Ask Lemmy

Regarding consciousness/the human experience, I think the best way I've seen it explained is: a soul (whether you add the religious meaning or not) watching a brain watching a body.

Personally, since I believe I'll be judged by the Creator, I do believe in life (consciousness) after death. Not reincarnation, but it's a continuation. Monotheists around the world believe in it also, for whatever that's worth. 😅

it seems reinicarnation, is an obsession amongst western countries co-opted from india/buddhism, and incorporated into many medias.

Eh... No, but its nice to think about it.

As stated by many others, evidence is required to prove something. However, the stories we tell ourselves are comforting, so I wont fault anyone who does. Up until the point where people start going "My sky-dad could totally beat up your sky-dad", that can Belgium right off...

Nope. When I die, there is no longer a me of any sort; just any media and memory that captures some moment of when I still was until those too fade.

The amount of effort people put into saying “Maaaybe. We really don’t know,” is just crazy to me. No, because it’s nonsense.

I see it (or at least some form of it) as a realistic possibility. Let's say that consciousness is a completely physical thing, a certain set of chemicals, cells and molecules in my brain that define what is "me". That would mean that given infinite time, something that possesses "my" consciousness would eventually appear again.

I want to believe

I'm going to make a guess that majority of people looking at this question have grown up in countries with Christian cultural background. Meaning even if they aren't religious, their more or less subconscious believes about the nature of reality may involve some vague ideas about souls, absolute good and evil and so on. Separate entities in a hierarchical world. From that perspective, reincarnation is never going to sound anything but magical.

But if you drop your belief in you as a separate entity, literally everything is a "reincarnation" of you, if you want to use that word. But it's not the "you" that you think you are. Reality is prior to your thought about it, as thoughts are just imperfect reflections of reality.

You get a disconnect when you try to take a concept like reincarnation from a thought-framework such as Buddhism, without being REALLY FUCKING INTIMATELY STEEPED IN IT, and then try to fit it into whatever dualistic worldview you're likely holding in this largely Chisto-capitalistic world that is hell bent on making sure you always feel separate, alone and not enough.

It really is like taking a power plug from the EU and then being surprised it doesn't fit in the socket in the USA. And then going off about what a stupid design EU has while not ever even considering if the socket is even meant to receive that kind of a plug (because in YOUR opinion, your socket must be perfect in every way and could never ever be questioned).

Get Waking Up by Sam Harris... Or read Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Loch Kelly, Jayasara, Kiran Trace, Christopher Wallis, Bernardo Kastrup, many more. It's all available out there but unfortunately a lot gets dismissed because "nooo muh materialistic worldview that is required for the current capitalistic hellscape that's slowly destroying our world can't possibly be wrong". So many people are pushing the collective cart towards doom, complain about the doom and the cart but never question what they so deeply believe that they won't just stop pushing.

We live in an infinite universe. As such, it seems hubristic to me to believe that we have, more or less, nature figured out.

I don't feel compelled to believe in the soul as some strange sort of object that is continuously reincarnated towards a great purpose. But if we consider consciousness as an energy of its own kind, then it should hold true that it cannot be created or destroyed, only change form. This could mean that the consciousness that resides in the body could move between different life forms like a fluid, freely mixing and melding with others, filling a new vessel as necessary.

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but one thing that isn’t mentioned enough is that there aren’t enough “souls” for everyone to have a reincarnation. If you rewind the clock back, once the original (for the sake of this exercise) 100 people died, the next generation would have 200-300 people already alive due to multiple children, which means they would halve mostly new souls. Fast forward to today, I’d imagine a lot of people would have baby souls.

You say forgetting memories is proof or indicative that memory depends on the physical body. But isn't that true for conscious as well?

Our conscious is inherently bound to our physical being. We see, we feel, we taste, we identify with our body. Our brain allows us to think, and experience, to conceptualize our body, our being, us as an entity.

We cut off fingernails and discard them as no longer part of ourselves. We drive a car and internalize movement as if it were us moving, while not seeing the vehicle as part of ourselves.

Without experiencing and without a body to conceptualize, what would our consciousness be? Without a body and mind where consciousness can arise from experience and thoughts, how could consciousness arise?

This will sound crazy if you aren't spiritual whatsoever. It's based on my personal experience with meditation and psychedelics, countless chats with other metaphysically versed people, video essays and I also studied philosophy. Before all that I used to be strictly atheist. Also if something I write doesn't resonate just let it fly, everyone has to walk their own path.

I think the whole universe is basically god experiencing himself. The division between maker and creation causes the tension that facilitates time and space. It's like we as humans are all part of God's mirror image. That means our soul is, the ego isn't divine. It's not neccessarily bad either, it's just that it's a tool distinctly different from the true self. This true self can be found, unearthed if you will. The first step is acknowledging that you are more than your thoughts. The rest tends to fall into place when the time is right.

From what you wrote I feel like you are half way there already. So as you start being present in the moment you may start feeling your soul living inside your body and you may also start identifying with this energy rather than the body that houses it or the thoughts it experiences. This is something you need to experience for yourself though, it can't sufficiently be put into words. True faith is evidence based, with the evidence being inside of you.

But anyway as that starts to happen you will naturally get a feel for eternal life and what it may or may not be like. I've realized that the soul can't be fractured like the mind can (mainly because since discovering mine I no longer suffer from depression and social anxiety) so if it is always whole there is reason enough to believe that it won't just vanish once you stop breathing.

Want there to be evidence reincarnation exists . Want there to be research teams dedicated to finding it