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**twinaircant** · 07-27-2010, 06:41 PM

Seems to me that questions about the afterlife can only arise in one who is working with the assumption that a person is a discrete, singular entity with a single, fixed identity that persists through a lifetime, and that there is some sort of temporally-persistent identity in the first place. 'Samsara' can also be interpreted as 'process'. What people routinely misconstrue as a singular entity is a collection of processes, not a true being in the conventional sense. It's not nothing, but neither is it the thing we conceive it to be. Processes continue whether we consider them to be personal or impersonal. Personhood is the first illusion that must be overcome. Once that is accomplished, the question of what rebirth is obvious, if not trivial. In conventional terms, it's an impersonal universe. Persons, as conventionally conceived, don't really exist, even momentarily. Persons are convenient fictions overlaid upon never-ending processes.

Or I could be wrong.

07-27-2010, 06:41 PM	#14
twinaircant Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 475 Senior Member	Seems to me that questions about the afterlife can only arise in one who is working with the assumption that a person is a discrete, singular entity with a single, fixed identity that persists through a lifetime, and that there is some sort of temporally-persistent identity in the first place. 'Samsara' can also be interpreted as 'process'. What people routinely misconstrue as a singular entity is a collection of processes, not a true being in the conventional sense. It's not nothing, but neither is it the thing we conceive it to be. Processes continue whether we consider them to be personal or impersonal. Personhood is the first illusion that must be overcome. Once that is accomplished, the question of what rebirth is obvious, if not trivial. In conventional terms, it's an impersonal universe. Persons, as conventionally conceived, don't really exist, even momentarily. Persons are convenient fictions overlaid upon never-ending processes. Or I could be wrong.
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