I did get messed up by some anxiety and have these thoughts rolling through my head so I’ll leave it at cosmic horror warning.
spoiler
I’m not religious but I have thoughts about experiencing consciousness and what it is. I say that consciousness is independent of memory because we forget, clearly dependent on our physical body, etc. generally I do say that we don’t know consciousness so maybe it can be reconstructed (in the can’t rule out the possibility way)
So I can see scenarios were my conscious could pop into existence without my memories after I die (as I’m writing this I realized that’s nothing to fear).
I am trying to adopt healthier mindset of looking at everything in life as a quest, new things are a call to action, and that it’s okay if everything I do amounts to little in x number of years (worked out okay for ozymandias, right?).
Im probably just rambling because my life has got boring and monotonous along with actual fear of American politics.
Buddhist here. We have the teaching of “non-self”, that no self can be found anywhere in our experience. There is no “me” in the present moment, so there is no self whose continuity must be maintained. There are just the different elements of experience arising and falling away. There is just a causal connection between the past life and the present life, no enduring self dies or is born. Similar to the Ship of Theseus. This is the Buddhist understanding.
Hinduism and Jainism on the other hand assert that there is a self.
i too am a long time lay practictioner of tibetan buddhsm, That is the real answer.
And to add, The Buddhists themselves don’t really focus on the reincarnation aspect as much as one would think, its only ever really something that comes up incidentally like when enough connections about something come together in the right ways to warrant the question that maybe a past life is returning.
A reincarnated someone would be similar to someone who by their entirety of their atoms to their thoughts, seems to be like this other collection of thoughts and atoms.
Like the process of identifying the dalai lama is basically for the people searching to hone in on the schema of a dalai lama through any way they can and then when someone matches it they do their tests which are essentially to check if their actions are similar to that of the previous ones.
The way in which memory of psst lives works is much like lucid dreaming upon your death bed, you go to sleep with awareness of the changing reality and then the dream you end up in preferably made with an intentional choice becomes one solid line of remembrance which leads to kids who remember their past lives directly.