Would you even 'want' a life hereafter?

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Whether I like it or not, I think being is just something we are and that this is an endless number of manifestations that consciousness can take. It seems really logical to me, just seeing how all of nature works, Everywhere you look, the energy in matter takes form but never disappears. It just always is, so I doubt that the ill understood phenomenon of consciousness is any different.

I don't believe in heaven either. You can only make now, this moment heaven, by loving yourself and others. All we or anything else has is the moment right in front of us, and we need to make it the best moment we can. I don't see why the afterlife, if there is one, would be any different.

Last edited by JNathanK on 25 Feb 2012, 4:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

Shame there isn't a way for one to off themselves well enough to make sure they never come back. Perhaps if I can make enough money in my lifetime and find out I have a terminal illness I can be sent out into space and from there atomize myself with a hydrogen bomb. F*** coming back...

Is there any guarantee that after flower decomposes that its nutrients won't ever again be assimilated into another biological system? Why would it be any different with awareness? Every moment is holy, or at least we should treat it that way, because that's all there is.

Maybe so on the recycling part but I absolutely will not agree on the holy part.

Its what you want it to be ultimately, but its better if we reverence every moment. I see it as holy, because its what is, and we should make the best of it. I think its amazing that there is something rather than nothing and that we can participate subjectively and actively in it. If we take this all for granted and drift through life in a detached stupor, not trying to make every moment the best we can make it only denigrates the universe, or at least our rolls in it. Were all intrinsic components of the universe. You and I may be playing insignificant rolls, but were not any less a part of the totality of all that is than anyone or anything else.





There's two realities we all collectively can move toward, the one of death, destruction, and meaninglessness or the one of life, growth, and meaning. As individuals, we each make choices in every moment that moves us to one extreme or the other. Myself, I want the reality on the left in the Alex Grey paining, the one of enlightenment and purpose, so I'm gonna try to do my very small part to move things in that direction. Hopefully everyone else will do the same, but even if the vast majority doesn't want that path, I'll at least know I tried.

Respect yourself, others, and your surroundings. Do yourself a favor and the universe a favor. Self loathing doesn't do you, others, or the whole of the cosmos any good. We've been given so many gifts, and we shouldn't take any of them for granted, but we do all the time.

Anyway dude, if you're that depressed about life, that you can't wait for this all to be done with, I don't know what your hang ups are. We've all done stupid things and have acted irresponsibly. Just learn from the past, don't get consumed by it, and find a new path by breaking your old habits.

Anyway, peace bro.

I don't know whether there's an afterlife or not. I don't think it really matters and that its all mostly speculation. All that I think matters is, whatever moment you find yourself in, whether its in this life or some other one, use it wisely and treat it with respect.

Last edited by JNathanK on 25 Feb 2012, 5:52 am, edited 3 times in total.

Hell no! Being compelled to live forever is so cruel. Is that the penalty for believing in Jesus?

ruveyn

I typically don't peck at other people's beliefs but since things are starting to feel a bit preachy I'll point a few things out:

1) There's about as much solid ground for arguing the existence of free will as there is arguing the existence of Yahweh. Events are 1:1, probabilities are a man-made coping mechanism that we use to compensate for complexities and sheer amounts of raw data and input information that we don't have. Human decisions are essentially the same.
2) Meaning/lessness will always be relative, no matter what the beholders optimism/pessimism disposition is. At the same time though meaning will always be something we fabricate out of whole cloth and it will always be relative to us, outside of that its essentially a vacuous concept, like many we have, floating in a void with nothing to define or contrast it.
3) Movement of any type, at all, comes of an agitation. Any thought, any feeling, any sensation. In a lot of ways, just to get through a good day even we're netting negative and moving on compulsion. Even being alive itself is a compulsion, not a choice.

