lambdaphagy:

polyaletheia:

davidsevera:

One idea I’m surprised I’ve never seen some religion propose is that there is only one soul, endlessly reincarnated. For instance, every person (or every living being) has the same soul at some point in its progression. Perhaps the soul begins as the vilest human or the basest animal and slowly works its way towards enlightenment each generation. Then it becomes divine. Obviously this would involve a time traveling soul that could incarnate in ancient Greece and then modern China and back again. The advantage is that anything good or bad you do, you do to yourself, which is a powerful incentive if you believe. Downside is you’re Hitler.

This idea occurred to me as a child (except without the vile/enlightened thing). It caused me to worry not about being Hitler but about being Jews in death camps and other sufferers.

Of course, if the soul time-travels, a more plausible theory is that you reincarnate as yourself, and live the same life exactly the same way, over and over eternally. This is Nietzsche’s thought experiment: if you were convinced that were true, how would you live your life?

This had occurred to me too as a kid.  It is a possible response to the seemingly sensible question “why am I myself, and not e.g. Julius Caesar?  Why do I experience the consciousness of this person in particular?” 

One of the things I like about this concept is that by stacking lived human lives on top of one another, it makes viscerally obvious, in a way that few things do, just how many people exist and have existed.  Imagine just how much experience you would have if this were true, and just how tiny your current life would be in comparison to your larger existence.  It gives me the chills.

(Of course, for this idea to be true you would have to forget everything between lifetimes, and your personality would have to change enough for you to produce the behavior each person you inhabit, and at that point it makes it hard to say what it would even mean for the idea to be “true.”  If I die and then wake up as Julius Caesar, would I “notice”?)

(via lambdaphagy)