A conversation and musings…
I was having a conversation with someone very dear to me. She´s been through a lot and I proud to say I love her. We were talking among other things about out ideas on death and reincartion. We were both sorta Wiccan once. We´re both sorta pagan now. I identify as an eclectic pagan. My original idea of reincaration was that when one is in another life if they choose to search for their past life and if the past life chooses to show itself the person will learn of it. After she had talked to her significant other about it (hes a Druid) he put in in a way I hadnt thought about but realize that it is a more comforting and logical way of thinking about it.
It goes like this: “That when we die, we become enlightened, and we see all our past lives. Then we decide what we want to experience next.”
Im not entirely sure about the enlightened part but I do believe we reach a higher state, I just dont know if I would go so far as to call it enlightenment. But otherwise I think I completely agree with the statement but would like to add that get to know your past lives you would have a make an effort to search for them. Tonight I´ll write a post about my experience searching for past lives.
Okay, so here goes.
The thing is that this ‘we’ that’s supposed to be moving from one life to the rest doesn’t seem to actually exist. In the last couple decades neurology has identified all of the qualities attributed to an immaterial soul as definite functions of the brain. So ‘we’ you speak of is just whatever the specific pattern of information in our heads happens to be doing at any given time, and when we die that pattern decays into a meaningless jumble of meat, and the sense of awareness that it was generating as it processed information ceases to exist.