Does some aspect of our personality survive bodily death? 

Some say no. But there are strong reasons for thinking it does. You’ll find some of them discussed later in this article. Meanwhile, here are the basic teachings of the Vedic philosophy, the teachings given by the ancient wisdom literature of India.

According to the Vedic literature, the psychophysical entity with which we now identify ourselves is not our true self. The true self is neither the body nor the mind, nor a combination of both. The Vedic sages tell us that the body and mind are but gross and subtle coverings of the self.

Underlying these temporary coverings, the real self is a spark of spiritual consciousness, eternal and unchanging but temporarily misidentifying itself with matter in the form of the body and mind. And this real self, the Vedic sages tell us, survives the death of the body and lives on.

 

If it does survive, where does it go?

• Eternal heaven or hell?
• Or perhaps we merge into some sort of spiritual oneness.

At the end of one lifetime, do we embark upon another?

 

The Explanatory Value of the Vedic Point of V iew 

The Vedic teachings about reincarnation offer us an opportunity to understand our material circumstances more deeply, and those teachings answer questions that might otherwise yield no suitable answers.

• Why are living beings born in such a multiplicity of forms and circumstances? Not by chance but because of their previous acts.
• How is it that some people have extraordinary skills, even at an early age? How is it, for example, that Mozart was composing symphonies by the age of four? If we accept the Vedic point of view, those skills may have persisted from a previous life.
• Even with ordinary abilities—some of us are good at mechanics, others at math—reincarnation offers explanatory value.
• Why do some of us have particular fears, others particular objects of fondness? One contributing reason may be the circumstances of a previous life.
• Why do some people feel they’ve got “the wrong gender”? Some men feel like they “should be” women, some women like they should be men. Why? Feelings persisting from a previous life offer, again, a contributing answer.

The Vedic answer also virtually solves “the problem of evil.”

Why do the innocent suffer? Why do bad things happen to good people? How can a just God permit injustice in the world? As soon as we accept the Vedic view, the problem virtually dissolves. For no longer is anyone “innocent.” None of us is merely a blank slate. Each of us has to suffer or enjoy the results of our own past acts.

 

People Who Believe In Reincarnation?

In much of the civilized world, the idea of reincarnation, or transmigration of the soul, is the prevailing point of view. More than a third of the world’s people accept reincarnation as a fact of life.

And even in the West, the doctrine of reincarnation has a long list of distinguished adherents.

 

(Socrates preaching to his disciples about the eternality of the soul as he is about to drink the poison hemlock)

• Pythagoras (Greek philosopher and mathematician, c.582–c.500 BC)
• Socrates (Greek philosopher, 469–399 BC)
• Plato (Greek philosopher, 427–347 BC)
• Plotinus (Greek philosopher, founder of Neoplatonism, 204–270)
• Giordano Bruno (Italian philosopher, 1548–1600)
• François Voltaire (French philosopher, 1694–1778)
• Benjamin Franklin (US statesman, philosopher and inventor, 1706–1790)
• Gotthold Lessing (German philosopher and dramatist, 1729–1781)
• John Adams (Second president of the United States, 1735–1826)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German poet and dramatist, 1749–1832)
• August Wilhelm von Schlegel (German poet, critic and translator, 1767–1845)
• William Wordsworth (English poet, 1770–1850)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (US philosopher and writer, 1803–1882)
• Robert Browning (English poet, 1812–1889)
• Richard Wagner (German composer, 1813–1883)
• Henry David Thoreau (US social critic, writer and philosopher, 1817–1862)
• Walt Whitman (US poet, 1819–1892)
• Thomas Huxley (English biologist and writer, 1825–1895)
• Leo Tolstoy (Russian novelist and social critic, 1828–1910)
• Mark Twain (US writer, 1835–1910)
• George Bernard Shaw (British writer, 1856–1950)
• Gustav Mahler (German composer, 1860–1911)
• Rudolf Steiner (Austrian philosopher, 1861–1925)
• David Lloyd George (British Prime Minister, 1863–1945)
• Henry Ford (US automobile pioneer, 1863–1947)
• Rudyard Kipling (English writer, 1865–1936)
• Somerset Maugham (English writer, 1874–1965)
• Carl Jung (Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist, 1875–1961)
• Sir Hugh Dowding (British Air Marshal during the Battle of Britain, 1882–1970)
• George S. Patton (US general, 1885–1945)
• Albert Schewitzer (Alsatian writer, missionary, doctor, and musician. 1875–1965)
• Robert Graves (English poet, 1895–1985)
• Erik Erikson (US psychoanalyst, 1902–1994)
• Isaac Bashevis Singer (US novelist and short-story writer, 1904–1991)

 

If reincarnation is a fact, how does it work?

