Edit: Goddamnit will one of you please comprehend my question and give a relevant response.
I didn’t ask whether or not you think souls are real or what you think about Buddha
This is not a creative writing prompt nor a place for you to pontificate your religious ponderings! 🙄
I’m atheist so my understanding may be slightly off, but from what I’ve gathered. Reincarnation is a bad thing. Reaching enlightenment is the end goal and breaks the process of Reincarnation. The goal is not a perfect life. It’s breaking the cycle.
In Buddhism, yes.
For Hindus, well, it’s complicated.
For other people who happen to believe in reincarnation?
That would be anybodys guess, I guess.I think it depends on what religion we’re talking about. OP didn’t specify one so, in general, if there was an actual process that put “you” into another body, assuming it’s human, then would it be random or “good?” Theoretically, life is what you make of it, so no “good” is really guaranteed if you mess it up. But starting out with more options than another person would give you an advantage.
I think if it was real, it would be random. Like, you die and you pop into whatever baby was next in line and that’s the gamble.
Of course, none of that is real. There is no god, no afterlife, nothing but atoms in an amazingly random configuration to produce “life,” as we know it.
I know your looking for a straight answer, but questions like this don’t really have satisfactory answers due to them not being scientific questions. The definition of “best life” will be fundimentally different for everyone and the actual best life for each person will be consequently unique. You might define your best life as having lots of money or cars, while I define mine as acquiring and sharing knowledge and skills. Neither life is superior, just yours might suck for me and mine might seem tedious to you.
That being said, given hypothetically infinite time, then everyone would logically get to live their defined best life at some point. However, because time has a definitive beginning (at least as we currently understand it) and is therefore not infinite, we would never be able to empirically know if we had reached peak life experience or if one of the infinite possibilities that never happened would have been better.
What’s the best life possible?
Honestly, if you have a pretty good life, and you are wired for happiness, that’s about as good as it gets. Wealth, ability, fame, respect… Those all have an aspect of continuous struggle. And ultimately, it’ll be subjective
But someone with a happy childhood, low stress, satisfying relationships, and an enjoyable, stable daily life? Coupled with a brain wired to enjoy life? I’m not sure it gets much better than that, and there’s people like that everywhere.
So I’d say yeah, probably
Ahh, I remember when I posted this.
Egg Theory
Everyone ? but it’s just me. A few reincarnations from now I might be you, or a lemur from Madagascar. It’s just me, bro ! you’re me ! I am you !
You mean a sort of Pathfinder/dnd?
If I’m not mistaken, if you behave badly in life you are sent to one of the evil/chaotic planes; otherwise to the good ones. If you die there you die tho, no more reincarnation. And if you go to one of the bad planes, you will “die” in a way as to survive cause unless you are very special you are doomed to be eaten (literally).
Dunno how the actual religions behave on the matter.
Personally, while I hope that reincarnation is a thing it is mostly to not be afraid to die… after all, even if it were a thing I wouldn’t remember a thing about this life no? If I did, I would know right now that actual reincarnation is a thing. Since I can’t possibly know that reincarnation is a thing, and I don’t know cause I don’t remember a previous life that means it either exists but I don’t remember a thing or it doesn’t exist and when I die light’s out it’s over. In any case, for the living me it leads to the same problem(s).
Going back to your original question: assuming that we indeed reincarnate, with or without memories, then yes given an infinite amount of lives we will experience both the worst and the best
Well, I don’t believe in reincarnation, so NO.
But suppose that I did. What does that mean? Do you retain your memories and respawn like a videogame character? Get to be a baby who knows everything as an adult? That’s a weird life, and probably not “best”.
If you don’t retain your memories, then what is “you”? Some kind of … virus? Whatever, hopping between bodies, unable to do anything to affect their outcome. So now it’s down to random chance.
What’s the “very best life imaginable”? Imaginable, not real? The real life you spawn into isn’t going to meet that standard, so never.
Like most religious ideas, it doesn’t define any of its terms, and they don’t make sense when you do.
As AwakeSoul/Buddha tried explaining…
and as Hindu Ramana Maharshi also tried explaining…
WHEN one reaches such fundamental-awareness that there is NO self in it…
it is AWARENESS,
THEN, one only has to dissolve into that OceanOfAllAwakeSouls/OceanOfAWARENESS/OceanOfBuddhas/God.
No self, indestructible bliss, Eternal awareness, watching all unfolding endless-stream-of-Universes, as magical display…
No, not every Souls/CellsOfGod/Continuums get to experience amazingness incarnate.
Elisabeth Haich commented on that, in her book “Initiation”.
Some Souls/Continuums, or their natures/characters, chose aversion-therapy reincarnation-cycle, for whatever reason.
It’s a Bell curve, probably:
the normal is to have an average “pinnacle”, and an average “bottom-of-the-barrel”, and an average set-of-between-range incarnations/someones/lives.
Only the more-extreme would inhabit the more-extreme ends of the bell curve.
Same as all Nature…
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