After This Life -- What? (soul, Christianity, Christian, service)

[tuebor]

Originally Posted by Tzaphkiel

you are you throughout all your incarnations. in between lifetimes you have all your memories of all your lifetimes intact. You plan each lifetime based on areas of yourself you still seek to develop and improve. After each liftetime during the "post game show" you review how successful you were in accomplishing what you set out to do, and what still needs to be done.

it is "you" every time because you custom design each lifetime to give you the exact and optimal opportunities to develop and grow where you need to develop and grow. it is a high level of responsibility when you realize that every circumstance in your life in every area is custom designed by you, for you.

Thank you for responding to my question in the terms in which I framed it.

That's an interesting idea. The prospect of some sort of progress across lifetimes is appealing. I asked the question because I've been exploring Druidry, and many modern Druids believe in reincarnation. The ancient Druids may have believed in it too; the evidence is inconclusive.

Your account of reincarnation is internally consistent, I think, but I find it hard to accept as described. There are too many horrors in this world. I could give graphic examples but I won't; suffice it to say that I can't believe that the people and animals who suffer these horrors do so because some super-selves that they have no knowledge of or control over, but which are somehow them, decided that they needed to add those horrors to its stock of experiences, and so "custom designed" "every circumstance", and that these victims are therefore responsible for their own suffering.

On the other hand, the concepts of the super-self and its progress across incarnations may be separable from the question of how much control or responsibility the super-self exerts over its incarnations.

Physicists have posited other dimensions to make sense of certain phenomena; they propose that things or events that seem completely unconnected in the dimensions we are familiar with, but which vary together in ways that cannot be coincidental, are actually connected in other dimensions. Similarly, it may be that these super-selves (meta-selves?) of yours provide a unity to seemingly unconnected life-narratives. I'll have to think about it some more.

[Tzaphkiel]

Originally Posted by tuebor

Thank you for responding to my question in the terms in which I framed it.

That's an interesting idea. The prospect of some sort of progress across lifetimes is appealing. I asked the question because I've been exploring Druidry, and many modern Druids believe in reincarnation. The ancient Druids may have believed in it too; the evidence is inconclusive.

Your account of reincarnation is internally consistent, I think, but I find it hard to accept as described. There are too many horrors in this world. I could give graphic examples but I won't; suffice it to say that I can't believe that the people and animals who suffer these horrors do so because some super-selves that they have no knowledge of or control over, but which are somehow them, decided that they needed to add those horrors to its stock of experiences, and so "custom designed" "every circumstance", and that these victims are therefore responsible for their own suffering.

On the other hand, the concepts of the super-self and its progress across incarnations may be separable from the question of how much control or responsibility the super-self exerts over its incarnations.

Physicists have posited other dimensions to make sense of certain phenomena; they propose that things or events that seem completely unconnected in the dimensions we are familiar with, but which vary together in ways that cannot be coincidental, are actually connected in other dimensions. Similarly, it may be that these super-selves (meta-selves?) of yours provide a unity to seemingly unconnected life-narratives. I'll have to think about it some more.

The beauty of it all is that when we can see from the higher perspective, the horrors aren't horrors at all. Think of it like actors in a play. People in the play die and go through all sorts of drama and heartbreak and intrigue. Then after the play is over they all go to the cast party and discuss the performance and congratulate each other on playing their parts to the hilt really really well.

Are the actors dead? No but they put on a really convincing play and people in the audience were gasping and in tears and frightened in all the scary parts. Do the actors who played the bad guys really hate the hero? Of course not. They are best friends and have worked together in many different plays.

It's like that.

The actor [you] can play many different roles and parts [different life times], a hero a villain a thief a peasant a king. He is the same actor [you]. He is not to be confused with the parts he plays [different incarnations].

[ukrkoz]

Tzap, it is not "you" that re-exists. Sigh, not "incarnates", tired of clarifying this.
What re-exists is I-ness. Not "you"-ness. "you" is acquired during an existence. It is commonly known as personality. A name. A label. This dissipates at the last stage of after the death states.
But I-ness stays forever. The eternal sensation of individuality, but not of being individuum. Even after enlightenment, when one disappears, when physical body disappears, when ego disappears - I-ness is present. Even when I-nes progresses into consciousness - it is still I-ness, vs Others-ness.

Ad hoc. Here's a question no one asks.
So everyone has some idea of afterlife. this or that.
But why no one ever asks what was BEFORE life? Everyone knows everything about death, but no one knows anything about BIRTH? That is surprisingly ignorant, as there is no death without birth. Mof, death starts immediately with birth yet - no one speaks on THAT matter?
As what is life? Cry of a born baby followed by last gasp of dying man.....

[ukrkoz]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io_scJbhCOY

[Nozzferrahhtoo]

Originally Posted by TroutDude

I experienced something somewhat similar and understand what you mean about the "vast awareness." It's unforgettable, yet difficult to access beyond the memory of it. At least for me. But the memory is powerful.

There are interesting neurological correlates to such an experience which, I fear, will render those experiences rather mundane compared to the interpretation many people having them would like.