According to the Bhagavad-gita, whatever we think of at the time of death determines what sort of body we’ll take next. And of course what we think of at death depends largely on what we thought about and what we did during our life. The process is subtle, because the mind is subtle.

The Bhagavad-gita explains that the mind, at death, carries with it subtle conceptions, just as the air carries aromas. And these subtle thoughts are what shape the next body. They determine what sort of eyes one will have, what nose, ears, and tongue, what sort of hands and legs and other bodily features. These all assemble around the mind.

The Vedic writings tell us, also, that our karma— we deserve for our past acts— not only from what we have done in the present life but from past lives as well. My present birth, then, is an outcome of what I have thought and what I have done in the past.

Are human beings always reborn as human beings? According to the Vedic literature, no. Some are, but others are promoted to still higher forms, forms beyond our present experience, and others are degraded to lower species.

Sometimes, for example, we see a person living just like a pig—, sloppy, gluttonous. We may think he even looks like a pig. According to the Vedic teachings, such a person, already practically a pig in consciousness, may get the body of a pig in his next life.

The Vedic writings say that there are 8,400,000 species, most of them lower than human. In the lower species, the living beings always act precisely as nature dictates. They have no choice. A horse always acts like a horse, a tree like a tree. You never see a tiger stealing oranges.

And so the living beings in lower species always advance to species higher. Slowly, one step at a time, they are promoted by nature from one species to the next.

But human life affords us greater choice. We can live in harmony with nature’s laws, or we can violate them. And accordingly we may be promoted or degraded. The human life is therefore meant for spiritual realization and for gaining freedom from the cycle of birth and death. No other species offers us this opportunity.

What about scientific evidence for reincarnation?

There are various sorts of empiric evidence offered in support of the idea of reincarnation. Much of it is weak or useless, some of it strong.

• Déjà vu
• Channeling, or mediumistic communication
• Past-life regressions under hypnosis
• Spontaneous experiences of past lives
• Spontaneous past-life memories in children

Let’s take a look at these.

Spontaneous past-life memories in children 

Here we come to the scientific evidence for reincarnation that is most interesting and persuasive.

Sometimes a child, perhaps at the age when he first begins to speak, will talk about a “past life.” He may give details about that life, sometimes enough to enable one to identify a particular deceased person as the “former personality” whose life the child seems to remember.

The child may yearn to go back to his “former home.”

He may show interests, habits, mannerisms or skills characteristic of the “former personality.”

He may show knowledge of personal matters that few but the previous person would have known.

He may show fears that match the cause of the previous person’s death—for example, a child who speaks of having been killed by a lorry may have a particular fear of lorries.

If the child is brought to the town or village where the previous person lived, he may be able to lead the way to that person’s house. And there he may show signs of recognizing the former person’s friends and relatives. He may show strong emotions towards them, emotions fitting for the previous person. He may act towards them in ways suitable for the relationships that the former person had–like a son towards that person’s parents, like a parent towards that person’s child.

Dr. Ian Stevenson, M.D.

Dr. Stevenson, for many years Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, was the founder and director of the university’s Division of Personality Studies (now known as the Division of Perceptual Studies).

His more than forty years of research, analysis, and publication raised increasingly difficult problems for those who assume that consciousness cannot possibly survive bodily death.

Modern science typically holds that consciousness is a product of biology. Life comes from matter, in the form of the body, and when the body ceases to function, life ceases to exist.

Dr. Stevenson turned up considerable evidence that this view may be wrong.

Whether or not there’s a living “something” that persists after the death of the body is what is known as “the survival question.” Dr. Stevenson brought to that question an impressive body of empirical research.

