This is a good question SLI, and I'll try and be helpful and constructive here.
As a rational materialist I'm a firm believer in reincarnation. I think it's not only plausible but provable. Unfortunately I think that it's not the reincarnation that many imagine it to be. To talk about it, I need to take us back to Africa.
Religions have been interested in the survival of self in some form since at least the
Epic of Gilgamesh -- so 2150-2000 BCE. There are lots of different stories about how the self survives, but for me the foundational one comes from ancient Egypt.
The ancient Egyptians believed that our self breaks into five pieces: a body, a
šwt (shadow), a
ba (personality or soul), a
ka (life-force), and a
name. The
ba was effectively the mind, and they located it in the heart, not the brain. After death, different pieces could go in different directions at will, but the ultimate goal of the faithful was to rejoin their
ba and
ka and become immortal.
Preservation of the original body was essential to provide a home for the
ba and
ka, which is why they'd mummify the bodies of kings and priests -- but even the poor looked forward to having a mumified body, thanks to the dry desert air. After death the mummies would be symbolically re-animated by a priest -- but they were more used as a fetish for some symbolic body in the after-life than trying to get the old body to move again. This thinking isn't reincarnation because it's not literally 'being made flesh again', but it's awfully close. The burial of goods with the dead was meant to furnish their after-lives with real property -- and the Chinese do this today too, using paper symbols for money and goods. I don't know of any Egyptian stories of mummies coming back to life, but I find it hard to imagine that they didn't have them. It'd take a very unusual mind to look at a mummified body surrounded by burial goods and not imagine it moving.
What's most interesting to me about this thinking is how the self splits up. I don't know, but I imagine that if I were an ancient Egyptian I'd identify my 'self' with my
ba and name and shadow. The
ka would be a commodity -- I'd prefer my own, but perhaps any
ka could do. My
šwt is the image of my body, and I'd like to keep that to remind me of my own shape. My
ba is what I know to be me, and my name is what
others know to be me. If I were to go mad I'd be a name without a
ba, perhaps. Or if I were outcast I'd be a
ba without a name -- both terrible plights to suffer. And if I died and my
ka were lost, I'd be a mind without a life -- a ghost perhaps able to see lives but miserably unable to enjoy one. Even worse.
I think that Egyptian thinking is foundational because it highlights all the problems that we have to think about regarding death: What happens to my mind? What happens to my animating spark? What happens to my
name or social identity -- my relationships and status? What about my shape? What about the comforts I accumulated in life?
Reincarnation tells several different stories depending on which culture you ask -- and even within the same culture there can be robust differences of opinion:
- You can come back in the same body, or a different one;
- You may keep your possessions and comforts, or not;
- Your mind comes back intact; or
- Your mind comes back, but it forgets most of what it knew; your personality and moral identity (your reputation with the gods, the powers of fate etc... -- essentially your true name) are preserved
- Neither your mind nor your personality come back, but your moral identity is preserved; or
- Your mind comes back, but your moral identity is reset -- you get a new name, and are free from any bad reputation you accumulated in your last life; or
- Nothing is preserved except the ka spark which animated you; or
- You don't get another body so it's not reincarnation, but otherwise one of the above things happens to the rest of you anyway.
As a materialist I'm obliged to acknowledge that our body changes our mind. The ageing process that occurs, the way we lay down memories mean that I cannot recover the child-mind I once was -- I can only remember it with growing dimness. As we age we lose memories, thought function, our sense of humour. We literally lose the minds we had... and should we grow old enough we lose our minds entirely.
For this reason I can't credit any form of afterlife that preserves mind intact, because we can't even preserve it in life. But also as a materialist I realise that our minds leave records -- in our art and philosophy, say -- and the records of minds can be fascinating. So I think that
part of our minds can reincarnate -- just not the whole of them.
That leaves what happens to my moral identity (my "name" if you will) and my life-spark.
I think that in some social sense, your society preserves your name for you -- for a while, at least. In the statues and images of leaders we reincarnate their moral identities. In family albums and heirlooms we give ourselves something to heap praise or calumny upon. Granddad's ormolu clock becomes the reincarnation of grandfather's name. Shakespeare's name reincarnates on every print of his plays and poems, and on every print of this rather swish, if balding, portrait.
So to my materialist's eye, parts of our minds can reincarnate and so do our names -- sometimes together as with Shakespeare, and sometimes separately -- e.g. in statues and family records where you get the name, but not the mind.
But the moral identity itself mutates according to our growing myths about a person, and preserving the myths about all our dead is a growing burden. Some (like historians and geneology enthusiasts) shoulder that burden willingly, but many don't really bother. In consequence, your name eventually mutates in what it means to people, and eventually your own society and culture move on and much of what's said about you becomes lies... or in the worst case your name becomes just an entry in a book somewhere, or a mark upon a gravestone, a plaque on some wall -- devoid of meaning entirely.
That just leaves the
ka and rationalistically, I don't care about the
ka. I borrow the atoms of my body from so much other life -- plants and dead animals and maggots and beetles and squillions of bacteria, and atoms that have perhaps never been part of life before -- and all of those atoms are borrowed. I only lease them. The energy that lets them connect and reconnect isn't my energy, yet for a while it animates me and allows me to have mind and name. But then that energy goes and does other things that are unrelated to life -- the energy of those atoms help to create weather, or soil, or sea or fossils or whatever else.
For this reason I don't see the energy of life as special -- it's just a phase of energy. Life is special to me, but only because I have mind. But I couldn't have the energy of my life if it weren't for the energy of non-life around me -- and some of that non-life was once living, so I really need to be grateful to the once-living for now being dead. If they weren't dead, I couldn't live at all. And meanwhile I need to be reconciled to my own destruction of body and mind and name, because it will give other bodies and minds and names a chance to experience a life that they can enjoy, as I enjoy mine.
So since I'm talking to authors-aspirant, I can wish you all a cordial reincarnation -- or several, in fact. I hope that the better parts of your mind reincarnate in writings that people will treasure through multiple reprints. I hope that your name will reincarnate in your writings and images, and that people will heap praise and not calumny on it. I hope that when you die (and not too soon) your
ka breaks into a million pieces of life and unlife, and gives countless beings their own chance at life, and that they are somehow dimly grateful for your own gracious death allowing them to live.
