Reincarnation doesnt help us, since the person we were essentially dies for good and we have no knowledge of that life in the next one.
I’ve wondered this myself.
One explanation is that person we appear to be in any particular life-span is just a role, rather than our actual identity. Who we actually are transcends the various roles we play over however many lifetimes. The “you” that you are independent of all those roles learns from the life lessons and applies what was learned to the next life.
Some philosophies regard our lives here not just to learn, but to create. So reincarnation is just another opportunity to create, as opposed to being directly karma-based. (I lean more towards it being a voluntary, karma-independent, endeavor.)
Again, that’s just one explanation.
Where I would personally draw the line with that is as in the case of Hinduism, where cows are held sacred: Some of them believe that if you eat beef, you have to reincarnate as a cow once for every hair on that cow’s body as punishment (though they don’t like to call it “punishment” for some reason; rather, they see it as just the nature of things and nothing personal per se).
I’m sorry, but I don’t see the use in that. As a cow, I’m not going to remember why I’m a cow, and that my cow-ness is “bad” karma for eating cows in a previous life. Reincarnating as a cow
once, maybe. But again and again as many times as there are hairs on the cow(s) body(ies)? I’m pretty sure people will pick up on whatever lesson was supposed to be learned in a single cow’s single life-span. Any more would be beating a dead horse, and who knows what religion finds
that bad.
Lets add another scenario......What if when we die, we just wake up in a another life with memories....just like we do when we die in a "dream" now?
There are cases where very young children (usually under age six) do remember details of a life previously lived, and upon further research turns out to have been real (see the link to this that I shared in post
#15.
