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 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.
Seconding this. “Best life” is highly subjective. My dad, for example, was a very simple man (simple in a positive way, for the record). Sure, looking at cool cars were neat and all, but the happiest I ever saw him was when he was sitting on the balcony of the vacation home in the norwegian mountains, as a break from everyday life. His “best life possible” would probably be filled with days like that.
I, on the other hand, would probably want something more. Sure, it was nice and all, but I get bored too easily, to the point where I brought my PC up there in the 90’s so I could study Turbo Padcal, and bringing tech back then was pretty much considered sacrilege. I have yet to find out what is considered my “best life possible”. I just hope my kids will one day be able to see me as truly happy.
I thinks ultimately a massive waste of time to chase the dragon of a “best life”, it’s neigh unattainable and you’ll never know if you’ve reached it or not. Instead, focus on finding your own personal Norwegian balcony and fully enjoy those brief moments for what they truly are. Though I’ll be the first to admit that the last part can be really fucking hard sometimes.
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I think you might be confused. If you didn’t want people’s answers, perhaps next time don’t ask, or ask a buddy over a drink.
If I asked “what is the molecular composition of water” and people started answering irrelevant things like “purple, orange, rain is water, tiger, harmonica, matter cannot be created nor destroyed,” don’t you see how OP would find that frustrating?
But this answer is just a logical answer to tour question? Idk what you’re on about.
In case the reincarnations go on forever, then yes, I think the best life is inevitable. I’m amazed. I’ve thought about this concept in the past, but I always imagined the negative consequences - everyone would have to experience the very worst suffering there is. The fact that you took it from the positive side is mindblowing to me. Good for you!
Yes, you get it! 😍 I thought of it from the positive angle because I know a man who is living this idyllic life right now, He was born into the best possible circumstances with the best family and the best education and the best wealth and love and opportunities and lives in the most beautiful place in the world, and I’ve told him a few times, he is living the best life known to human potential.
And he’s humble too so he hasn’t fully embraced my lofty assessment of him 😄
But I think his circumstances are one in a billion and I’ve told him he is living his peak incarnation right now!
I love your optimistic take. You were born with a brain capable of positive thinking, which, unfortunately, doesn’t happen to everyone. Enjoy your stay in this body 😊
Ahh, I remember when I posted this.
Egg Theory
Love that short story
I don’t think there is a single best life. No one’s life is perfect, and there is certainly a lot of bad luck that a single person can experience. Everyone lives their own life. Sometimes it’s a wonderful adventure, sometimes on easy mode, sometimes life sucks and you have few if any choices to change it. Reincarnation is just pressing play, again.
That would also imply everyone gets to live the very worst life imaginable too
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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 have also heard buddhist view of reincarnation as simply the act of identifying with yourself in each new moment. Since enlightenment involves disillusionment with self, this is how enlightenment stops the process of reincarnation.
I think this is correct. Had a friend ages ago who was Buddhist and I remember her saying something like the best thing to be reincarnated as was a butterfly because their lives are so short and that reincarnation was undesirable because enlightenment was the real goal. If you attained enlightenment you won the game, so to speak.
Boiling it down to its bare essentials, I think the question is really whether or not it’s plausible to claim that getting potentially unlimited resets, but still tracking each entity from a finite pool, with the ideal goal of any one given entity changing on each reset in a non-deterministic way, there would eventually come a state, in which each and every single entity has, at some point, encountered their then active ideal goal.
If we don’t track the entities and/or the pool is not finite, then I would say it’s simply impossible. But even then there are boundaries and variables that need further defining.
But if we assume the initial scenario I described, then sure, I think it is inevitable that a finite set of beings will eventually have all experienced their ideal goal, at some point, assuming the goals are, too, finite. And even then the one limiting boundary — time — would have to be infinite. If not, then we’d also have to define the entire thing further.
How will you know if this life is better, it not as if you know right know, so how will you tell? Don’t overthink, live! PS: i do not believe
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The best life? Probably not.
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
Best as defined by whom?
What if the best life was someone so into Coprophilia that they get more happiness out of being surrounded by and even eating shit than anyone else in the universe has experienced happiness about anything? And then they got a job for 40 years cleaning porta potties and even when they could retire don’t in order to keep it up?
Is it just maximal dopamine and serotonin? Maybe then the best life is a drug addict with a gambling addiction but a lot of luck?
Or maybe happiness is more a matter of perspective than external circumstance once past the bottom layers of Maslow’s pyramid, and there’s many lives that could be a best life to the right mindset.
I’m not even sure it takes living multiple lives to end up living the best life, and potentially pushing the pursuit of living one’s best life off onto the next one is a damaging prospect in and of itself.
What if you spend every life waiting for the next attempt rather than maximizing the life you have?
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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Philosophically, the premise is flawed. Best life… according to whom?
I mean, the best life for a slug or a fly won’t cut it for you. I can imagine a fly being born in such conditions that from that fly’s perspective it would be ‘the best life’ imaginable… for a fly.
There’s this passage from Roger Crisp’s Mill on Utilitarianism, where he proposes this thought experiment. There one reads:
“You are a soul in heaven waiting to be allocated a life on Earth. It is late Friday afternoon, and you watch anxiously as the supply of available lives dwindles. When your turn comes, the angel in charge offers you a choice between two lives, that of the composer Joseph Haydn and that of an oyster. Besides composing some wonderful music and influencing the evolution of the symphony, Haydn will meet with success and honour in his own lifetime, be cheerful and popular, travel and gain much enjoyment from field sports. The oyster’s life is far less exciting. Though this is rather a sophisticated oyster, its life will consist only of mild sensual pleasure, rather like that experienced by humans when floating very drunk in a warm bath. When you request the life of Haydn, the angel sighs, ‘I’ll never get rid of this oyster life. It’s been hanging around for ages. Look, I’ll offer you a special deal. Haydn will die at the age of seventy-seven. But I’ll make the oyster life as long as you like…’”
So, a pig or Haydn? A fly or your own life right now?
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
We live to learn, to learn you must suffer. Buddah lived in a palace without knowing illness, old age and death and only when he discovered them went into a path of suffering and learning until he became enlightened. Plus ultimately if you have the right mindset any life can be the perfect life for your soul.