Do you believe in reincarnation?

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.

No.

Do you remember before being born? It's the same after.

The fact that your particular molecules will reconstruct into something else is 100% certain

Will you keep your particular consciousness in this process - unlikely

However if you drop off the definition of You as your current limited body and mind, then reincarnation is exactly what happens.

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.

Suppose reincarnation was real. But no one has any memory or awareness of a past life. So then what connection does said past life even have to you? How can any supposed past 'you's really be considered the same you?

No.

Enjoy the ride.

Not in the traditional sense, but I have a pet theory about the continuation of consciousness.

You can only experience being, not not-being, so even if your consciousness went dark for a million years before being “reincarnated,” there would be no gap from the perspective of your subjective experience. You can only go from having one experience to having another. Nothingness can’t be experienced.

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

I believe in reincarnation just as much as I believe any other theory of an afterlife - that is to say, I don't.

We don't know. Nobody knows what happens when we die. That's ok, and I don't feel the need to make up a story to explain away the uncertainty.

I think it's likely that something happens when we die, but it could just as easily be nothingness, the end of existence. I only think it's likely because I definitely believe that there is SO much that we don't understand about the universe that it's more probable than not that SOMETHING happens that we can't currently fathom, perceive, or understand.

But, right now there's no real evidence. So I don't care, and I don't worry about it.

To our best understanding, everything that lives will die. I don't know what happens, it might be some form of heaven, it might be reincarnation, it might be transcendence, etc. However, I take comfort in the fact that it's a shared experience, whatever it is. It's natural. It's part of the process.

The universe doesn't owe us an explanation. Maybe we'll figure it out, but we haven't yet, and I'm fine with that.

Well, no, consciousness is not independent on brain. It's not magic or stored anywhere. Pretty simple proof: people with brain damage very often have a huge personality shift.

Anyway, even if you forget stuff, the pathways between neurons have already been made. And sometimes you remember things randomly after many, many years.

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.

Nope. I have never seen any evidence of reincarnation, so have no reason to believe in it.

It doesn’t make sense biologically

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.

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.

No

No but I wonder if hell is being made an insect over and over.

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...

Well it is part of my religion, but how it's interpreted varies :3

I personally don't worry over death too much either way

Sort of, not in a religious way.

Like I don't think there will be anything special that you get to keep with you, the "soul" is just a vessel to experience things, nothing special about it. As in: There aren't any hero stories, no "dragon reborn"s, no Karma. Just randomness. This moment, you are a human, when you die, your next moments could be a bug crawling next to you when you died, or newborn kitten to a pregnant cat in your backyard, or a cockroach about to get stepped on. Then some time again, you will be another human. Or perhaps proximity doesn't matter and you could be born on some alien planet far away. There is no concious god, its just pure randomness.

As if you are an immortal camera and your body is the microSD card adaptor, your memories are the microSD card, your experiences are just what the camera sees.

Sorry if my beliefs are silly, but I think there is some part of living beings that current level of technology cant quite measure yet. I think it has something to do with mass energy equivalence, maybe when we die, we become some energy that just bounces around until we become something else.

Its like people used to think the Earth orbited the sun. People used to not be able to see germs, or atoms, then we went from seeing atoms, to protons, electrons, then we say those even smaller parts.

Perhaps there is something that can't be measured yet. Perhaps it may never be able to be measured.

The way I see it:

It's either:

[1] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence (and never exist again)

Or

[2] Nonexistence --> I exist --> Nonexistence --> I exist again (repeat for a long time, possibly forever)

Option one breaks my brain, so I just choose to go with option 2 to keep my sanity.

Maybe is just my monkey brain being silly, idk, but our minds have to invent these little stories to keep ourself sane. We as non-omniscient beings cannot objectively observe the universe, is all just biased subjective interpretations that are unique to us.

