For those who believe, how does reincarnation work?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Seeing the ads for “A Dog’s Purpose” brought this question back to the top of my brain.

So, say you believe in reincarnation. How does it work?

As soon as you die, does your soul go right into the next baby being born? Anywhere in the world?
Do you wait around in some holding area for the “right” body ?
Because the population is increasing, are there more souls being created, or are there bodies running around with no soul?
Is there a final destination? Can you get out of the cycle? How?
Is there a point in your soul’s existence that you can remember past lives?
Why can’t you remember past lives? For those that say they do, are they lying, or is there a glitch in the system?
Is there a governing agency controlling the reincarnation cycle? Is karma involved? Is there a point to it all, analogous to Christianity’s heaven, or is reincarnation just the way the universe is? A cold lonely universe, but with reincarnation.
There are millions of people that believe, yet I’ve never read or heard any description on how it “is”? I can discuss and understand heaven and hell, sin and forgiveness, eternal damnation, but reincarnation philosophy eludes my understanding. I’ve read A Dog’s Purpose and Jonathon Livingston Seagull, but I don’t think they are being sold as accurate. :slight_smile: The only person IRL I know that believed in reincarnation had her own unique philosophy that I don’t think matched anyone else’s.

If I believed, I’d probably believe there is only one soul, and it eventually lives in every body that ever existed (time has no meaning outside the universe, so time travel is no problem). It makes existence make sense. That one soul gets the totality of the human experience. Ruler and follower, killer and victim, rich and poor, famous and anonymous, the one soul experiences it all.

2

I am not an expert on this subject so I may be wrong. So at the risk of Straight Doper style ridicule I will try to be helpful from my understanding of Buddhism (other religions may have different ideas). I write this in all sincerity.

Thus I have heard:

After you die, your consciousness goes into a limbo state called the Bardo by Tibetan Buddhists for (I think but I may be wrong) for 49 or maybe 50 days (I forgot) where you have no body to inhabit. Some Buddhists believe that one’s consciousness goes into another womb right away. Some other Buddhists said that both are true because the 49 or 50 days pass so quickly that it feels like a second because without a body your sense of time is altered, and you feel very disoriented during this Bardo phase. I have heard that one feels very lonely in this stage disconnected from everything.

I use the word consciousness because Buddhists don’t believe in a soul. I think Hindus believe in a soul called Atman. This is sort of a matter of semantics depending on how you define “soul”. If you think that the soul is permanent and never changing, then no, Buddhists don’t believe that. If you want to define soul as your consciousness that does change, then you could call it a soul.

So back to your question, I have heard that Buddhists believe your next body that you will inhabit is based on your karma from your last life and previous lives. Karma means “action”, meaning whatever patterns or habits that your consciousness has created. Your tendencies of action, personalities, thought patterns, etc will determine your next birth. In your next life, your tendencies will continue.

And it is not just in this world that you may be reborn. It could be anywhere, any universe. Yeah, weird, you could be reborn in a different dimension in a different universe. I heard this from my Buddhist teacher who is a Buddhist monk that I have know for two years. This explains earth’s population issue. You could be reborn as an animal or in heaven or hell. I think there are 6 realms (I am not sure about the 6, I am just a simple layperson). Actually I have heard human rebirths are very rare. Most likely you will be born an animal. You have wait more than a trillion lifetimes before you are reborn as a human. There is a common Buddhist allegory about the rarity of a human birth. That if there was a blind turtle swimming around the world’s oceans, and every once in a while that turtle went to the surface to take a breath of air. If there was a piece of wood with a knothole floating around the oceans, the chance of a human birth is about the chances of that turtle’s head going through the knothole of that wood. There is another metaphor a granite mountain that is a mile high and a mile long, and every (I think 100 or 1000 years or so) a bird flew over the mountain and one of its feathers brushed the top of the mountain. In the time it takes for the mountain to be worn away to nothing is how long you have to wait in between human births.

As for to end this cycle of rebirth which is called samsara, you have to realize absolute reality, in other words realize your enlightenment. I heard this takes a while. Then you get to be in nirvana (not the rock band).

Your karma is the reason you are reborn or caught in this cycle of samsara.

I have heard from my teacher that people do not realize their enlightenment is because of their misidentification. He said that he doesn’t like to use the word “attachment”, and another Buddhist teacher said “attachment” is a poor translation. (The same way dukkha is poorly translated into suffering.) They mistaken their body, thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories as them when their true self is Buddha nature. In conventional reality, you are your body, thoughts, feelings, and sensations, but in absolute reality, that is not you. This misidentification is what keeps you from enlightenment and trapped in samsara. Once you realize your enlightenment, you will no longer suffer from karma.

