What is rebirth for the skeptic?

As an atheist falling into Buddhist practice, I’m faced with many of the same questions and beliefs shared by most Buddhist schools of thought, and none is more persistent than the belief in rebirth.

The academic side of me feels a need to know the “truth” of the claim. But the more matured side of me, the blossoming Buddhist, sees now that life can be full of contradictions, even of two truths at once. That’s something the skeptic in me still resists.

When it comes to rebirth, I land on two related thoughts. The first is that it doesn’t really matter. It’s almost irrelevant, because it doesn’t change how I approach Buddhism or how I treat others. And even if rebirth is true, I’ll never know it happened to me. The continuation of consciousness isn’t the continuation of “Dan.” The Dan anyone knows ceases to exist in this form and is gone forever. I’ll never get to confirm whether I was right or wrong, so who exactly am I trying to convince, if the facts don’t change my behavior either way? I’m better off acting as though it exists, not because I’m chasing a reward in some afterlife, but because doing so simply means treating people the way they deserve to be treated. In that sense, it can be true and untrue at once, because either way it shapes the same behavior.

Many Buddhist monks call this a “continuation,” a word I used above to describe how we’re not reborn, exactly, just continued. They tend to frame this in terms of consciousness. I think of it more as energy.

Matter and energy can’t be created or destroyed. That’s the First Law of Thermodynamics. So “birth” and “death,” in the way we usually think about them, are something like illusions. You didn’t begin at birth; the matter and energy that make up “you” already existed, in your parents, in the food they ate, in the elements of the earth. You’re a reorganization of what came before. And when you die, you return to the earth, the universe, whatever you want to call it, and continue on into other living things, sentient and not.

When my father passed away, we cremated him and buried his ashes beneath a tree in his yard, then scattered some at his parents’ graves. He continues now in so many other forms of life. Insects, birds, and other creatures will benefit from his remains becoming part of that tree: the grass around it, the leaves that eventually blow off and carry seeds, nourishing life both sentient and not. I’ll never know exactly where he continues, but he does continue. Parts of his matter and energy are simply new forms of life now.

This isn’t rebirth in the strict Buddhist sense, but it is a form of rebirth, or at least of continuation. Maybe it’s a more updated view than the one the Buddha and his followers held 2,500 years ago. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, in the Kalama Sutta, the Buddha closes with this:

“Do not go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical deduction, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’”

In other words: follow your lived experience, and follow the evidence. The evidence I’ve seen is what’s brought me to where I stand on rebirth today, and new evidence or experience could move me again. What matters is staying open to every truth and possibility, without blindly accepting any of them. In that spirit, I try to practice what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called a “willing suspension of disbelief,” not blind acceptance, but a temporary openness to an idea, held long enough to honestly test it against lived experience. I don’t have to fully believe something to stay open to it, and I don’t have to reject it outright just because I can’t yet prove it.

What I believe is likely far from the traditional sense of rebirth, and it doesn’t fully square with some of the thinking around karma and samsara. I’ll explore how those concepts might fit this model in later posts, and, if they don’t fit, why that doesn’t diminish the importance of Buddhist practice or the Buddha’s teachings.

There’s one more way to think about rebirth, though, closer to home: waking up each morning is itself a kind of rebirth. The Dalai Lama put it this way:

“Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

I don’t want to frame this as some new theory of rebirth, just another way of seeing that the gift of waking up is itself a continuation of your consciousness. Every morning is a chance to make today better than yesterday, and a new day to continue the practice.