Lolli
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2006
- Messages
- 49
In different schools of cultivation they believe that man continually reincarnates and throughout his various reincarnations he takes two things with him, his karma and his virtue. Without Karma you wouldn't have a single tribulation in life. Here is an excerpt from Master Li Hongzhi from one of his Buddha Law lectures where he expounds upon this point:
"Throughout your lifetimes, which is to say, during each of your lives, each of your lifetimes, you might have all bullied someone, deceived someone, or harmed someone or killed someone, etc. Perhaps, you did something even worse. Then, you will have to repay such karma that you owed. There is a principle in this universe, which is called: No loss, no gain. To gain, you must lose. What is owed must be repaid. If it is not repaid in this lifetime, it will be done in the next lifetime. It is definitely this way. When a person suffers now, he will consider it an accident, and think that others are not being fair to him or others are not being good.
I am telling you that none of these are accidental, and they are all caused by the karma you owed in the past. If you do not have karma, as you walk on the street, everyone will smile when they see you. People you do not know will all offer to serve you, and you will be just too comfortable! However, such a person will definitely not be living in the human dimension, and he should have returned to heaven. Human beings are just the way they are. Because people have karma, they will never be able to move up in cultivation if their thoughts are not purified. It is the same principle as I mentioned earlier.
It is not a bad thing for people to suffer a little bit and to have a little tribulation. By facing a little tribulation, you will repay the karma. You will really go to a wonderful place and never again suffer hardship. No matter how happily you live in the human society, with millions of dollars at home, or however high your rank is in office, it will be just for a few decades and will soon be over. Please think about your reincarnation. You come with nothing on your body and you leave with nothing on your body. What can you take with you? You cannot take anything with you. Who do you leave things to? You think that you have left them to your descendants. However, next time when you are born again, they will not know who you are.
If you go to work for them or sweep the floor for them, they may not be kind to you nor may they pay you an extra penny. It is truly this way! Man simply can’t see it. Here we are talking about the essential principles of human life. Think about it, when we suffer pains, when others bully you, when others cause you trouble, or when you lose some material interest, in my view it may not necessarily be a bad thing."
- from the Falun Dafa Lecture in Sydney, Australia: https://www.falundafa.org/book/eng/xnjf1.htm
I agree with you, the brain is not the source of our consciousness or thoughts. In Falun Dafa believe that the soul of a human is the true source of thinking and the brain is merely a 'processing plant' to translate the souls intention into our everyday speech and expressions. Here is an excerpt from Zhuan Falun that talks about the source of peoples thoughts:
"When people discuss “thoughts” they are talking about mental processes. Here I would like to offer a spiritually informed perspective on thoughts and the mental processes that go with them, and look at the different forms that those processes (or thoughts) take, as well as how they come about. Many questions about the brain are still unanswered by the medical sciences, for the brain is not as easily understood as the outer, more superficial layers of the body. Thoughts exist at deeper planes of reality and vary in form across dimensions. But they are not as some teachers of energy practices have imagined them. These persons haven’t been able to offer a good explanation of how thoughts work since they don’t fully understand it. They believe that by generating a thought with their brains they can accomplish certain things, and believe that what then unfolds is done by their minds, or thoughts. But that isn’t in fact the case.
Let’s start by looking at where thoughts come from. In ancient China there was an expression, “thinking with the heart.” It’s a curious phrase, but there were reasons behind it. The science of ancient China was very advanced, since the connections among the human body, living things, and the cosmos were the focus of its inquiry. There were people back then who could actually sense that their hearts were thinking, while others might have sensed that it was their brains doing so. What accounts for this? They were onto something, in fact. The soul of a regular person tends to be quite small, yet ideas originate from it and not from the brain. And the soul doesn’t always remain inside the head, at the Niwan Palace—or “pineal gland,” in medical terminology. When the soul is at the Niwan Palace, a person might sense that his brain is thinking or sending out signals; and when it is at the heart, he might in fact sense that his heart is what’s doing so.
The human body is a micro universe, as I’ve said, and in the bodies of practitioners there are abundant supernatural beings, any of which might change locations. If it is your soul that changes locations, by going, for instance, to your stomach area, then you might sense that you are actually thinking with your stomach; or if it goes to your calf muscle or heel, then you might sense that you are thinking with your calf or heel. This is fully possible, as far-fetched as it may sound. And this is something you might be able to sense even before your practice has progressed very far. The presence of the soul together with your temperament, nature, and personal traits are what make you a full-fledged, unique individual, rather than just flesh.
Then what does the brain do? I regard the brain of this physical dimension as simply a processing plant. The thoughts that you have actually come from your soul, though not in the form of language. What happens is that your soul conveys to the brain a type of cosmic signal which carries with it a certain idea. This signal, once received, acts as a prompt that the brain translates into some form of expression, such as the language you speak, a gesture made with your hands, the look in your eyes, or your overall body language. And that is the role of the brain. The prompting or thought actually comes from your soul. People usually think that the ideas they have are simply the result of the brain working on its own. But the truth is that the soul is very much involved, and when located at the heart, it might give the sense that you are thinking with your heart."
- from Zhuan Falun, The Ninth Talk, Thoughts and the Mind : https://falundafa.org/eng/eng/zfl_2018_9.html#2
