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As a force that operates in the physical world, the self can be reduced to patterns of motions resulting from innumerable causes and conditions, including personal habits developed over the lifetime. This pattern persists for a lifetime (at least) and changes constantly as it interacts with patterns defined as other. And its continuity suggests, or causes one to feel, that a permanent, core self persists in the face of constant and ubiquitous change. Illusion or not, this is the experience of all of us, though a few claim to have awakened from it.

Based on the presumed illusory nature of the self, secular Buddhists argue against the reality of reincarnation: If there is no core self, then there is no one who can die, much less return to physical existence in a new body.

But how does this assertion prove that the pattern of habits and causal relationships that persists in the physical realm—the apparent self or personality—does not also persist in a nonphysical realm, functioning through another “body” of a different kind? Such body has traditionally been described as the subtle, nonphysical body.

Does a subtle body need to be a duplicate of the physical? Does it even need to have arms and legs, or is it just a luminous sphere of spirit? If some portion of my life's training (which I think of as part of “me”) is stored as “muscle memory,” then what happens to that program when there are no muscles?

Whether the subtle body exists or not, or whether it is best thought of as a “body” or as a program, the possibility exists that “someone” will someday be born into this world with my core program running as a baseline, or default system. Perhaps that new person will not inherit my basketball skills but will instead be blessed or cursed with my deeper qualities, such as generosity or selfishness.

Meanwhile,it is possible that whatever information has been generated or acquired in this life of mine will continue to be stored in Mind at large when I have died. This is the testimony of those who claim to have accessed the subtle database traditionally known as the akashic records.

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Does the subtle body have a self living inside it? If it is animated and conscious, such an apparent personality would still believe, in whatever dimension it now finds itself in, that it is a self. And it would make choices, as it does in this life, based on the consensus of its mental/emotional processes, which are ever changing. In this sense, it could be said that the individual survives death, even though there is no one there.

Memory

The perception, thought, or feeling of being a self depends, at least to a high degree, on the continuity of memory; that is, one's conscious knowledge of the significant life experiences that occurred in the past and were local to this organism.

Some people report that, after all their memory for a given period in time is erased from conscious recall—as during a traumatic event—there is the impression or feeling that they did not exist at all during that time.

Birth as the death of the apparent self

The dependence of self on memory poses a problem for the idea that “someone” reincarnates. Our inability to remember any experiences prior to birth effectively collapses the prior “self” and initializes a new one, a blank slate as far as conscious memory is concerned. Thus, whoever or whatever it is that gets reincarnated, its biographical self (memories of both physical and nonphysical life experience) effectively dies at birth. Birth is the death of whoever you were, or thought you were, before that.

Having inherited the attributes of your overall pattern that have survived physical death and are appropriate (even if maladaptive) for the new incarnation, the new self, or personality, is much like “you” were and feels much the same. It is likely to suffer in similar ways, acting on its inherited unconscious beliefs and strategies. To what extent the new personality inherits its attributes from past-life experience vs. inherited traits from the physical parents, is an open question.

The question of data storage

There is the idea that our memory of past lives and nonphysical interludes is actually preserved somewhere in the greater mind, in the akashic record, or in our own “greater self.” Tom Campbell refers to this as a database in consciousness, silently recording every detail of everyone's experiences, (whether they were conscious of it at the time or not). In normal waking consciousness, access to the data is normally unavailable, as awareness is completely occupied with sensory and thought input. If you are skilled in the process, you can access the data and plug it into your awareness as an input stream.

Given the existence of the database, there is the idea that after you die, all this biographical experience, in vivid detail, is accessible to you, and you can experience a period of full recollection of your history and its many lessons. This is often referred to as the life-review process. Perhaps it is how memories are finally digested before they are allowed to fade to insignificance.

The data storage, as reported by consciousness explorers, is almost always considered to operate outside of the physical universe, independent and beyond space and time. But how are they sure about this? How can we be sure that the information storage does not depend on the existence of living brains?

Just as conscious, nonphysical experience might depend on the existence of the physical brain, so too the database might exist only in the brains of countless human beings, with detailed information, feeling records, thoughts, and so on distributed over any number of brains, and perhaps randomly. If you accept the idea that ESP actually happens because our minds are invisibly connected in a vast and intricate web, this does not rule out the possibility that physical brains are required to support that web. The Collective Unconscious could be a networking program that has run continuously since our mammalian ancestors first developed it. It has never lost its database because humans have never gone extinct.

I mention this “wetware” hypothesis just because it is possible and not implausible. The testimony of Tom Campbell et al does not support it.