I did get messed up by some anxiety and have these thoughts rolling through my head so I’ll leave it at cosmic horror warning.
spoiler
I’m not religious but I have thoughts about experiencing consciousness and what it is. I say that consciousness is independent of memory because we forget, clearly dependent on our physical body, etc. generally I do say that we don’t know consciousness so maybe it can be reconstructed (in the can’t rule out the possibility way)
So I can see scenarios were my conscious could pop into existence without my memories after I die (as I’m writing this I realized that’s nothing to fear).
I am trying to adopt healthier mindset of looking at everything in life as a quest, new things are a call to action, and that it’s okay if everything I do amounts to little in x number of years (worked out okay for ozymandias, right?).
Im probably just rambling because my life has got boring and monotonous along with actual fear of American politics.
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I do believe in reincarnation, in that we are all physical manifestations of what you could call “God”. That means that everyone you meet, every dog you pet, every ant you accidentally squish, is synonymous with the divine. We are all constantly reincarnating throughout the universe, and this should be looked at no more acutely than the cells in your body constantly dying and being reborn.
I guess you could call it pantheism, though I tend to follow philosophies like Zen Buddhism and the Tao and it still seems to work.
Looking at existence in this way can form a new understanding, nay, a new reverence towards your life and the universe. Then you will understand who you really are and why you’re here. The real power of God is in manifesting everywhere, all the time, all at once. After all…
And that is, of course, why the images of the Hindu gods are shown with many arms or many faces: because it is saying that all arms are the arms of the divinity, all faces are its masks.
-Alan Watts, Out Of Your Mind
If it was real and you could retain memories of past lives, I’m confident we’d have some evidence/proof.
If it exists without memory retention and its just some sort of “soul” concept then it really doesn’t matter since you won’t remember anything for it to be worth worrying about.
The fact that brain injuries can erase memories shows that memory isn’t going to continue when the brain no longer functions.
Ever hear of Dr. Ian Stevenson?
Edit: Not sure why I’m being downvoted, dude looked into reincarnation and had hundreds of documented cases, Carl Sagan wanted people to look more into it
He emphasized that the information he collected was suggestive of reincarnation but “was not flawless and it certainly does not compel such a belief.”
If even the guy who had done the most research on it doesn’t believe in it, why should anyone else?
Don’t cherrypick qoutes.
Regardless he had to say that to give himself an out, there was concern that he’d be judged negatively for even suggesting reincarnation. Something proven by your own hostility.
When you see anyone disagreeing with you as hostility, you’ve clearly lost the thread.
Stop trying to twist his words in weird ways that benefit your stance, he very literally said we shouldn’t believe.
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If there is reincarnation and you don’t remember a single thing from before, why bother it doesn’t matter.
If there would be reincarnation where you remembered your previous life, surely someone would have spilled the beans on this by now. I surely would contact any sort of family friends that i had previously.
Since both could be possible but 2. hasnt happened and 1 doesnt matter i would give this a no.
That’s my view too. even if reincarnation existed, it wouldn’t matter. If each life has no memory of the others, then each life is effectively a different person altogether, so from the POV of any one of those people, there is effectively no such thing as reincarnation.
Now suppose there’s some kind of ‘soul’ who the lives ‘belong to’ and will one day remember the lives, again – so what? They’re just memories. Those lives were each a separate person who no longer exists, and never knew the others or the soul.
I get that. Have you read The Egg by Andy Weir? If not, there’s a Kurzgesagt video that’s just that story with animation. I’d suggest it. It touches on this concept and kinda paints a more optimistic picture.
I don’t think I’d read it, but just looked it up and did. Or maybe I read it before and forgot–I’ve certainly heard that concept enough times, and many variations on it. The ultimate ego trip!
It doesn’t make sense biologically
No, that’s silly and easily disproven. I merely believe I’m a facet of a benevolent fierce deity that supervenes on behalf of humanity
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.
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.
If it was a choice why would I ever wanna come back to this hell hole ?
I think this universe sucks, not to ignore human history. Lots of it is empty space apparently cosmic events can wipe you out with next to no warning, your made up of atoms and cells that can die and degrade, and we are stuck to this solar system because space isn’t empty it’s full of shit thats going to kill you
Which is why my headcanon for this universe is that we’re basically running rogue playthrough in this life. After you die, you’ll regain all your “soul” memories and will be given a choice to “replay” with another life and losing your memories “again” until you’ve reached a certain level of enlightenment and then you’ll “graduate” from our current level of existence.
