The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 224 of 254
Habitual tendencies and the mindstream
That which continues from one life to the next is not the contents of consciousness, such as memories or knowledge of people and places, but the mind’s ‘habitual tendencies’. So if, for example, you have practised mindfulness enough to have extreme mental clarity, then that clarity will be there in your reincarnation. ‘If anything continues, I think what would continue are my habitual tendencies, the way I react, the way I think. That is what would probably continue, not necessarily all the memories, because lots of things we forget even now.’ What we seem to have here is a threefold distinction between the ultimate unified reality; the relative reality of individuals in each mortal lifespan (skandhas or ‘aggregates’); and the intermediate reality of the ‘mindstream’, persisting mainly as habits, which are the subjects of karmic laws. To put it another way, if we accept the Tibetan Buddhist view, we have three kinds of selves: the building, the space occupied by a series of buildings, and the entire space of which the building only occupies a part.