But first a word on how we discovered them as it is interesting in itself......

There is a very interesting neurological failure called Capgras delusion which baffled people for a long time. In this syndrome people will look at someone highly important to them......... say their mother for example.......... and be utterly convinced that the person is an impostor of the real thing. They will look at their mother and say "That is no longer my mother, she is an impostor who has taken her place!"

Interestingly if the patient then talked to their mother on the phone, the delusion went away. It only happened when the mother returned into view.

The Freudian explanations were...... ingenious, as Freudian explanations often are........ which was to suggest that the person had become sexually attracted to their mother and to cope with this the brain would deny it really was their mother. This did not hold up as the syndrome also affected people with things like their dog, car, house, and much more which A) they were unlikely to be sexually attracted to or B) would be unlikely to require a delusion to validate or justify the sexual attraction.

So we researched it and we made an interesting discovery which explained the delusion AND why the delusion worked on sight and not on the phone in some patients (or the other way around in others).

There are areas of the brain that mediate the information passing between thee limbic system, the amygdala and the inferotemporal cortex. And it controls your subjective response of "relevance and importance". So when you see, smell, hear, taste or feel something........ the impulses ALSO pass through this area to be tested how "relevant" it is to you. So when you hear or see your mother, this area goes "DING!".

In those patients the connection between the eyes (or in some patients the ears) and this part of the brain was damaged. So things they looked at no longer were tested for "DING!". So they looked at their mother and the "DING!" did not happen and so the brain formed the delusion to explain this. But the connection from the ears was not severed, so talking to their mother on the phone was fine.

Now certain medical conditions, drugs, duress under NDE experience.......... and even some forms of meditation including those pedaled by one resident fraud........... can hyper stimulate that area of the brain. Suddenly EVERYTHING feels relevant, important, interconnected, vast in a way that is independent of context or stimulus. It is a remarkable experience for those lucky enough to have it, and even more so for those lucky enough to be able to contrive to evoke it.

And while the explanation is mundane and rational I can only imagine that for those unable to parse it in such rational terms......... it must be intensely spiritually trans-formative. The Universal interconnection of all things under an all encompassing plan, replete with a permeated sense of love, relevance and importance.......... how could a feeling like that NOT suddenly have many people start espousing god based narratives of design and destiny?

Originally Posted by TroutDude

What do you think/believe/hope?

I do not really find myself "hoping" either way except to "hope" to know what is true. I am neither invested emotionally in their being an after life, or there not being one. I just hope that if there IS one, I am eventually presented with the evidence of the truth of it. Because I hope when things are true, that I find out they are true.

That said however I do find myself unconvinced that I would be able to rationally espouse the value of human life if it was an insignificant portion of an infinite whole. The wondrous value of life, and the individual, for me comes from it's uniqueness, transience, rarity and being finite.

When someone, for example, sacrifices their life for a person, a place, or an ideal....... the value of that sacrifice comes from them genuinely having given something up they had and can not ever get back. What value has such sacrifice if they are offering it from a pot of infinity however? Which is more of a sacrifice......... the unemployed homeless man donating 10 dollars or bill gates donating 10 dollars? Could the later be coherently viewed as a sacrifice at all?

And we see the result of some forms of this in our real world. Some parents watch their children die, often painfully, for want of a simple medical treatment......... all because medical intervention is an affront to their god. That is to say, the value of this life is insignificant in terms of ones eternal well being. In relative terms at least the lives of those children in the here and now was worthless to the parents who actually did love them strongly. A horror in itself. An even greater horror when you realize that curtailed short little life is very likely to be the only one those children ever had, or ever will.

Originally Posted by TroutDude

I'm inclined to think some aspect of us continues, beyond the return of our atoms to the universal pool.

I have genuinely been offered no arguments, no evidence, no data, and no reasoning that is even remotely suggestive that any aspect of consciousness, sentience, or subjective experience survives the biological (not clinical) death of the brain.

I have not even seen any substantiation that such things operate independently of the brain even when the brain still lives (such as in claims of OBE, astral plane walking, remote viewing, or any other claim that is based on some brain independent / remote operation of consciousness).

What we do have is a wealth of evidence to the opposite, linking aspects of consciousness and subjective experience to the brain and the complexities of the activities going on in it. To the point that we can reliably disrupt aspects of those operations and have predictable correlate disruptions of conscious experience or the entirety of consciousness itself.

We are not often lucky enough to have situations where 100% of the evidence we DO have pointing at conclusion A and not conclusion B. There is usually some level of substantiation that points at both. But here we very much do have such a case. 100% of our current data set links consciousness to the brain and 0% of it is suggestive of any potential disconnect between them........ let alone to the point of one surviving the death of the other.

I shy away from the absolutism of words like "certainty". But if such a word is to have any coherent meaning at all, then a situation where 100% of the evidence goes only one way HAS to be a situation where one can use it without embarrassment and only minor caveat qualification.

Originally Posted by TroutDude

I've experienced incidents that might be attributed to discarnate entities/ghosts that lead me to believe in "something" that either survives physical ending or can cross dimensional barriers.