As for remembering past lives, I have heard that is possible by intense meditation practice. My former teacher who is now in another country said that he did meditation practice using a huatou (sometimes spelled wato) for three months straight, and he remembered his past lives during a deep samadhi state.

I assume when you ask about governing agency, you were joking. That’s one of things I appreciate about Buddhism. You are in charge of your own salvation.

If you want to read more about it, I think the Tibetan Book of the Dead goes into this, and there are a lot of books on this subject.

3

“How’s your joint, George?”

4

^^^^ This.

When you finish this book, you close the cover, put it back on the shelf, and randomly select your next.

You are God in disguise — Alan Watts

God is a sense of self, superplural, as contrasted with the singular (“I”) sense of self and the plural (“we”) sense of self we’re more familiar with.

Reincarnation is not a process that transpires over time, but which transcends time, as you said.

5

Not an authority on the subject, but you have to ask “which reincarnation?” As typical with religious concepts, there seems to be lots of different versions of it.

6

Here’s a short story you might be interested in.

Which I only just noticed is by the same guy as The Martian.

7

Andy Weir is a damn good writer.

A really good novel came out back in the 70s called The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud. Quite an interesting take on the reincarnation thing.

8

One more nifty fictional presentation was “Plutonium” by Arsen Darnay. In his version, reincarnation is totally “natural,” and not supernatural at all. (Extremely counterfactual, but natural!) A material packet of memories exists after death, and is attracted toward the energy of a sperm/egg fertilization. The moral dimensions of the story are…chilling.

9

Hey, that reminds me. I’m sure some of you are familiar with the great reincarnated scientist, Archimedes Plutonium?

10

Oh, and on the reincarnation fiction front, The Dust of 100 Dogs is a good YA novel.

11

The correct answer is, “It depends”. Different sects teach different things.

Some sects teach that there is a god who judges dead souls, and sends them to their next rebirth. Other sects teach that karma is an impersonal force of nature, like gravity or magnetism. If you fall off of a cliff, gravity can be unpleasant, but gravity is not personally trying to screw you.

Some sects teach that, when you are between incarnations, you can remember your previous lives. In one of the Hindu epics, a god and a man are talking. The god says, “We have both lived countless times before. There is only one difference between us: I remember my past lives, but you do not.”

Other sects teach that there is no soul. Your body is composed of millions of atoms. Your personality is composed of millions of impulses and tendencies. When your body dies, the atoms break apart, and eventually get recycled into new bodies, but the hydrogen atom in your left foot will probably not end up in the same body as the nitrogen atom in your right hand. Likewise, your consciousness breaks apart, and the components get recycled into new personalities, but not the same one.

The vast majority of souls are in non-human bodies. Other species, and even other worlds.

Nirvana is the escape from the cycle. Some sects describe it as emptiness, or nonexistence, when one is freed from the pain and suffering of the physical world. Other sects describe it as seeing past the illusions of the physical world, and becoming one with the true reality, which humans understand about as well as an embryo understands a rainbow.

Q: What did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor?
A: Make me one with everything.

12

Somebody told the Dalai Lama that joke. He didn’t get it.

13

Ha! I don’t believe I ever read that, yet it is the same as my theory of reincarnation. Interesting!

Also interesting about souls going into non-humans. I had never thought about that.

The DL then gave the vendor a five-spot, and waited. Nothing happened. Finally he asked, where is my change? And the vendor replied, change must come from within.

14

A cowboy’s take on the subject, by Wallace McRae
(The Cowboy Curmudgeon, 1992)

“What is Reincarnation?”
A cowpoke asked his friend.
His pal replied, “It happens when
Yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair, and warsh yer neck,
And clean yer fingernails,
And lay you in a padded box
Away from life’s travails.”

“The box and you goes in a hole,
That’s been dug into the ground.
Reincarnation starts in when
Yore planted ‘neath a mound.
Them clods melt down, just like yer box,
And you who is inside.
And then yore just beginnin’ on
Yer transformation ride.”

“In a while, the grass’ll grow
Upon yer rendered mound.
Till some day on yer moldered grave
A lonely flower is found.
And say a hoss should wander by
And graze upon this flower
That once wuz you, but now’s become
Yer vegetative bower.”

“The posy that the hoss done ate
Up, with his other feed,
Makes bone, and fat, and muscle
Essential to the steed,
But some is left that he can’t use
And so it passes through,
And finally lays upon the ground
This thing that once wuz you.”

"Then say, by chance, I wanders by
And sees this upon the ground,
And I ponders, and I wonders at,
This object that I found.
I thinks of reincarnation,
Of life and death, and such,
And come away concludin, Slim,
You ain’t changed all that much.