Do you believe in reincarnation?

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We'll either find out when we're dead or we'll just be dead dead.

Most of the value of reincarnation and the work of reincarnation (ie. evolution of the conscious self, etc.) seems to really center around giving people something to organize their lives around. The consideration that everything you learn, everything you work for, every way you make yourself a better person greatens the chance of really being something great or saintly the next time around, or just being able to dig oneself out of cycle of misery. That and it seems like it's an approach that's aimed at making the universe a friendly and helpful place (through both pleasure and pain) rather than either a moral monster or a dead machine.

This is a good example of where fear of death as a sociological explanation for life-after ontology misses the mark. If anyone's fudging their logic out of fear or emotional necessity it's likely far more often something akin to the notion that most people's lives, under the conditions they're in, couldn't hold under nihilism. So many people would rather have something constructive to do, believe they have value, and believe it right to the very end - then cease to exist - rather than spending the bulk of their lives with complete impotence and insignificance constantly on their minds before going to the same place anyway.

I believe reincarnation is the only currently plausible, anthropogenic suggestion towards any form of afterlife. It would make sense, and I mostly believe that consciousness is separate from physical form.

No evidence doesn't mean no possibility.

One of the stronger research cases for extra-corporeal consciousness is Stuart Hameroff's work which seems to suggest that the microtubules of the brain do quantum compute, originate brainwave transmission, etc.. There are biologists as well who are talking about things like 'quantum biology' as a new field of science (Jim Al-Khalili etc.) which would address the use of this in nature, such as the adaption birds use in migration or how certain plants seem to use collapse in their metabolic processes.

If the 'material' of materialism does go in this holographic and soupy of a direction on the macro and especially on the biological levels it's headed toward a place where any hard-line-in-the-sand belief set could be right or wrong about the ultimate situation of things. Somehow I doubt we'll be shouting that HP Blavatski and Rudolph Steiner were right all along, or at least not quite..., but if so it means we'll have a whole other way to look at ourselves as sentient life and a whole new institution or set of institutions to work in, experiment, and further tighten the best formulas we have on how to engage such states productively (ie. esoteric Hindu and Buddhist practices, Golden Dawn, Rosicrucian, and Sufi practices, etc. etc.).

Based on research I've done in the past, I believe that reincarnation and a separation of the body from the "soul" or consciousness is possible, however I'm not convinced.

I'm an agnostic, and I do believe that there are many things that cannot currently be explained by science that may indicate the possibility of an afterlife or separation of mind and body. There's no proof of anything, however, so I refuse to make any kind of decision regarding the matter without more conclusive evidence.

That is very interesting, actually. I'm quite excited to see if that new field happens to come to fruition. Metaphysical consciousness was always a fascination of mine, so thank you for sharing.

A question keeps nagging at me ... Why is it than whenever I converse with an allegedly reincarnated person, he or she was always someone famous from the past?

Not one of them has ever claimed to have been an ordinary person, or even a member of the "underbelly of society". Instead, they all claim to have been royalty or some other notable historical personage of the upper classes from our history books.

Among others, I've met three Marie Antoinettes, two Napoleon Bonaparts, and a half-dozen men and women who claimed to have been Joan of Arc in a past life. No one ever claims to have been a peasant, a serf, or a common merchant or tradesperson. They all want to be reincarnated historical figures of great fame and influence!

Why is that, I wonder?

Dunno. Just off knee jerk - they're full?

Of what?

Oh ... ... never mind.

My biggest problem with reincarnation is, if we've lived our lives as other people in the past, how is that possible in modern times, when every living soul wouldn't have had a previous life, as there were far less people to have been in the past.
Then there's the belief that humans might not have been human in previous lives. If so, how many times would we have to live as amoebas, fruit flies, salmon, etc, till we can be humans? Crimony, I hope that such endless existences as one non-thinking life form or another isn't so.

Don't worry - planetary rounds solve that problem. At each root race you do two incarnations at each planet on a circuit of twelve - seven times around! It's like a birthing poker-run!

If there's anything to it I think it's likely way oversimplified by anyone who says 'It's x'. We could split into a dozen, fuse with a dozen others, do a little bit of both, feel absolutely great no matter what we're doing, and finding our hangovers and depressions again next time we decide to check into a womb. If consciousness is in some way fundamental, eg. Chalmers, it probably would flow like water and not be quite as much hung up on identity anyway.

Probably not but who knows, I like the idea of reincarnation and karma more than I do hellfire and pearly gates however.

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Last edited by wornlight on 03 Feb 2016, 1:50 am, edited 2 times in total.

No, I don't believe in any kind of religion. If people come back as a different person each time, why does the population continue to increase? Where are all these extra souls or whatever coming from?

And if reincarnation was real, with my luck I'd come back as someone with a much worse life than I have now for things I've done. Maybe I'll even come back as something extinct or a creature most people hate, like a mosquito or a cockroach.

to my conscious knowledge, I have not in any past life been a king or kingmaker or celebrity of any kind, but I have had recurring dreams where I was a playboy cad who committed suicide by drowning, or a swarthy thug.

I've had people try telling me what I was in a past life, anywhere from a priest of the Roman mysteries or a bard in the British Isles to a Giordano Bruno type character in the Renaissance who was burned at the stake - I haven't had any such recall. Needless to say I take these claims with a big enough grain of salt to not even structure my life with them. My guess is that if it is there, is happening, and we can't see it, might be that at this point it's none of our business asking.

Mark Stavish actually had a really good point in talking on this - ie. not to dwell on any of it, that you can be sure that who you are right now is the best you've ever been and that you won't really have much to learn by looking back let alone obsessing over it. Makes a certain kind of sense.