Not-Self, Rebirth, & Life After Death

Reflections of a Secular Buddhist

Photo by Pk Kashyap on Unsplash

The “self” or “conscious person” — whatever that is —seemingly continues from moment to moment. The individual takes on a persona, consisting of their memories, emotions, and habits. The self or person is, in some sense, real but is also an illusion. It is an illusion that emanates from clinging to the seemingly enduring aggregates (skandhas).

The aggregates (skandhas) are:

1. the material form or body
2. sensation or feeling
3. perception
4. saṃskāra (conditioned actions, habits, or dispositions)
5. consciousness

These aggregates act together to fuel (upādāna) the illusion of self. The more one clings to them, the more one’s sense of self is engrained. Clinging (upādāna) to these aggregates is what fuels the illusion of self. The more one lets go of them, the more they will lose their sense of self. The self is an epiphenomenon that arises from these aggregates. It is an emergent phenomenon that results from clinging to the aggregates. The self as an emergent phenomenon is real. Nevertheless, the self is illusory in the sense that it has no essence.

Am I now really the same person that I was ten years ago? I don’t think so, and I would hope that no one identifies me with that person. There were times in my life when I let sexual depravity, ignorance, and hate gain control of the way I behaved. I habitually behaved in unethical ways and was controlled by negative habits that had developed into compulsions. There was a time when I had lost self-control. Is the person that I was then, at my lowest point, the same person I am now? I don’t behave the same way, I don’t believe the same things, and I don’t even feel the same way. I’m a completely different person now! One factor that gives the illusion that I am the same person is the fact that I am in the same body. But this too is an illusion! This is not the same body that I had ten years ago! Every single cell in my body has been replaced. Well, then, maybe it is my memories that make the old me the same me as the new me. But I don’t have the same memories as the old me either. Even the shared memories are not the same memories. Memories are just stored data in the brain, but that data is kind of like a Word document on a computer. Every time it is opened, it can be edited. When it is re-saved, data can be added or lost. This is why eye-witnesses are notoriously unreliable in courts of law. People often don’t remember events accurately; and the more they are asked to recollect, the more their memory changes. It is well known that recovered-memory therapy can lead to false-memory syndrome. When one undergoes hypnosis to recover a memory, the individual becomes open to suggestion and the therapist can quite easily insert new details into the patient’s existing memories. It is even possible for the therapist to create new memories from scratch that are entirely false. When we reach a certain age, our brains will start to fail and memories will get deleted or become unrecoverable as dementia sets in. Was my grandfather less my grandfather when his memories of me faded? Or maybe memories are not what makes us us either. The conscious self, our awareness, in conjunction with our memories, habits, our body, and the aggregates, all clinging together, causes the emergence of the self. The self is real but not really real. A puddle is just a bunch of molecules of water clinging together and the puddle ceases to exist when the water molecules stop clinging to each other. The self or the person is just a puddle and the aggregates are its water molecules. While the parts are lumped together, it is useful to behave as if the puddle or the person is real, but the puddle and the person are illusory in terms of ultimate reality.

Perhaps we can gain some insight into the Buddhist concept of rebirth here. A core Buddhist doctrine is anātman (not-self) — the doctrine that the “self” or “soul” (ātman) does not really exist. The Buddhist concept of rebirth, consequently, is quite different from the Hindu concept of reincarnation or the transmigration of souls. There is no soul to transmigrate to a new body. According to Buddhism, it is not you that is reborn. The self — the person or the soul — does not get reincarnated. It is not the self that persists, but life. It is karma and life that continues, not the self. A secular Buddhist interpretation of the doctrine of rebirth could turn reincarnation into a metaphor. The doctrine of rebirth is threefold in my interpretation: (1) we are constantly being born again in this life as we change over time, (2) we live on after death through the ways our actions have affected the world around us, and (3) since the self is illusory it makes no sense to distinguish our consciousness from that of those who are born after us, so we can see ourselves as being reborn in them.

