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.
I’m going to make a guess that majority of people looking at this question have grown up in countries with Christian cultural background. Meaning even if they aren’t religious, their more or less subconscious believes about the nature of reality may involve some vague ideas about souls, absolute good and evil and so on. Separate entities in a hierarchical world. From that perspective, reincarnation is never going to sound anything but magical.
But if you drop your belief in you as a separate entity, literally everything is a “reincarnation” of you, if you want to use that word. But it’s not the “you” that you think you are. Reality is prior to your thought about it, as thoughts are just imperfect reflections of reality.
You get a disconnect when you try to take a concept like reincarnation from a thought-framework such as Buddhism, without being REALLY FUCKING INTIMATELY STEEPED IN IT, and then try to fit it into whatever dualistic worldview you’re likely holding in this largely Chisto-capitalistic world that is hell bent on making sure you always feel separate, alone and not enough.
It really is like taking a power plug from the EU and then being surprised it doesn’t fit in the socket in the USA. And then going off about what a stupid design EU has while not ever even considering if the socket is even meant to receive that kind of a plug (because in YOUR opinion, your socket must be perfect in every way and could never ever be questioned).
Get Waking Up by Sam Harris… Or read Adyashanti, Rupert Spira, Loch Kelly, Jayasara, Kiran Trace, Christopher Wallis, Bernardo Kastrup, many more. It’s all available out there but unfortunately a lot gets dismissed because “nooo muh materialistic worldview that is required for the current capitalistic hellscape that’s slowly destroying our world can’t possibly be wrong”. So many people are pushing the collective cart towards doom, complain about the doom and the cart but never question what they so deeply believe that they won’t just stop pushing.