[Buddha-l] Being unable to imagine dying and living

[JKirkpatrick]

   I  think  that  research  on  past life regressions,
near-death  experiences and other related phenomena can help  us
to understand us better and that seems a good thing to me. For
instance, Kübler-Ross reports the case of  a  born  blind  little
girl who during a near-death experience  was  able  to see. Among
other things, this calls into question our general understanding
about how our  senses  work  and  could open a promising research
field  for blind people. In addition to that, and since rebirth
is   a   traditional  Buddhist  teaching,  it
surprises  me  that  Buddhist  scholars don't show more interest
in such phenomena.

> To  my  mind the best treatment of the topic is still Carol
Zaleski's 
> Otherworld Journeys (Oxford, 1987).


   Ben (Oviedo, Asturias, Spain)

_________________________
Didn't Jung have some thoughts on these issues, maybe not
near-death exp.because in his day people weren't talking about
this (or were they?), but about consciousness vis a vis ESP. (Or
is that a mis-recall?)

Also, he was not very interested in Buddhism per se, but he got
into astrology, alchemy as a symbolic system re individuation,
and (again as I recall, not having a good library nearby to check
all this out with the Bollingen series) he also had some views on
rebirth, n'est ce pas? 

IMHO, consciousness/awareness as a living-creature phenomenon
(humans, animals,  insects) has *not yet* been fully studied, nor
close to understood. 
Not by a long shot.

Joanna