The "might" there is quite powerful though. I have seen people explain all kinds of things away with that "might" that otherwise turned out to have rational explanations.

Unfortunately we the reader are rarely lucky enough to observe the incidents in question ourselves so our rational explanations for them are guess work at best. Observe for example the "lamp" story in this video.

I was lucky enough to observe one such case myself. A case where a missing item suddenly magically appeared back in the bag of the person who was looking for it. She checked her bag, it was not there, she checked it later, and it was. She could not explain it and thought it was some sort of magic.

However *I* saw what actually happened. WHILE looking for it she got distracted, and in that moment of distraction she happened to find the item and absent mindedly put it in her bag out of pure habit. She then resumed the search for it, not noticing what she had just done. The explanation was 100% real, 100% rational, 100% mundane. However when SHE found the item in the bag it verified her already woo world view as to the machinations of the spirit world.

Originally Posted by TroutDude

I don't like the idea of completely surrendering my sense of individuality to become a hive creature like the Borg.

Yeah that has always amused me on some level, where I find people describing the borg as one of the more terrifying villians created in modern literature and entertainment. The viewer, and in fact many of the characters, value that individuality to the point that death is preferable than it's loss. In fact in star trek when they believed they were about to be captured, the captain of the ship ordered a suicidal collision course with the Borg Ship in order to prevent it. That is...... the loss of individuality was such a given..... that it never occurred to the captain to offer the crew the choice "Would you rather die or do you value your life enough to want to survive in this altered state". Had *I* been the captain I would have picked up my gun, announced to the crew they had the choice of suicide or survival, and then shot myself in the head. The choice of death was not his to make for everyone else but for him, the writer of the show, and the viewers......... it was presumed it was.

Yet the same people will go on to describe a paradise after life that is, essentially, a form of the Borg Collective. It is one of the more remarkable examples of human cognitive dissonance that I have encountered.

[stepka]

Originally Posted by TroutDude

I'm inclined to think some aspect of us continues, beyond the return of our atoms to the universal pool.

Actually almost all of your atoms have already gone back to the universal pool many, many times over. You've already replaced 72% of them from just 16 days ago! So what makes you, you?

Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801

The strongest thing I believe is that love survives death.

As do I. What I believe does not survive is your ego. The ego is a toolkit for life and no longer needed in the afterlife and it's the biggest barrier to happy human relationships that I can think of. Lose the ego, lose the negative drama.

Originally Posted by Terryj

15 years ago I had a heart attack, when the EMT's arrived at my apartment they found me on the floor, technically dead. What I experienced during that time changed my life completely. I didn't see a light tunnel nor did I see any relatives that had died, I saw nothing. What I did experience was an awareness, I knew things that I'd never even thought about before, I also experienced a familiar presents someone or something that I knew. Then in a flash of light I was back.

Do I know there something after death, yes very much so. This sense of knowing has really set me free, it has opened my mind and stripped away my beliefs. It is to know that we return to that in which we came, to know that the choice was ours to experience anything we choose to experience. There is no heaven nor is there a hell, there is just this vast awareness that we all participate in and are all apart of.

And this is what I believe. Why not listen to those who've been there? Also, since NDE's are short-lived, why not listen to those who've gone thru intense hypnotherapy and can regress to past lives and the after-life as well. Dr. Michael Newton wrote some really good books about this--FTR, reincarnation does pass my "gut test."

[CatwomanofV]

Originally Posted by Mightyqueen801

The strongest thing I believe is that love survives death.

I never understand when after someone dies, people will say, "I loved him." or "I loved her." Does that mean they stopped loving them only because they died?


Cat

[tuebor]

Originally Posted by Tzaphkiel

The beauty of it all is that when we can see from the higher perspective, the horrors aren't horrors at all. Think of it like actors in a play. People in the play die and go through all sorts of drama and heartbreak and intrigue. Then after the play is over they all go to the cast party and discuss the performance and congratulate each other on playing their parts to the hilt really really well.

Are the actors dead? No but they put on a really convincing play and people in the audience were gasping and in tears and frightened in all the scary parts. Do the actors who played the bad guys really hate the hero? Of course not. They are best friends and have worked together in many different plays.

It's like that.

The actor [you] can play many different roles and parts [different life times], a hero a villain a thief a peasant a king. He is the same actor [you]. He is not to be confused with the parts he plays [different incarnations].

If I play Romeo in a play, Romeo doesn't really suffer, and I don't suffer much either. I don't know if the meta-self who "plays" tuebor in this incarnation suffers, but I know that tuebor does! As Santayana says, this life may be an illusion, but the suffering is real.

But that is almost beside the point. Could you look a refugee from Syria or Darfur in the eye and state this theory of yours? I sure couldn't.

[bulmabriefs144]

Afterlife is like water. Whatever you see is real.

[Mightyqueen801]

Originally Posted by CatwomanofV

I never understand when after someone dies, people will say, "I loved him." or "I loved her." Does that mean they stopped loving them only because they died?


Cat

I'm with you on that.