An Atheist's Reincarnation

Who am “I”? Throughout life I am taught that “I” am my thoughts, opinions, impulses, and unique physical embodiment. The question is though, are those what define who “I” am?

Am “I” my thoughts? If you take away my thoughts, am “I” still “me”? If you take away my ability to think, am “I” still “me”?

Am “I” this physical embodiment that I currently experience? If you take away my sensory organs, am “I” still “me”? If I cannot experience, am I still “me”?

Am “I” my impulses? If I lose that which controls my impulses, am “I” still “me”?

If you take away all these things, yet I am still known by my name, am “I” still “me”?

What am “I”? Which fundamental quality about “me”, here and now, cannot be taken away without “I” no longer existing?

Am “I” my thoughts, opinions, impulses, and unique physical embodiment, or am “I” still “me” without any distinguishable qualities? Am “I” still “me” without the sensations I am familiar with?

If you alter my DNA, am “I” still “me”? Do I cease to exist? Am I no longer “me” but someone else?

Which specific quality of “me” is “mine” and nobody else’s?

If I start listening to another style of music, am I no longer me?

If my taste in food changes, am I no longer me? Am I somebody else?

Is there something permanent about “me” that tethers “me” to myself?

I am always changing, biologically, mentally, and physically. At which specific point in time was I “me”?

Was I “me” in the past and now I am someone else, or am I “me” now and someone else in the past?

If you take away all these things, am I still not “me”? Do “I” not still “exist” in some “form”?

Is there a specific “form” I must be in for “me” to exist?

If you take all the things that define “me” and look past them to discover their fundamental parts, what am “I”?

Am “I” not a collection of matter and energy?

If you take everything in this universe and look past its surface, every person, rock, and molecule, is it not just matter and energy?

Once you have looked past the surface of what your eyes tell you, can you distinguish where I end, and you begin?

Are “you” and “I” just a sensory illusion? Are “you” and “I” just a part of the whole?

Are “you” and “I” not an extension of existence indefinitely becoming? Experiencing itself from different points in space and time? As the bird? The fly? The bear? The wolf? The yet to “be” and the what is no more?

Were we ever born? Do we ever die? Was there ever a beginning or an end, except to form?

Perhaps we do not have individual souls but are in fact a part of one soul. One being. One happening. One body. Physically. Biologically.

Karma Redefined

Once “we” realize we are just an extension of “the one” (the total existence, the one “being”, the one “happening”) we see the importance of karma and its effects on “us” in this incarnation and future ones.

The actions we take here and now will influence the environment for the future, for better or worse. A future that we may play a part in and experience the effects of. A life more hellish or more heavenly, dependent on our collective decisions. Perhaps heaven and hell are not places defined by a god but rather words to define the quality of the state of our current existence.

A future where we will not know our past selves or retain any memories of past incarnations, as the faculties that retain memories decay and we do not have individual souls, but will experience the results of our past nonetheless as the collective of all previous happenings.

Karma is collectively shared by all of “us”, as “we” are all part of the “one happening”. The pleasant and unpleasant actions of those in the past bleeding into the future that we all share.