That said I would agree that, as long as the mechanisms we exist as force us to exist until they fall apart of their own, we should strive to make this world better in any way we can (legitimately better rather than a chain of worsenings with "but we meant well!" tied to them). The optimal way of doing that is by making it a world where people can be their best selves with as little in the way of limitations as possible and where they can be rewarded on it. Anything that essentially crushes down or starves us for oxygen (figuratively) is an evil - whether its a necessary or unnecessary evil, and the point of progress seems to be throwing as many unnecessary evils out the window as possible while putting in efforts to resolve any that remain as 'necessary' since the point is shrinking that pool as far as can be done.

Even there though - we're essentially palleating an existence where you come into being, are excited and want to take it all on, just to find out that there's essentially nothing here and most of your life is really spent coming to grips with the vacuousness of now, the vacuousness of self, the vacuousness of us. Any gain, any strengthening, any rise in self-actualization is still bittersweet because you're gratifying and releasing stresses to reduce pain more than solving the ultimate problem when you drill down to it - that you exist at all.

sylvia is just one voice among many, like the presets on a car radio, so you can change the station to find some better spiritual truth stations if you want. no one preset has all the stuff you or anybody else would want at all times. i kinda like edgar cayce's station, or dr. ian stephenson's station also. IOW they all have pieces of the truth, and part of discernment is to find those pieces of truthful wheat while prudently putting aside the chaff, for within the chaff there may also be elemental bits of truth. in any case, spirits are NOT created equal, there are more successful and less successful spirits. spiritualists believe that some individual souls or spirits fail utterly and are "recycled" back into undifferentiated light, eventually to be reborn in a different mixture of traits in some new spirit. the energy itself is eternal and cannot be destroyed but the spiritual "engrams" upon the energy evolve or devolve in different ways.

again, tune to different stations until you find a good one or at least one whose contents you can readily assimilate. when the student is ready, the lesson will begin. an appropriate level of truth will come to any of us when we are ready for it. as for the bright world, "in my house there are many mansions." you will not be a misfit in the most perfect place, you will be in the niche which fits you. you are incalculably more than your most recent incarnation which is just the tip of the iceburg. there is a mental realm where one can do all the "navel gazing" one feels the need to do. there are no clocks anywhere there. and there is always something to take back. you can't spend time in this hellworld without it making some kind of impression [engrams] upon your soul.

how does one know if there is such a thing as absolute truth? or if it exists, how can limited human cognition understand the totality of it? just as when your parents might've answered your childhood sex questions with the tale of the stork, so to does human understanding limit itself to various kinds of fanciful tales which contain small elements of truth lacing together disparate fictions of a common theme, which are digestible to the young spirit. humans can't handle the [absolute] truth, it is echelons beyond their reality. psychics way back when, were known as "sensitives" - think of a radio that is ultra-sensitive that can pick up very faint stations that a regular radio can't resolve- that is your basic psychic person. to extend the radio analogy, a very sensitive radio also picks up a lot more noise from the local environment, as the bits of radio waveform get more dilute. sylvia is akin to a very sensitive radio tuner, and she tunes in distant stations but also picks up lots of local noise [her own prejudices]. a far better tuner is edgar cayce, who worked in trance and was far less subject to his own noisy fundamentalist prejudices from his old-fashioned upbringing.

you can take this or leave this google-list, of course-
dr. ian stephenson [in particular, his book "you cannot die"]
edgar cayce [association for research and enlightenment or ARE]
the seth material [jane roberts]
robert monroe [the monroe institute]
in addition, (clicky)THIS is an interesting website, give it a chance
you will find much greater stuff than i can suggest for you. it's out there, waiting for you to learn about it.

Well, if we didn't assault each others sensibilities from time to time, things would get rather boring. If you're offended at me picking apart your beliefs, then don't bother making posts about such existential and philosophical claims on a public forum. You're free to pick mine apart, and I'm not offended. I hope you aren't either.



I think our problem though is that we see ourselves too much as particulates and not part of an integrated whole when we make decisions. I think more destructive decisions are made when you're only factoring yourself and only your needs in a decision as opposed to factoring in your relationship to the whole you're ultimately an extension of. The same goes for factoring the needs of the whole over yourself. In either case, its a disconnected view of things, and I think this is really what the source of relativistic nihilism is, that we differentiate our selves too much from everything else, because of our own egos.