Call me crazy but it helps me sleep at night, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeeeeah, all due respect to believers, but we’re squishy wet computers riding squishy wet stilts and when we get turned off we just sort of fizzle out.
There’s some poetry to only having one go at it, but I’m not gonna stand here and say a sense of humanism makes your hardcoded fear of death subside. I get why humans come up with coping mechanisms where they get to live forever in some form that isn’t having their atoms repurposed as fertilizer and space dust.
To be honest, the only answer i have to say is: “we’ll see”. Wheter it’s nothing or not, the second option would imply that there is effectively something beyond what we know about the universe.
What even is the soul? YOU from now think very different than YOU from ten years ago. Can we say that those two people are the same? Not really. Yet you share common memories with this early you, who doesn’t exist anynore. Is it technically correct in this point of view to say that you are the reincarnation of you from ten years ago?
If someone in the far future were to think like you, to remember exact memories from yours, would act the same way you would act in the same situation, it would not we wrong to say they are your reincarnation, no?
Again i’m just supposing.
I like the idea in Buddhism, that you are precious/valuable from the moment you are born. You already achieved plenty in your past life, which is why you were born as a human. Therefore, there is no need for self-hatred or for pressure to perform.
Not very knowledgeable about Buddhism but is the cycle over once you ‘reach’ humanity or can you just be an awful human being in this incarnation and come back as E. coli the next time?
IIRC, you can still come back as a “lesser” creature next time. Monks and ascetics exist because they’re trying to go up to whatever is above human. I’ve forgotten the details. Nirvana or some kind of god-like state of existence, or reunification with some higher power. This might vary depending on the specific religion.
Of course, there are people who believe that assuming humans are a higher form of life is an arrogant assumption in the first place, which would render all of that null.
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It’s hard to say exactly. I wouldn’t put it past the dev(s) to have potentially put something like “The Egg” in, so potentially yes, though we’d have no way of testing for it.
Story by Andy Weir here: https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
Yeah I watched that video when it was new and had it rattling around in my head. It probably why I starting thinking memories and intelligence aren’t part of consciousness. I do think emotions are connected to consciousness because they seem to override decision making.
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?
Yeah theirs an idea that universal can recreate particles and mass from energy that exists and eventually I guess the universe can recreate the the universe similar to how we know it after some amount of time or make a big bang. I don’t understand that physics but interesting concept.
I would be curious if the was consciousness without matter, maybe a pure energy based being could exist
I don’t see any possibility of that based on the physics I know of and my understanding.
No.
Do you remember before being born? It’s the same after.
Can you prove that memory is a reliable way to determine reality without referencing memory?
What about people who claim past life memories?
As is common amongst Buddhists
Related video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_4BFX_qhhyk
I am aware. I personally think it’s a load of religious bull, but don’t directly want to offend anyone wanting to believe it.
I also know repatriation (I hope that’s the correctly translated term) which is proven to be planted suggested memories through that very process scientifically as far as I am aware at the current state of science.
I do love reading (eg the game is life) playing with these theories, though!
Proof of the evidence that reparitation is suggested?
Fair request.
I did some research into the topic a year ago due to my situation and came to the stated conclusion.
So I tried to find some scientific research again right now (in a limited time frame of like 10 to 20 minutes, on my mobile).
I first tried in English bot got a lot of hits regarding companies and since my native language is not English I don’t know what that word means in relation to companies and also didn’t want to waste time on that.
So I tried it in German and was flooded by hits which offer that ad a service and as such of course tell you how successful it is. Obviously.
I was not able to find the research I remember within that time, I am sorry.
However in any case you’d be free to believe whatever anyway.
The point of the information I read was however that people coming out of the procedure (sometimes, possibly also accidentally) get memories planted in a well known psychological way and it is a highly untrustworthy procedure.
So that’s why I didn’t do it. I have enough to cope with and don’t need additional fictional issues added to that 😁
And they found that all this does is create false memories?
Edit: Oh you meant the hypnosis does. Yeah not sure why he recommended that part before meditation
I hope reincarnation is true. I want to be reborn. But than again, I fear being reborn in some dystopian future.
You could be reborn in America or something.
I’m hoping the fascist regime is America will end before I die