He focused on what he called “cases of the reincarnation type.” In the usual form of such a case, a child, when old enough to talk, begins to speak about a “former life.” He or she may tell of people, places, and events from that life and may express a desire to go back to a former home.

Sometimes what the child says is detailed enough to enable friends, relatives, or researchers to identify what seems to be the place and finally the “previous person.” And when brought to the place, the child may dramatically “recognize” the previous person’s home, friends, relatives, and possessions.

These cases have holes in them. Some cases may be deliberate frauds. Or else the child may have gotten information normally and dramatized it into a fictional “past life,” unwittingly prompted by relatives or researchers who want to believe the fiction true.

Paranormal explanations have also been offered. Perhaps the child telepathically picked up from the minds of living persons details of the life of a person dead.

Dr. Stevenson did much to guard against frauds and fictions. His case studies are full of cross-verifications, tabular records of matching and discrepant testimonies, and in-depth discussions of explanations not involving “survival” that might possibly better explain his data.

But his research strategies took things further. Recognizing the weaknesses of cases built on claimed memories alone, he reported numerous cases in which a child not not only “remembered” what a “previous person” knew but also seemed to mirror that person’s habits, tastes, mannerisms, and skills.

For example, the previous person may have been fond of liquor and may have drunk with a characteristic set of gestures, and the child, oddly enough, may have shown a matching set of mannerisms while playing at drinking. Or the previous person may have been expert at sewing, and the child may precociously have shown a similar expertise.

Dr. Stevenson argued that although one may easily pick up facts, great effort and practice would be needed to learn skills and complex mannerisms. How is it, then, that these seem to appear spontaneously in a child, along with a corresponding set of imaged memories?

Dr. Stevenson’s collection of cases grew to more than 3,000, and certain statistically significant regularities appeared. For example, in fifty-one percent of the cases where a “previous person” was identified, that person had undergone a violent death. The regularities in the collection strengthened the credibility of the individual cases.

In 1997 Dr. Stevenson published a two-volume book that made cases of the reincarnation type still more difficult to explain away: Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. In this book (2,080 pages) Dr. Stevenson offered detailed studies of more than 230 cases from around the world in which a person’s birthmarks or birth defects seemed to reflect physical features from the body of a “previous person” or be related to experiences from a previous life, particularly a violent death.

In some cases, a child apparently remembering the life of an identified previous person bore birthmarks matching wounds that person had suffered at death, such as entrance and exit bullet wounds. In other cases, birth defects in the form of constricting bands around the legs corresponded to the injuries of a “previous person” bound by the legs and killed.

Why, Dr. Stevenson asked, would a young child seem to recall a previous life, identify with the person whose life he or she seemed to remember, and be born with birth marks or birth defects (sometimes exceedingly rare) matching wounds related to that person’s violent death? And what indeed should we think, Dr. Stevenson asked, when we find that the “previous person” actually existed?

I once met Dr. Stevenson some years ago at a conference in Texas. We chatted a bit, and he said to me, “I think the question of survival matters, don’t you?” I had to agree.

Dr. Stevenson served as a pioneer in science by allowing that the question of survival does indeed matter and by vigorously and carefully investigating phenomena that bear upon that most deeply significant question.

 

Memories matched by congenital bodily conditions 

Dr. Stevenson’s most recent contribution to studies of cases of the reincarnation type is an examination of cases in which birthmarks or birth defects seem to correspond to physical features of the “former person,” often to fatal wounds. An unusual birthmark, for example, might correspond in shape and position to a previous person’s knife wound. Or severe and unusual birth defects in a person’s legs, defects in the form of ropelike constrictions, might correspond to the injuries of a previous person tied by the legs and killed

A child, one may suppose, might fantasize a previous life, with help from normally acquired knowledge or from what he has learned through ESP. Or adults might wishfully persuade themselves that a child’s statements were more accurate than they were. Or conniving adults might use a child to put up a hoax.

But how is it, we might ask, that a child would show severe and statistically rare birth defects corresponding to wounds verified by medical records to have been inflicted on the body of a person whose life he seems to remember?

Such are the questions dealt with in Dr. Stevenson’s two-volume work Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects, a collection of case histories, with analysis, amounting to more than two thousand pages.

Dr. Stevenson has also dealt with this research in a more accessible summary, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.

