to go into too much detail why the Buddhist's concept gave me some relieve.
Of course I wonder why a person so empathetic and caring as my wife had to go through all this misery. Our relationship was difficult from the beginning as we were so different. Her, emotional to a fault, spontanious, caring, living the moment. Me, showing a lot of autistic streaks. And I always wondered if our difficulties contributed to her disease.
But she had troubles all her live. Then I thought about karma and I noticed that throughout her whole life she always got things halfway. A happy childhood with a caring mother ended when her mother died when she was 13 and was replaced by a vicious stepmother. She got the guy she admired during teenagehood but he still bathed in the admiration of other girls. She got a guy she loved, a baby girl and a house of their own only to be left alone the moment her health declined and eventually her little girl who she cared for so much had to take care of her. Also she only got half her health. Throughout her life she suffered from chronic infections, coeliac desease, Morbus Bechterew (rheumatism) and finally neurological problems. None of these were lethal, yet modern science doesn't have a cure for any of those.
As for me I always got a taste of what things could be like. That involves sports, my musical ambitions, my education, my career, my relationships. Nothing developed in the long run for different reasons.
So karma makes a lot of sense. Of course the concept is a lot more complex than "if you do this, that will happen" but still it explains, why things happen if you see your existance on a way larger scale.
Now a short comment on the "soul", "Spirit", "Self" or whatever you may call it.
The main question for me is: "why do I think?".
Is it because tiny electric currents flow through my brain or do these currents flow through my brain because I think? If the first were true, there would be no free will, no responsibility, no "me". Everything I think would be the result of electrical currents in my brain, influenced by input of my nervous system which would be triggered from the outside by light, sound, touch, smell etc. Even if I'd question my existience it would still be the result of some physical or chemical event in my body that changes those tiny currents in my brain. Of course this could still be the truth, but it would make actively contemplating things an irrational action, because everything I come up with would happen anyway.
In buddhism it's not really the soul in a traditional sense that enters a new body during rebirth. There is no concious "Self", it's more like the energy of it and some sort of DNA that continues to exist under new circumstances.
What I don't like about this idea is that this way I would most likely never meet my wife again, but then it's my ego that wants to be with her again and the ego is not what life should be about.
I have some other thoughts about possible concepts of the "soul" but I'm not finished contemplating the details of those.

[Marcel]

11 minutes ago, HPB said:

Why should this be wrong, invalid? Because of "ego"?

Well, maybe.
The same as you I'm searching for answers. I have ideas, do research on different concepts but I can't be sure of anything.
But I have to question if the way the universe works really depends on what I want.
Of course I just want my wife back. Or at least to know that she's happy now.
But I also have to ask whether her life made any sense, and that's very hard. We're talking about the person we loved and admired most in the world. How could anything bad happen to them? Was it us who caused that evil? Was it a god who just wanted to do things his way? Or is it mainly just a case of cause and effect, like everything else in our physical world?
I don't have an answer. Like you I'm still searching for it.

[Spengler]

This is an interesting thread, and I don't know if I can add to it in a useful or meaningful way. What I can say is that I do not accept the materialistic / mechanistic view of life and the universe. There's just too much that is strange, and just plain inexplicable. Goedel's Theorem, the Church-Turing Thesis, quantum entanglement -- all of these seem to cast doubt on a rational or comprehensible universe. And I've personally experienced things that don't fit into any explanation I've read about or that I can rationalize. What I think is that there's room for a deity, an afterlife, reincarnation, and all manner of other things. And I think that belief and prayer have power. And I think that life has meaning, and that even if it does not have meaning, still it has meaning.

And I think there is something to fate and destiny. Now, free will I'm not so sure about. It's a rather shabby form of free will where you can choose your actions but have little or no control over the consequences thereof. But, hey, what do I know?

 

 

[HPB]

11 hours ago, Marcel said:

How could anything bad happen to them? Was it us who caused that evil? Was it a god who just wanted to do things his way? Or is it mainly just a case of cause and effect, like everything else in our physical world?
I don't have an answer. Like you I'm still searching for it.

...same here, I really don't have the answers. I'm just searching while struggling on. I found some aspects that make sense to me in a book which is also free to download as pdf on the following link:

https://swedenborg.com/product/god-let-happen/

It argues in a similar way as C.S. Lewis in his book "The Problem of Pain" (which is also available on the web for free pdf download, but was very difficult to read for me.)

Both books above argue, that what's happening to us is a combination of randomness and God's providence.

Bad things are apparently happening for the sake of consistent natural laws, that can not be bent even by God, and due to the free will given to us.

I hope that God's providence is working - as stated in the book above from Bruce Henderson - so that things are coming to a good end.

 

[tlc]

There is more to this life that we are living than we can see or comprehend. Near Death Experiences, past life experiences and personal experiences for which there is no explanation. Even scientific theories are constantly changing as they delve deeper. The earth was flat, remember. The universe is perhaps a multiverse and hey, maybe we don't live in a three dimensional world after all! I reckon that Terry is there somewhere. I cannot see him but he's in a dimension not currently visable to most of us. Doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. 

[KayC]

16 hours ago, Marcel said:

The main question for me is: "why do I think?".
Is it because tiny electric currents flow through my brain or do these currents flow through my brain because I think? If the first were true, there would be no free will, no responsibility, no "me".

My little sister had a baby born without a brain, only the nubbin that controlled reflexes and allowed her to breathe.  She was fed through a tube in her stomach, they had to implant a button to put the tube into.  She had no cognitive ability, no way to form thoughts, know her parents, etc.  She knew comfort vs pain, that was it.  BUT she had a spirit about her.  That was when I realized that we aren't just our brain, there's something more to us that exists apart from the body.  It doesn't exist in the brain because that wasn't there.  I assume it's her soul or spirit.  When she died, as when my husband died, that was gone from the body...not that it ceased to exist, but the physical body was no longer it's residence.  That is us, who we are.  Some things we can't explain, they aren't easily definable like other scientific properties.  There is a mystery about life.  Kind of neat, but my way of looking at it.  

Like Sunflower, I've also had NDEs, one when I died during an operation four years ago.  Another time it was a dream in which I died and I had the NDE...they always say you can't die in a dream, you'll wake up, but in my case I had a NDE in it, and it was very real!  I also "died" giving blood years ago, I had the NDE and it was an out of body experience as I could see them working on me (I was above) and I could see the worried look my kids's faces.  That's why I decided to come back.  Yes, I got a choice both times.  It was very alluring to go, but in the operation I made the decision to come back because my dog needed me, I couldn't bear him alone and wondering where I was.  He was a rescue, I didn't want him to go through that again.  That's not to infer that everyone has a choice, I don't know why some do and some don't, if that's the case.  I'm only relaying my experiences.

Buddhism teaches good things.  Christianity to me, is not about religion, but a relationship.  We gravitate to what helps us personally.

[Marcel]

28 minutes ago, KayC said:

That was when I realized that we aren't just our brain

I like to view the brain as an interface that connects the spirit with the body. If the brain is damaged the soul can't use the body the way it's supposed to.
If someone has a stroke, his soul is probably untouched but it can't control the body as before because some wires are cut. If other areas remained healthy the soul can use them to do some rewiring and gain some control back.

[Spengler]

8 hours ago, Marcel said:

I like to view the brain as an interface that connects the spirit with the body. If the brain is damaged the soul can't use the body the way it's supposed to.
 

Exactly. Our body is our house. The soul is our spiritual essence. The mind is the seat of our consciousness. The brain is the switchboard.