While I personally believe in some sort of "reincarnation," I have several issues that keep me from solidifying my thoughts about what it might be, and I keep having issues with what others advance.
First among these is the assumption that I keep seeing (not just here, but in almost everything I've ever read or heard on the subject of life and death and the afterlife and reincarnation/transmigration, and so on) we are just one or two things: A body, and perhaps, A spirit or soul.
What is our body? It's a pattern of matter and energy that is not constant, that changes over time. We recognize, for example, that we have almost total replacement of cells in the body roughly every 7 years--but the implications for this are not well thought out, at least as far as I've seen. What biologists and chemists have realized--but the implications still are not well understood, imo--is that the atoms that make up our cells and our bodies are replaced much more quickly than that. All of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in your body at this moment, for instance, will be gone, replaced by other atoms, in a matter of just a few weeks. The longest-lasting atoms are calcium in our bones, which are all replaced after about 20 years.
Our bodies, therefore, are not constant things, but patterns of matter and energy flow maintained over a period much longer than our attention span. We think we are a body, but it's better to recognize that we are a process, a pattern.
What is our mind, our consciousness? It does seem to be a part of that pattern, an amazing consistent pattern of response to environmental inputs (such as the matter and energy that we consume and that constructs our bodies and flows out again, the sensory input, etc.) that allows us to be an ongoing person, with intelligence, personality, habits, preferences, learning ability, and so on. Is that an emergent property of that pattern of matter and energy that is our body? Or, is that indicative of something that sometimes is called "higher" consciousness, an astral body or nature that we can experience but has not yet be empirically demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction?
For the people who think we humans have a spirit/soul, why is the thought almost entirely singular? Some cultures, I've heard, think people have multiple-part souls, up to maybe a dozen parts, each often associated with specific aspects of the body, the mind, or the functioning of the individual. I don't see why we don't consider having hundreds, thousands, millions or more parts of spirit/soul--just as we do with tissues and organs of the body, or cells, or atoms...And if there are lots of spiritual parts,what is to prevent some from going off to the "higher" planes of existence, some being absorbed by other beings, some being dissipated into the environment, others hanging around to "haunt" the places where the individual lived and/or died, and others being moved on to inhabit another person?
I don't have answers. I've got questions that have developed over time as I left being a monist and then a dualist until I've become a pluralist.
We base so much of our thought on the matter and energy we know and experience: we now know there are four kinds of "forces," that govern the subatomic and classical-level worlds and give rise to the 115-plus elements and all their isotopes.
But only comparatively recently have we realized that all that matter and energy we know and experience is about 5 percent of what exists in the universe, and there is something, and perhaps it is really several somethings, that we call Dark Matter, and that it makes up several times more of the universe than does our "ordinary" matter. And then, most recently, we've discovered the apparent existence of what we call Dark Energy--and we really have no clue as to what that is, but that it apparently makes up more than two-thirds of the universe.
What happens to "us" when we die? Maybe nothing, maybe lots of things. I believe parts of me have gone on from the past and will go on into the future. But I have no idea how, nor why, nor even if its actually true. And a lot of our arguing is pointless because we don't know very much about our universe, and we don't even look at "ourselves" in the right way to understand.
Apologies: end of philosophical rant.
