This is probably not fully on-topic with the theme of 5F but I thought I’d throw it out ‘there’ for comment in any case.
Some time ago I cited the Five Subjects for Frequent Recollection, implying - but perhaps not very clearly - that fear of death is uniquely human, or at least in the sense of shadowing our lives, and has wide-reaching behavioural consequences. Which dear @RhisiartGwilym might have described as Terror Derangement Syndrome.
There’s a Sutta for that, of course. In Vipassana one can contemplate ‘momentary death’ and realise that we ‘stop’ many many times every day but seldom notice it. About a month ago I attended a seven day silent retreat at Aruna Ratanagiri**, their first (and also mine) in 3.5 years. Some places offering retreats are still being cautious about doing so after the ‘Covid Years’ which pretty much prevented such gatherings.
After that ‘stop’ we restart, of course, with the next breath. Until we don’t. And this is a framing of ‘rebirth’ that I am much more on board with than the more commonly understood framework that tends to be tagged as ‘reincarnation’.
It’s said that kamma (karma) can follow us after death and it’s the only thing we truly own.
Anyway: I was meditating upon this and many other subjects, my creaking knees not least, while crows built their nests in the trees outside. I wondered to myself how they know how to build nests and the popular notion that animals, including ourselves of course, have this thing called ‘instinct’. Might this be kamma carried on from a previous life (in just a small percentage of crows, the rest copy what they see)?
And widening this out: are there things we ‘know’ that actually came from another life?
I received the audio transcripts from the retreat and will re-listen to the session where, as soon as the leader dinged the bowl and asked if there were any questions I did my ‘please miss’ wave and asked that very question. My impression was that the answer was a bit fuzzy, but then again I probably expressed the question rather vaguely. But in the meantime: what do people think?
**I believe this means something like ‘the shining gift at the top of the hill’