Not to take the whole thing too seriously, but it really depends on the tradition. Some believe in instant rebirth, some believe there is significant time between births, some believe there’s time between births, but only from the perspective of the dead, on earth it’s instant. Some believe it’s nonlinear, your next life could be a thousand years in the past. There’s a whooooole bunch of different ideas around reincarnation, even within the same traditions.
Yeah, ok but that means for it to be a adult bird or at least old enough to fly either 1. Young birds don’t have a soul. 2. His soul was in 2 bodies at the same time.
Then again, the concept of a soul as an individual thing rather than part of a continuum isn’t necessary for reincarnation. So, baby bird could definitely have soul, just like any other living, and one viewpoint of the universal soul that is everything is simply shifting awareness from one physical extension to the next, with no real need for it to not be happening to every living thing at any given point in what we call time.
Okay, that’s pretty thick there. Damn near opaque.
To rephrase. Imagine that there are no souls. There’s one soul. Only one. The soul is everything, everywhere, all at once. What the dying uncle told his family was nothing more or less than an echo across the universal soul between the bird state and the uncle state. The uncle part simply perceived the universe from the perspective of the universe, but could only glimpse the part closest to him in the limited perception of time that a living human has, i.e. linear.
The uncle saw his future as a bird in a straight line, but there was no line at all, and the bird was born prior to the death, but it looked like the future to him because it was the future for that part of the universal soul.
It’s all timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly soul stuff.
I’m not espousing this as my belief, nor as some kind of objective truth. Just saying that if we accept the possibility of soul as a state, we may not be able to quantify the entirety of it, so there’s no limits to what might be the actual experience of the soul. Kind of a thought experiment that isn’t an experiment, but more of a koan.
There are a few good analogies I’ve heard to help explain this concept.
"Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.
And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while."
(Quoted from The Good Place)
Not to take the whole thing too seriously, but it really depends on the tradition. Some believe in instant rebirth, some believe there is significant time between births, some believe there’s time between births, but only from the perspective of the dead, on earth it’s instant. Some believe it’s nonlinear, your next life could be a thousand years in the past. There’s a whooooole bunch of different ideas around reincarnation, even within the same traditions.
Yeah, ok but that means for it to be a adult bird or at least old enough to fly either 1. Young birds don’t have a soul. 2. His soul was in 2 bodies at the same time.
Concurrent incarnation is not a rare belief.
Then again, the concept of a soul as an individual thing rather than part of a continuum isn’t necessary for reincarnation. So, baby bird could definitely have soul, just like any other living, and one viewpoint of the universal soul that is everything is simply shifting awareness from one physical extension to the next, with no real need for it to not be happening to every living thing at any given point in what we call time.
Okay, that’s pretty thick there. Damn near opaque.
To rephrase. Imagine that there are no souls. There’s one soul. Only one. The soul is everything, everywhere, all at once. What the dying uncle told his family was nothing more or less than an echo across the universal soul between the bird state and the uncle state. The uncle part simply perceived the universe from the perspective of the universe, but could only glimpse the part closest to him in the limited perception of time that a living human has, i.e. linear.
The uncle saw his future as a bird in a straight line, but there was no line at all, and the bird was born prior to the death, but it looked like the future to him because it was the future for that part of the universal soul.
It’s all timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly soul stuff.
I’m not espousing this as my belief, nor as some kind of objective truth. Just saying that if we accept the possibility of soul as a state, we may not be able to quantify the entirety of it, so there’s no limits to what might be the actual experience of the soul. Kind of a thought experiment that isn’t an experiment, but more of a koan.
There are a few good analogies I’ve heard to help explain this concept.
"Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.
And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while." (Quoted from The Good Place)
The second one fits with a nonlinear view of reincarnation, and also with a non dualist view.