Paranormal explanations

Paranormal explanations are also possible.

A child might have powers of telepathy or clairvoyance and might use them to create and dramatize a fictitious past life corresponding to that of an actual deceased person. But why should he do this? And would the extent of the powers this would require—amounting to “super-ESP,” as it’s called—be any more likely than reincarnation?

Another possible explanation is that the child has been “possessed” by a disembodied spirit. For some cases, this explanation may in fact seem a better fit. But for others it seems to offer no explanatory advantage.

Particularly interesting are cases in which a child shows special skills characteristic of the previous person. Knowledge, it might be argued, could be passed normally to a child from some other person, or accessed by the child himself by super-ESP. But skills are forms of learned behavior. How could a child, without training, acquire the skills that another person had?

Spontaneous experiences of past lives 

Sometimes an adult not under hypnosis may experience what seem to be memories of a past life.

Again, there may be rich details and sincere conviction. And again, almost always, these cases are easily subject to normal explanation and are scientifically of little or no value.

How can we know that the “memories of a past life” haven’t really been generated from this one? Nearly always, most likely they have.

A few exceptional cases are notable—for example, cases in which a person shows the ability to speak a foreign language he seems not to have normally learned. (This may also be a feature of cases hypnotically invoked.) Such cases are rare, and reincarnation is not the only possible explanation for them.

 

Extensive professional research 

Cases of what seem to be spontaneous past-life memories in children have been extensively investigated for more than thirty years by Ian Stevenson, M.D., formerly Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.

He called his first book on the subject Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Years later, with some 3,000 cases on file, he felt justified to call a later, multi-volume work—reporting cases in India, Burma, Turkey, Alaska, and elsewhere—Cases of the Reincarnation Type.

Apart from the particulars of the individual cases, his collection of cases shows statistical regularities that strengthen confidence in the collection as a whole. For example, in 51% of the cases the “previous person” underwent a violent death. A tendency for the purported memories to appear in early childhood and fade as the child grows older are another statistically regular feature.

Dr. Stevenson’s published research, it should also be said, is notable for its rigor. Cross-verifications, searches of medical records, and reporting of discrepant testimony are standard in his work. Dr. Stevenson points out the weaknesses in his cases as well as their strengths. Also worth noting is the extent to which he discusses other possible explanations, both normal and paranormal, as alternatives to the hypothesis of reincarnation.

Other researchers with established professional credentials have independently studied similar cases.

 

If I’ve had past lives, why don’t I remember them?

Memory is such a thing that we put down our car keys and later can’t remember where.

We can’t remember being in the womb. Were we there?

Forgetting one’s previous birth upon taking the next appears to be a law of nature (though a law that apparently has exceptions).

Srimad-Bhagavatam, a Vedic scripture, says that by the trauma of birth a child forgets his previous life.

It might also be said that if we could remember our previous births, the burden of the memories would be unbearable. The memories we carry around from just one life are sometimes sorely distressing. Multiply such memories manyfold, and they would surpass our ability to deal with them.

 

 What could be the use of lives we don’t remember? 

The Vedic scriptures don’t tell us that the only purpose of reincarnation is to learn.

According to the Vedic sages, the living entity forgetful of his eternal relationship with God, or Krishna, wants to enjoy independently in the material world, so Krishna affords him repeated opportunities to try to do so.

Sometimes the living entity wants to experience the supposed enjoyment of flying, so Krishna may grant him the body of a bird. Sometimes he wants to enjoy eating without discrimination, so Krishna may give him the body of a pig.

In this way, the bewildered living being can repeatedly pursue–for unlimited lifetimes–the material enjoyments for which he has come to this material world.

On the other hand, Krishna gives the living being repeated opportunities to turn away from the fruitless prospect of independent material enjoyment, attain spiritual self-realization, and regain the eternal relationship with Him.

• Krishna offers guidance through books of wisdom, like the Vedic literature.
• He offers guidance through His saintly devotees.
• And He also prompts us from within.

In this way, we may embark on the path of spiritual advancement. And whatever progress we make is our permanent gain. So even if we don’t complete the project in one lifetime, in the next we can take it up where we left off.