I think the blank cloth we all have a part in making a mural on defines and contrasts itself. This vacuousness you're talking about, I take it, is the realm outside of human valuation, the external nature we see ourselves so much distinct from? I think the contrast between human value systems and nature is precisely what's necessary for either to exist as they do. The same goes for the contrast between substance and vacuum in general. One couldn't exist without the one dialectically complimenting and contrasting the other. Black wouldn't have the same context it does without white, negative couldn't exist without positive, happy couldn't exist without sad, and so on and so forth.



What else would there be for the universe to do but live itself out? Naturally I don't think reality just wants to exist as a pure vacuum. It wants to revolve around stars, traverse a space-time matrix, and contemplate itself subjectively, and I think that's what were a direct manifestation of. I think that's at least a tendency it gravitates toward anyway. Were all sets of eyes and ears it developed to see and hear itself with.



Well, when I say that I'm gonna do my best to move things toward the better reality even though others won't, I don't mean I'm just going to sit around and wish for the best. I mean I'm going to actually do my best, even if there isn't some large trend indicating everyone else isn't moving in the same direction. If everyone just sat on their hands in a malaise waiting for others or a majority to act, positive, social changes could never take shape.

...and I agree we should make an optimal world where people can be their best selves. However, I we are that world, and each of us, individually, can change it, at least on a very miniscule level, by changing how we relate to ourselves and others. Many of the unnecessary evils are systemic, but good or bad systems arise by good or bad day to day human interactions.

This is why I'm concerned about the general malaise plaguing much of post-modernist thinking. If you look at yourself as meaningless and insignificant because of the relativity of things, its a self fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, if you adopt value and meaning in yourself, then its an impetus to get engaged and really care about yourself and your role in the world. It may be relative, but beliefs have power in that way.



Were the poets of poems, the story tellers of stories, the philosophers of philosophy, the artists of arts, the lovers that love, the dreamers of dreams, the livers of life. If that's what vacuousness is, that's incredible.

So...you are an agnostic Buddhist?

Awesome.

Okay, yeah, I did read The Sleeping Prophet when I was younger. I had a relative who was supposed clairvoyant, indicated that she believed I was 'intuitive' (outside of the standard definition apparently) and somewhere along the line I think recommended that I read this.

Even there, the story of the room full of letters from people asking for healing advice, the 'stick a pickle under your pillow and you should be fine' type responses, claims that people with autism have spirits that aren't fully 'tucked in' their bodies, it was almost harder to put credibility to than Benny Hinn or Issam Nemeh's healing ministries. Stories like these not only go counterclockwise to everything we see at present about the universe, they disburse into vapour the minute one tries to test them. The closest thing to looking like convincing science for a human reach beyond the body was the PEAR project. As for the US and Russian militaries many psychic programs had been tried and failed.

Yes, but wood you pine fir feelings?

You know, I remember when I was neurotic about my mortality. Then I saw my great grandmother in her final days, and she had this kind of "whatever" sense about it, seeming more chagrined than upset. I think the chagrin was for the fact that someone was inevitably going to be very upset and depressed about her dying, which I understand is what you really start to think about when you are the one dying. I realized then, "I've really been making too much of this dying nonsense."

I feel smaller, knowing that I have only a limited window in which to be effective at anything, but it's not a feeling that is so big that I can't manage it. I know I'm not important enough to the universe to keep around forever and ever, but that is actually kind of liberating in a way. If you're just another mayfly dancing in the wind, there is a certain sense of perfection in every moment that you have.

My life is a punctuation, not a line. It is a shout, not a wail.

Last edited by WilliamWDelaney on 25 Feb 2012, 10:49 am, edited 1 time in total.

No, not offended but perhaps slightly exasperated in the sense that I feel like you're seeing a lot of what I'm seeing but are still missing a critical piece or two.

