I understand what you are saying and what I believe are some of the best explanations for reincarnation comes from Buddhism. I might be biased because I first seriously explored the concept of reincarnation when studying Buddhism. Nonetheless, it certainly isn't a simple concept and it takes some time to really grasp what is being said in Buddhist circles. Keep in mind that there are several "schools" of Buddhism and you have to be aware that they all have different "flavors" of thought.
Anyways, going back to your original questions... "Why don't I remember the past ones?" "Why do I remember the one that I'm experiencing right now?"
I believe that it can actually be possible to be ignorant of our past lives and somehow "we" continue to persist throughout time independent of what appears to be our material circumstances. Not remembering being conscious during a previous lifetime does not prove or even imply there wasn't one. In fact, it could be possible that we are simply perceiving our consciousness wrong in the first place.
Buddhism inherited their beliefs from Hindu thought. Siddharta Gautma, the founder of Buddhism, came from a school of Hinduism that taught that we had an "atman" or a "soul". Generally, when people speak of Reincarnation, they are generically presuming that there is some kind of "soul substance" that is unchanging, eternal, and somehow seperate from the material universe. This type of soul is what Hindus in the Buddha's time taught existed. Buddhism is unique in that they deny the existence of this kind of "soul", and yet somehow they are still capable of supporting a belief in reincarnation. But how?
In the modern world, we often assume that our consciousness is something that springs forth only from our brains. This is pretty common place and I don't have many reasons to believe it is not true. It is not, however, something which you can easily prove is true.
In order to see why it might not be true, it can be helpful to "see" how somebody like Siddharta Gautama would have viewed consciousness. Afterall, what is so special about the brain that makes it capable of producing something as profound as consciousness? What is consciousness itself? What if "consciousness" is actually a phenomenon that persists throughout time and is somehow independent of our brain?
I'm stealing this quote from Wikipedia where it describes our consciousness like "the flame of a dying candle lighting up another. The consciousness in the newly born being is neither identical to nor entirely different from that in the deceased but the two form a causal continuum or stream in this Buddhist theory."
In other words, they're describing a "persistent state" of consciousness that flows through time in a manner that is similar to a flame. If you analyze the components of a flame, you will see that it does not appear to be composed of parts that are either eternal or unchanging. We are still able to recognize a substance that we can refer to as a "flame", however. Therefore, going back to your original questions, we may simply not have access to memories of our past lives because it was "burnt up" so to speak. Our consciousness, however, may still be persisting from one brain to the next.
In this sense, consciousness is a phenomenon that travels through time like a "stream". The interesting thing about Buddhism is that they had a fairly scientific approach to reality from the beginning. They often analyzed what we call the mind by analyzing it's components. They referred to the various "aggregate parts" of the mind as "Skandas". I'd be lying if I said I fully understood everything from a Buddhist perspective, but the more I live the more I have come to appreciate this school of thought. Truthfully, it blows my mind that anyone that lived 2500 years ago was capable of thinking in these terms without access to modern knowledge.
I agree with this. What are the odds of all of this happening in the first place? Was it simply chance? That can be hard to believe. In a lot of ways, it seems kind of stupid to believe our universe came into existence simply due to chance. Not to mention that it seems equally strange that there could be something rather than nothing.
Yes some of the greatest minds were already alive thousand years ago. I think that's because we didn't evolve at all in this short period of time. Society evolved, technology evolved, our lifestyles changed, but we didn't changed a bit.
All these questions get asked more often now because we're all educated, we share knowledge faster than ever with the internet, we have more time for ourselves to contemplate the world than a poor peasant had in the Middle Ages.
It's good to know though that even in those times, it was possible to have a mindset of a today's human.
Now to get back on the Buddhist view of consciousness. I still can't get a grasp of how a stream of consciousness would work. But as you said it's not a simple concept so I apologize in advance.
From your Wikipedia quote, it seems like consciousness is hereditary. It's obviously not because parents and children do not share the same consciousness.
Does the Buddhist see consciousness as an "awareness of existence" (what we're talking about here) or something completely different ?
Because what bothers me is just being aware. If my "soul" is one day reincarnated in somebody else but I don't get to feel it, then I don't care. I just don't want to be awake.
To repeat my point in my previous post :
If this line represents the stream of consciousness : <---------------------------------->
And this bar represents my awareness of being alive at a given time : I
Why am I here today : <-----------------------I------->
And not here : <------I----------------------->
Or in any other places !
Why right now I am not experiencing my life as a farmer growing wheat for a Lord in the Middle Ages. Why am I not experiencing my life as a Pirate on his ship on the search of his lost treasure. Or maybe my life in some billions years from now as an alien in another galaxy.
There is no reason why if I was already conscious in the past, that I feel conscious only now, and not at any other moments.
If memories do burn, I shouldn't be conscious at all. All my lives should pass in a flash without me noticing it, like the 14 billion years of the universe that I didn't feel before coming into this world.
I don't believe in souls isolated from the materialistic world. It raises too much questions which can be answered easily if consciousness is considered as matter or energy.
For exemple : Why souls, where are they, how much of them is there ? Why some souls will never experience the world and some will ? Why wait 14 billion years ?
Why some souls are already reincarnated when others didn't even lived once yet ! Not fair.
I think this is all a human way to find some peace with the fact that we're truly not here for a purpose.
I believe in random. I think it's natural for us human beings to reject the random. It's weird, scary, incomprehensible. Even I reject it sometimes.
I say to myself : It's impossible, there must be a reason to all of this. Did everything I did in my life was so pointless ? This can't be the end of everything, certainly after my death I will meet some dude that will explain to me that it was all a prank for their TV show !
But think of it that way. If there's a reason, and we're stuck here forever, that's horrible. I don't want that. I don't want to be a prisoner of some endless cycle. I want eternal peace.
The only one true mystery for now is indeed : Why is there a Universe at all. Doesn't matter how it appeared, but why it appeared in the first place, as you said.
Well, maybe the answer is right in front of us, only we humans aren't able to perceive it with our current mental composition.
It's like trying to think of a color that doesn't exist in our visible light's spectrum. It's impossible. But other colors could exist, we just don't perceive them. Like dark matter.
Same goes for the answer of the Universe. We can't picture it. But it's here.
I think there is a way of creating a conscious being artificially. Don't know if our species will reach that stage, but the tools are there in the Universe.
What we won't be able to predict is WHO will be conscious in the mind we've just created.
Just like me or you, who was born, the random puzzle of atoms that made our brain resulted in my or your consciousness to be awaken.
Maybe the actual consciousness that is awaken when a specific set of unique atoms are put together comes from some dark energy floating around us, emitting waves that are picked up by the receptors in our brains.
And our consciousness is found at a certain wavelength that only specific receptors can pick up. If you add up these parameters, there is no way of being conscious in another mind than ours.
Really, sometimes I wonder why we debate on all this stuff. I should just die already. No more worries ^^.