Materially, whatever we have gained in one lifetime we leave behind when life is over. The millionaire can’t take with him even a penny. The professor can’t hold on to even a shred of his erudition.

But spiritually, according to the Bhagavad-gita, whatever gains one makes are never lost. If one takes up the path of spiritual advancement but fails to complete it, he may be granted a birth in a pious family or a wealthy one. Or, still better, he may be born in a family of transcendentalists. He then revives the spiritual consciousness of his previous life and again tries to make further progress.

By virtue of the divine consciousness of his previous life, he automatically becomes attracted to spiritual principles—even without seeking them. And when he engages himself with sincere endeavor in making further progress, he is gradually freed of all contaminations. Then, ultimately, after many, many births of practice, he achieves perfection and attains the supreme goal.

 

If reincarnation is a fact, why is the population increasing?

The Vedic literature tells us that there are 8,400,000 species of life, and living beings pass through all of them. So although to our limited vision the population may be growing, when we take all these species into account the true population of the world is beyond counting.

Added to this, the Vedic literature tells us that there are also living beings on other planets and in other universes.

The results of our limited human census, therefore, don’t present a problem.

One might object that this is just an ad-hoc explanation, a cop-out, a way to escape from the objection. But in fact it is an integral part of the Vedic philosophy, with implications in other contexts That it is not falsifiable doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. The realms of empiric science have their limits, so not everything in the world is falsifiable. What it means, therefore, is that the truth of this Vedic teaching is beyond the ability of science alone to either confirm or deny.

How could I enter someone else’s body and become someone else? 

According to the Vedic literature, that’s not what happens.

It’s not that you switch bodies with someone else, or take over someone else’s body. Rather, you—the consciousness or soul within the body—take birth again, in a new body. You transfer, just as you might transfer from one apartment to another, or as you might change clothes, or as a caterpillar sheds its old body and takes on that of a butterfly.

 

But the Bible Denies Reincarnation

Reincarnation is a topic about which the Bible is fairly quiet.

There is a text—Hebrews 9:27—that says, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.”

But is this a comment on reincarnation? Or is it, rather, a conventional statement? Any particular man—John W. Smith—is born but once, and dies but once. This we all know. Whether his soul then enters another lifetime is another matter.

The Vedic literature says that when any man dies, the acts of his life are weighed—he is judged. And then he takes his next birth accordingly. Is this in conflict with the text? You decide.

But before you do, please take into account the entire text:

And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many; and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time without sin unto salvation. (Hebrews 9:27-28)

The focus here is not on the question of whether the soul undergoes transmigration. Rather, a common example is being given by which to better understand the divine sacrifice offered by Christ.

There seems little reason to suppose that the use of this example rules out reincarnation.

Sometimes a text from Matthew (17:9-12) is offered as evidence of reincarnation. There Jesus tells his disciples that Elias had come again as John the Baptist. This text, however, does little to support the doctrine of reincarnation. It fits better with the Vedic concept of avatara—the doctrine that God, God’s son, or one of God’s messengers from the spiritual world may, by spiritual power, appear through birth in the world for the upliftment of the fallen souls. (Christians may find that this Vedic doctrine resonates with their own beliefs, or even offers a way to greater understanding—but that is another matter.)

A more relevant text appears in John (9:1-2):

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

The idea that the man was born blind due to the sins of his parents is easily intelligible: because of their own sins, the parents had a son who was blind.

But how are we to understand that a man could have been born blind due to sins of his own? Clearly, the man must have lived before. Of course, one could say that the man must have sinned in the womb. But this is a very strange explanation. What sin could the man have done there—crossed his legs wrong? Would the disciples have even entertained such ideas? Surely the alternative they are asking about is the possibility that the man had sinned in a previous life, an alternative that fit with a doctrine taught for centuries before Christ and undoubtedly still current while he was on earth—the doctrine of reincarnation.

And how does Jesus answer? Does he upbraid the disciples for their foolishness? Does he condemn them for bringing up a worthless or repugnant idea? Does he tell them in no uncertain terms that reincarnation is a mistake, a wrong teaching, an error?

Surely, here was an ideal opportunity to do so. But Jesus doesn’t.

Instead, in the next verse, he answers, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”

In other words, this is a special case, a setup. The man has been born blind so that Jesus may show a miracle, as he does a few verses later.

