Faith: "When I die, my consciousness, shorn of the shameful baggage of ego, will manifest itself in the form of another conscious being. I know this to be true from the many anomalous 'past-life' flashbacks that have intruded unbidden upon my train of thought since my earliest childhood. The future will be similar, though more defined, clearer, with each successive incarnation, as the process of spiritual evolution continues to enhance my soul."
Doubt: "Rubbish - purest wishful thinking. When you die - when anyone dies - that's it. Your consciousness is snuffed out; it ceases forever. It's around for one lifetime - and then oblivion. There's no 'Heaven', no 'reincarnation', no 'nirvana' or 'Valhalla'. What happens to your consciousness after you die is an eternity of nothingness, but as you're not conscious of that, it's not a problem."
The doubt lingers, but its lessening over time. Those exomnesiac flashbacks, incongruous familiarities, are strong, and real. They exist in my subjective conscious experience, I savour them several times a week. You cannot deny them, any more than I can describe how you react to the sensations of walking along a sandy beach. Our qualia are locked away in our individual minds.
Our Western, rationalist culture - built on top of an earlier religious culture that had no concept of reincarnation - beats back interest in such ideas. Christianity uses the notion of body/spirit dualism to hold that on death, we leave the material world and our souls (as a reward for leading a good life), and ascend into Heaven, a realm entirely separate from the atoms and galaxies that make up our Universe. There, after one short life, we bask in God's presence for evermore. I am more inclined to believe in one realm, one Universe, unfolding, through which consciousness flows, evolving to higher planes, over the aeons, until All is in God, and God is in All.
What if I'm wrong? Pascal's Wager comes into play. If I'm wrong, I face an eternity of nothingness, but not being around to observe that nothingness - there's no problem.
But if I'm right, the chances are the 'I' won't even know about it, the ego being stripped away from consciousness at the body's death, the pure consciousness experiencing only familiar yet unworldly echoes of my current life. Although I'd expect the flashbacks to become stronger and more regular in future incarnations, squeezing out the doubt over time. And confirming that our souls - our consciousnesses - are in a state of continuous spiritual evolution.
The exomnesiac flashbacks are always pleasant to have; they serve as an spiritual anchor for me - "ah, here's another one", old, familiar, treasured - a qualia memory from another life in another time. Sometime they come as dreams, but I find it folly trying to piece together that other life (those other lives) from dreams. "My name was so-and-so, and I lived in _______, and did this, this and that. Not the point; this is a futile chase, a spurious direction of enquiry.
In my early adulthood, I would be interested 'who' I was in 'my' past life; looking for names, places, dates; I found vague traces. The dawn of the internet helped. But I've learned to let that go - it's something far more subtle. Something too hard for our brains to pin down. Maybe - in the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics, I'm somehow detecting traces of a parallel universe. Who knows.
Dreams that include disjunctive cognitions (when two or more clashing facts come together, such as taking a bus with my late father from Ealing to Góra Kalwaria to see the Jewish ritual bath there, changing buses at Shepherd's Bush, for example) suggest that there is something far stranger going on during our dreams that just routine 'clear-outs' of memory. [Incidentally, my dream diary is coming on nicely; making sense of it all will take many years!]
The more rigorously I examine these phenomena I experience, the less far-fetched they are (rejecting a literal reincarnation theory), the better I can describe them (flavour, frequency, vividness and duration), the less room I have for doubt.
This annual series of Lenten blog posts serves to show how my thinking, and indeed how my beliefs, are evolving over the years. In particular, how I see the phenomenon of exomnesia, those 'foreign memories' that are an intrinsic part of the subjective conscious experience of being me.
Those echoes of faint familiarity imply connectivity and continuity; they are an endless metaphysical thread linking the distant past to the very distant future.
This time last year:
Build your own religion: the trappings of faith
This time four years ago:
Health: duty of care
This time five years ago:
Cognitive bias in the search for God
This time six years ago:
A spiritual frame of mind
This time seven years ago:
Sunday in the City
This time eight years ago:
God's teachings
This time 12 years ago:
A week into Lent
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