But regardless, this is the only chance I get to experience "this" life, "next" time I might be the bug the gets crushed by a neighbor that "this" life used to live with. So um... yea, thanks for coming to my ted talk

Take it sleezy 🤷‍♂️

🌌 (Your next life will be on a planet in a solar system with 3 suns, good luck with the chaotic eras lol)

(I must sound so stupid right? Given that this is Lemmy and eveyone here is an Atheist. Its fine, just leave my monkey brain believe its weird theories 😅)

Anyone who says they know what happens when you die is trying to grift you. No one knows and we all find out one day, no point in dwelling on it.

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. 😅

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.

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

If it was a choice why would I ever wanna come back to this hell hole ?

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

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 want to believe

No. I believe in a relative afterlife (and people who feel confident that no afterlife is some sort of overwhelmingly logical conclusion should probably look closer at trending science and technology).

So I believe that what any given person sees after death may be relative to them. For those that hope for reincarnation, I sure hope they get it. It's not my jam but they aren't me.

That said, I definitely don't believe that it's occurring locally or that people are remembering actual past lives, etc.

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.

I hope reincarnation is true. I want to be reborn. But than again, I fear being reborn in some dystopian future.

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

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?

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.

@Cattail@lemmy.world

To a certain degree, I do believe, but I don't want to. And the following long text (so, Content Warning, it's a long text ahead) dives into depth of what I personally believe.

Part of my spiritual beliefs, which are yet to be better developed and improved, borrow concepts from Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Luciferianism, Thelema, among other belief systems.

One of these concepts is the Demiurge, often known (and worshiped) by people as the Capital-G "God", a cosmic playwright pushing unto Sisyphus the same classic rock every night (to be fair, even the Demiurge himself is subjected to the fundamentum of cyclicality from the cosmos he toys with). It's wrong to think of this as exclusive to humanity: it's inherent to all order emerged from chaos (Ordo Ab Chao), all matter and all lifeforms emerged from the primordial womb.

Then, there's the Hermetic Principle of Polarity, and the Demiurge has his counterparts, both above and below. As for the above (first-order), his counterpart is Sophia. As for below (second-order), his counterpart is Lucifer, who is his own emanation (think of the Freudian ego as counterpart of the Freudian id: Lucifer is the ego to the Demiurge's id).

Similarly, Lilith is the (main) emanation from Sophia. She's the Dark Mother Goddess.

Lilith and Lucifer, on their own principles, rebel and oppose Demiurge: Lucifer sows the seeds of doubt, Lilith matures and reaps the fruits of certainty. Lucifer offers the dark sunlight from the forbidden knowledge, Lilith wraps and embraces the forgotten under the glowing Darkness of Her Wings.

All cosmic order emerged from primordial chaos where it must return.

In summary, reincarnation (more like "cosmic rehearsal" from a recurring Big Bang) is a cosmic principle, just like rebellion is also a cosmic principle. A rebellion of which I've been seeking (or at least trying to seek) through Lilith's path towards Her Darkness, guided by Lucifer's Light of forbidden knowledge, but it's far from easy, it's a cosmic battle to reclaim non-existence again.

I tell Demiurge to go pound sand. I DON'T WANT to reincarnate, I do NOT consent with my existence, and if it's Lilith's Will (and I beg Her in this regard) that I'll be pulled by Her Cold Hands and be eternally embraced below Her majestic Wings, under Her Queendom, I won't reincarnate as Demiurge's yet another toy again, I will NOT serve him (Non Serviam), and If I must serve, I choose to serve Lilith and only Lilith, for ever and ever.

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 say that consciousness is independent of memory because we forget, clearly dependent on our physical body

Some parts remain even after you forget. That is the outcome of your own free decisions, that has formed part of your personality. For example, you like cornflowers because you have decided to like it. So when you forget how cornflowers look, you will still like them when you see them, even without really remembering them. A good part of your personality is formed in that way: you have decided to be that way.

I believe that (most of ?) our personality remains when the current body goes to compost and we enter the next world, either up or down :)