And so Jesus comments on neither of the offered alternatives—the sins of the parents nor the past sins of the man himself—but simply puts forward a different story.

As we see, reincarnation is an idea that Lord Jesus declines the opportunity to refute.

 

Clearly, the idea of reincarnation proceeds from wishful thinking

One might say: “Clearly, the idea of reincarnation proceeds merely from wishful thinking—it’s comforting to think that, birth after birth, the soul lives on.”

Comforting? The Vedic writings say that the cycle of birth and death entails repeated miseries. Is birth fun? Is dying your idea of having a good time?

Apart from that, whether the idea gives solace or dread is beside the point. How we feel about things makes no difference as to whether they are true or not.

The objection suffers from the fallacious strategy of attacking one’s supposed motives for holding to a position—in this case, the idea of reincarnation—rather than addressing the position itself.

 

But personality is but a product of the higher nervous system and the brain

“But personality is but a product of the higher nervous system and the brain,” you might say. “So how could it move from one physical body to another?

Well, hold on there. You’re making some pretty big assumptions.

That consciousness is just a product of highly organized matter is just a theory. And the theory has an awful lot going against it.

Of course, if your theory is right, your objection raises serious difficulties. Effectively, reincarnation is scuttled. But if your theory is wrong, the grounds for your objection dissolve.

Apart from that, the objection essentially begs the question. The doctrine of reincarnation holds that we are souls who transmigrate from one body to the next. The objection says that this is wrong because we aren’t souls at all.

Merely to assert this just isn’t enough to amount to a refutation. Without supporting evidence, it’s just an instance of circular reasoning: The doctrine is wrong because it is wrong.

For your objection to be sustainable, you need to show us—not merely tell us but persuasively demonstrate—that the so-called soul (that is, individual consciousness) does arise from and depend upon particular formations of matter.

Though that belief is widely held to, with all the zeal of an article of faith, it is far from scientifically established. It remains a belief, with a lot going against it.

• Extensive data gathered in rigorous parapsychological research points to the existence of consciousness as an entity that doesn’t conform to what are usually thought of as material laws.
Such research has shown strong evidence for psychokinesis—that is, the ability to bring about tangible material effects in objects beyond the reach of the muscles and physical senses. And there’s similar evidence for clairvoyance—the ability to see objects and actions beyond the range of natural vision. And this is apart from out-of-body experiences, precognition, evidence for spirit possession, and cases of the reincarnation type.
And we’re talking here not about flimsy research but high-caliber professional work. (For example, the work at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research)
• Quantum physical arguments offer reasons to suspect that consciousness is an entity unable to be confined within physical systems.
• And arguments from information theory show that the genesis of consciousness from matter would require either that enormous levels of complexity develop from the sparest of information (how? and why?) or that enormous amounts of complex information be present in boundary conditions from the start (and again why? and from where?).

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

A number of philosophers have consider consciousness a mystery such that they have question whether it even makes conceptual sense to think of consciousness as arising from matter. After consciousness is fundamentally different from matter.

Describing the hard problem of consciousness David Chalmerssays:

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

If any problem qualifies as the problem of consciousness, it is this one. In this central sense of “consciousness”, an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism, and a mental state is conscious if there is something it is like to be in that state. Sometimes terms such as “phenomenal consciousness” and “qualia” are also used here, but I find it more natural to speak of “conscious experience” or simply “experience”. Another useful way to avoid confusion (used by e.g. Newell 1990, Chalmers 1996) is to reserve the term “consciousness” for the phenomena of experience, using the less loaded term “awareness” for the more straightforward phenomena described earlier. If such a convention were widely adopted, communication would be much easier; as things stand, those who talk about “consciousness” are frequently talking past each other.

This problem has led some philosophers, like Thomas Nagel, to seriously consider pan-psychism as an alternative paradigm to reductionist theories of mind.

At this point, regarding consciousness, all options are on the table and that leaves an open-minded inquirer free to be persuaded by the considerable strengths of the Vedic view that the conscious living being is indeed a separate entity, transmigrating from one lifetime to the next.

Source: http://www.jswami.com/the-scientific-evidence-for-reincarnation/