My personality today is totally different from what it was ten years ago. My habits have changed, my dispositions and emotional reactions to things are different, my memories have been altered, and every single cell in my body has been replaced. There is a constant process of rebirth taking place. I have been born again as a new person and I will continue to change forever. Do I cease to exist when I die? Yes and no. Yes, insofar as the illusion of self ceases; but, no, insofar as the components that created me continue to exist. Does the puddle continue to exist when it dries up? or does it cease to exist? The answer is both. The puddle, the illusory emergent phenomenon whereby the many water molecules appear to be a single thing, ceases to exist, but the thing-in-itself lives on insofar as all the water molecules continue to exist. When Buddhists speak of karma, they mean the law of cause-and-effect — actions have consequences. The Buddha taught that every existing thing is conditioned by other things. My actions now will have reactions that determine the course of future events. Our karma will affect those who come after us. If we do things that destroy the planet, the people who live after us will suffer as a result. If we build a sustainable utopia on Earth, the people who live after us will have much happier lives. In some sense, we live on through the lasting effects that our behaviors have on the world around us. If the self is not real, what basis do I have for drawing a clear distinction between myself and those who come after me? In essence, we are all identical. We have our anatmanic nature in common. We are all fundamentally the same in essence. You and I are essentially the same. I am fundamentally the same as the people that will be born after me. If the self does not exist, then it is a mistake to assume that my self differs from the self of the next person to be born after I die. In some sense, we can see ourselves reborn in every other sentient creature that comes after us.

Something analogous to a secular Buddhist interpretation of rebirth can be found in Thomas W. Clark’s Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity. Clark starts by pointing out the absurdity of atheists who speak of nothingness as if it were a thing, who say that when we die nothing exists. Nothing does not exist, by definition. When we die, something exists — it is us who cease to exist. There is no nothingness. Thomas Clark makes the following argument:

“First is the initially somewhat surprising fact that, from our point of view as subjects of experience, there are no gaps during the course of our conscious lives. Despite the fact that we are frequently and regularly unconscious (asleep, perhaps drugged, knocked out, etc.) these unconscious periods do not represent subjective pauses between periods of consciousness. That is, for the subject there is an instantaneous transition from the experience preceding the unconscious interval to the experience immediately following it. On the operating table we hear ourselves mumble our last admonition to the anesthesiologist not to overdo the pentathol and the next instant we are aware of the fluorescent lights in the recovery room. Or we experience a last vague thought before falling asleep and the next experience (barring a dream, another sort of experience) is hearing the neighbor’s dog at 6 a.m. As much as we know that time has passed, nevertheless for us there has been no gap or interval between the two experiences which bracket a period of unconsciousness. I will call this fact about experience “personal subjective continuity”.

Next, note that this continuity proceeds from our first experience as a child until the instant of death. For the subject, life is a single block of experience, marked by the rhythm of days, weeks, months, and years, and highlighted by personal and social watersheds. Although it may seem obvious and even tautological, for the purposes of what follows I want to emphasize that during our lives we never find ourselves absent from the scene. We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or “undergone” a period of unconsciousness, but of course this is impossible. For the subject, awareness is constant throughout life; the “nothingness” of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.

But what about the time periods before and after this subjectively continuous block of experience, that is, before birth and after death? Don’t these represent some sort of emptiness or “blank” for the subject, since, after all, it doesn’t exist in either? To think that they might, as I’ve pointed out, is to confuse non-existence with a state that we somehow primitively subsist in, as an impotent ego confronted with blackness. Certainly we don’t ordinarily think of the time before we come into existence as an abyss from which we manage to escape; we simply find ourselves present in the world. We cannot contrast the fact of being conscious with some prior state of non-experience.

