Reincarnation

[azurelunatic]

I'm stewing over some little tidbit about reincarnation that isn't in a form that I can articulate yet.

If one can't prove it or disprove it...
If it's something that either one must experience or not...
If cause and effect, and even time itself, are perspective-based...
What is a soul? Can one measure the soul with a tool, or must one experience it?
What are the criteria for similarity in souls?
Identity is a matter of experience and choice to identify, as one changes over time.

Comments

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I don't have answers, but thought you might be interested to know that reincarnation is the thread that ties together KSR's "Years of Rice and Salt."

[azurelunatic]

Hmm, definitely interesting.

[acheron-hades.livejournal.com]

I was a devout scientist for a long time, and so didn't really consider things like recincarnation. Then I came across something (http://www.reciprocality.org/) which completely turned my mind inside out.

Anyway, my working hypothesis is that the soul is a collection of wisdom, lessons and patterns learned, experience. If the speculation in the Reciprocality project is correct, the soul reforms by the mechanism of one's life experiences.. so each time around, you'd recap the previous life's lessons, only more quickly, to leave room for learning some new ones. Interesting thought, and it would explain a lot.

As for verification, that's a tricky one. I don't discount the possibility that one can experience exerpts from previous lives in certain altered states of consciousness.. but I also wouldn't mind betting that a lot of so-called 'regression' is bunk. But then, I have a cynical nature.

[azurelunatic]

Well, I know someone who either had past lives or really really *odd* multiple personalities. I'm still boggling from having to deal with that, and the last I really ran into it was two years or more ago.

I've been linked there before, but I think I'm still hiding...

[juuro.livejournal.com]

Simple reincarnation can not the complete truth be. The number of humans right now alive outnumber the dead. Either a splitting-off process to multiply existing egos or a generative process to produce new ones to supply for the demand.

Given the claims some for souls have made, whatever tool developed to measure the soul, there will be clamor saying this is not the soul, soul is something else that the instrument measure not.

Identity as a matter of experience. Yes.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

My own personal hypothesis is that a consciousness is just a splinter of the universe, and the universe is/has been/will be all consciousnesses. I don't know if I believe in consciousness recycling, as in one splinter of consciousness taking multiple forms in past and future times, because I don't know if I believe the consciousness of the universe exists in time, out of time, or through time.

In time meaning you can have been other things in the past and only in the past, out of time meaning that the universe is all things at once (so that the portion of conscious that is you can never have been anything else in the past), and through time meaning that from the point of view of the consciousness that encompasses yours, you might in the past have been something in the past, present, or even future. I think the "through time" hypothesis is my favorite in a romantic sense but the "out of time" hypothesis is the one that makes most sense. But it's also possible that all those hypotheses depend on false assumptions about time that stem from having lived in it all my life.

Since I'll probably never have the opportunity to prove or disprove any part of this, it seems reasonable to act as though it's true. It does have implications like "every time you kill, you cause 'yourself' to have died, be dying, or die later," that are interesting.

[azurelunatic]

The spear in the Other's heart is the spear in your own.