In response to a recent post of a Zen luminary on the myth of reincarnation:

H – It doesn’t work for me anymore, the whole of a person continuing to a new incarnation. With all the new developments in science, what would make more sense would be a continuous recombination of energy, new iterations that contain many different consciousnesses, an amalgam of instinct/tendencies/preferences defined by random selection. In genetics, regression toward the mean.

G – I get it, all except the last sentence, no on the regression. A dissipation of life energy to be re-iterated in another combination, a new life energy, always shifting, always changing. It has nothing to do with science, science just attempts to measure it.

H – returning to the mean, or statistical average, is the reason Einstein’s children weren’t also geniuses.

G – Bene Gesserit from Dune, remember? Genuises always have average IQ children, ha-ha. but not always true Henry.

H – genetics only partly determines the individual, of course, but here I’m using it as an analogy to explain consciousness. in the same way that evolution and genetics have illustrated the origin of our DNA code to be, not something distinctly ours, but a long chain of mutation through countless generations, the same for consciousness, combined and recombined, threaded through infinite loops throughout sentient life; a similar structure.