I got this excellent question on an email and thought this would be a good post.

Question:  Why, from his own point of view, and apart from general humanitarian considerations, should anyone care what happens in future incarnations, since, if I understand correctly, those will be different personalities?
Answer:

That’s a very interesting question.

The answers to this question is personal and philosophical, so please remember that my response would be different from other responses you might get on the subject.

So, this is why I care:

Consider that we do not have the same personality through this particular incarnation. Our personality at five years old is different from 10, 25, 50 and so on. Along the way, we made decisions and choices that have changed the direction in our lives, our life circumstances; like going to college so we can get a better education that results in an ability to make more money or work in a career that we are interested in, we marry a certain person (or more than one, or no one), decide to have children or not, save for retirement or not. All of our experiences change our personality and we often forget many of our earlier experiences as if they did not exist.

Our gross consciousness (awakened mind) subsides during death, just as it does during sleep. But once we are reborn, our gross consciousness reemerges again in physical life. But just as we cannot remember much from our infancy and early childhood, so we will not be able to remember much from this life. But it doesn’t mean that the gross mind that we cling to won’t experience our future life.

What does go with us when we die are the imprints of our past lives which is called karma which are stored in our unconscious mind and emerge when the conditions are right, much like planting seeds and watering them. So if we plant negative seeds, negative results will ripen for us, and if we plant positive seeds, positive results will ripen.

Now from my point of view, understanding karma is vital to assist us in creating our future. My personal belief is that there are no accidents when it comes to life circumstances. We experience what we have caused others to experience.  So, if you are a kind and helpful person, you will attract kind and helpful people to you in the future. You will also have the tendency to be kind and helpful in the future making it easier to perform kind acts. The opposite is also true, if you tend to do harm to other sentient beings, you will have that harm happen to in the future, not because some super-being is causing it, but because you ingrain those tendencies in your unconscious mind and create the potential for experiencing them. Whether you consider your life to be good or bad, every experience in it is a result of a past experience that you caused someone else to experience. To project this theory out, it is also logical to assume that what you cause another to experience in this life you will experience in a future life.

Finally, there is also the issue of enlightenment. We have the opportunity as human beings to get out of this endless cycle of birth, aging, sickness and death. A state of mind where suffering no longer has any relevance to us and from this place, we can assist all sentient beings our of this endless cycle (to the humanitarian aspect which to me is the most important part of the equation). Assisting people in having less suffering or eliminating it altogether is, from my point of view, the most important part of being human.

Thank you for your question.

Bob Morrison, DCH