Skip Navigation
29 comments
  • I don’t believe in it in the traditional sense, but I do have a feeling that there’s something deeply mysterious about our minds and consciousness. I wouldn’t claim with absolute certainty that death is the end of experience.

    Take general anesthesia, for example - it’s one of the closest things to dying that we can experience and still return from. What does it feel like? Nothing. By definition, it cannot be experienced. You might have been under for ten hours, but from your perspective, you simply go from feeling drowsy to waking up in another room, with no sense of time having passed in between. You can only experience being, not not-being.

    Who’s to say something similar doesn’t happen when you die? Your experience could simply continue elsewhere. Whether it happens instantly or after a ten-thousand-year gap is irrelevant - because from the standpoint of your subjective experience, it would feel instantaneous. We could take this even further and consider the possibility that consciousness is something universal - something we merely tap into rather than generate individually. In that case, who’s to say you weren’t “born” this morning into this already existing body, complete with prior memories of a past life, simply continuing from where “someone else” left off?

  • I don't necessarily believe in it, but I have had the thought that if it was real the reason it hasn't been proven could very well be that it's super duper hard to come back as a human and not as, like, a protozoa or even be on Earth. The universe is pretty damn huge; possibly infinite. The chances of coming back as the same thing in the same place are exceptionally small.

  • I've sort of always believed in reincarnation, though I can't recall the first time I was introduced to the concept. I feel like the universe is very cyclical, so why not reincarnation? Although I guess I'm not sure how much of us gets "carried over" into the next life. What makes us "us"? What part of us would be passed on to the next life? I definitely feel like I've been here before, though it would be hard to explain why, and perhaps I'm just mistaking that feeling.

29 comments