The same is true of the time after death. There will be no future personal state of non-experience to which we can compare our present state of being conscious. All we have, as subjects, is this block of experience. We know, of course, that it is a finite block, but since that’s all we have, we cannot experience its finitude. As much as we can know with certainty that this particular collection of memories, desires, intentions, and habits will cease, this cessation will not be a concrete fact for us, but can only be hearsay, so to speak. Hence (and this may start to sound a little fishy) as far as we’re concerned as subjects, we’re always situated here in the midst of experience.

Even given all this, when we imagine our death being imminent (a minute or two away, let us suppose) it is still difficult not to ask the questions “What will happen to me?” or “What’s next?”, and then anticipate the onset of nothingness. It is extraordinarily tempting to project ourselves — this locus of awareness — into the future, entering the blackness or emptiness of non-experience. But since we’ve ruled out nothingness or non-experience as the fate of subjectivity what, then, are plausible answers to such questions? The first one we can dispense with fairly readily. The “me” characterized by personality and memory simply ends. No longer will experience occur in the context of such personality and memory. The second question (“What’s next?”) is a little trickier, because, unless we suppose that my death is coincident with the end of the entire universe, we can’t responsibly answer “nothing.” Nothing is precisely what can’t happen next. What happens next must be something, and part of that something consists in various sorts of consciousness. In the very ordinary sense that other centers of awareness exist and come into being, experience continues after my death. This is the something (along with many other things) which follows the end of my particular set of experiences.

Burgess suggests, when facing death, that “concerning oneself with a world that is soon to fade out like a television image in a power cut seems mere frivolity.” But we know, as persons who have survived and witnessed, perhaps, the death of others, that the world does not fade out. It continues on in all sorts of ways, including the persistence of our particular subjective worlds. Death ends individual subjectivities while at the same time others are continuing or being created.

As I tried to make clear above, subjectivities — centers of awareness — don’t have beginnings and endings for themselves, rather they simply find themselves in the world. From their perspective, it’s as if they have always been present, always here; as if the various worlds evoked by consciousness were always “in place.” Of course we know that they are not always in place from an objective standpoint, but their own non-being is never an experienced actuality for them. This fact, along with the fact that other subjectivities succeed us after we die, suggests an alternative to the intuition of impending nothingness in the face of death. (Be warned that this suggestion will likely seem obscure until it gets fleshed out using the thought experiment below.) Instead of anticipating nothingness at death, I propose that we should anticipate the subjective sense of always having been present, experienced within a different context, the context provided by those subjectivities which exist or come into being.

In proposing this I don’t mean to suggest that there exist some supernatural, death-defying connections between consciousnesses which could somehow preserve elements of memory or personality. This is not at all what I have in mind, since material evidence suggests that everything a person consists of — a living body, awareness, personality, memories, preferences, expectations, etc. — is erased at death. Personal subjective continuity as I defined it above requires that experiences be those of a particular person; hence, this sort of continuity is bounded by death. So when I say that you should look forward, at death, to the “subjective sense of always having been present,” I am speaking rather loosely, for it is not you — not this set of personal characteristics — that will experience “being present.” Rather, it will be another set of characteristics (in fact, countless sets) with the capacity, perhaps, for completely different sorts of experience. But, despite these (perhaps radical) differences, it will share the qualitatively very same sense of always having been here, and, like you, will never experience its cessation.

After death we won’t experience non-being, we won’t “fade to black.” We continue as the generic subjectivity that always finds itself here, in the various contexts of awareness that the physical universe manages to create. So when I recommend that you look forward to the (continuing) sense of always having been here, construe that “you” not as a particular person, but as that condition of awareness, which although manifesting itself in finite subjectivities, nevertheless always finds itself present.

… Of course we cannot completely put aside our biologically given aversion to the prospect of death, but we can ask, at its approach, why we are so attached to this context of consciousness. Why, if experience continues anyway, is it so terribly important that it continue within this set of personal characteristics, memories, and body?”

Thanks to Ted Bolha for introducing me to the idea of generic subjective continuity in his post Life After Death — A Naturalistic Conclusion.