I think a lot of what you end up saying below still appeals to free will, you talk about certain kinds of decisions and why we make them, however in a universe where the now is a bit like an impulse traveling up a fixed structure, there was no different path for a single atom, molecule, or subatomic particle in this universe to have than the path it traveled, is traveling, or will travel.

Probably my favorite homemade example just in its brevity and what it encompasses. Suppose you walk into a casino, walk past many people, smell many different smells, have a series of thoughts, walk up to a craps table, and throw lucky sevens. You can rewind that segment of time as many times as you like between you entering the door, which will be perfect in replica, you in fact will be perfect in replica in that the same exact molecules of you will be in the same places and states, you will interact with the same people who are in the same states, you will think the same thoughts, the sights and smells will not only be identical - you're registe all of them identically, you'll have the identical conversation with the dealer and you will throw the only perfect replica of that dice roll that you will ever be able to in your life because it will be that exact moment on replay. You can replay this scenario 10 times, 100 times, 1,000,000 times, etc. and get the same result. In that sense even the window I provided, ie. walking in the door to letting dice fall, is an arbitrary and illustrative window as technically the same rules would apply infinitely backward and infinitely forward.

Hence humans, animals, and all of life are of the same ilk as rivers, streams, oceans, winds, etc.; we're cyclones of chemical reaction. That doesn't rule out there being extra-dimensional components necessarily but it does rule out free will, just as much as it likely rules out most tightly defined punish/reward deities of antiquity.


Well, if you believe that man is the measure of all things. At the same time though its a perspective relevant to us simply because we're here to measure, if we weren't here to measure and there was no 'us' to find a need to measure, the stars and their satellites in this universe would go on as they ever had. If we were the reason think about the countless number of stars and galaxies that exist well outside of our view, we assume they go on in the same manner that any other stars and galaxies would but there's an assumption that their being beyond our view is of no relevance to them. Same as if every star, every planet, and even Earth were beyond our view. They'd be without us while they did what they did, but they'd have no reason not to since we don't carve them out in any manner.


Is that a suggestion that it has sentience to wonder? If so its incredibly block-headed and masochistic.


I'd still argue that everything we will ever do was part of a fixed structure even at the time of the big bang and that this fixed structure we exist within only registers as moving in time because our awareness and 'I' experiences do. I don't bring that as an argument that we should all go home, pop rohypnols, and smack ourselves in the faces because everything's already pre-written, but I am suggesting that all the motivations, all the needs, all the urges we will ever have are written in stone, all of the events that have or will happen are written in stone, and that goes just as much for the positive as the negative. People spend time in this folder arguing beliefs, arguing religious, economic, and social systems, etc. partly because every thought and keystroke they lay down was predestined but in that predestined process there's the double-entente of the 'I' experience and to us, in real time, we see things happening around us, in the news, in literature we read, they're shaping our belief systems or shaping our feelings of need to act to right the course of certain matters, and many of us do whats in our capacity. That said though not everyone will run out and join Occupy Wall Street or The Tea Party, and most of us will never run for office - partly because having ASD's the social aspect of things is a big weight on our shoulders but do we vote? Sure. Do we say a lot to each other? Sure. While it seems like outlooks and opinions change very little here does a neoconservative change a leftists mind on issues from time to time? Sure. Does a leftist change a neoconservative's mind on a particular issue from time to time? Sure. All around the world people's opinions are pretty fixed anyway and most persuasion seems to move bit-wise rather than sweepingly unless a heck of a reality bubble starts occurring between media and reality and that bubble happens to burst; which, we may be on the cusp of.


Except that a self-fulfilling prophecy is a highly tongue-in-cheek matter when one considers that what we call space and time is a fixed structure no matter which side of space we have to our backs while we're bicycling or driving a car.


The same amount of people will and won't. Its not a problem with life being meaningless at its fundamental level so much as where their own vantage point is. I think our best objective measure is 'alleviate suffering of sentient life as much as possible', because we can score subjective against subjective, its essentially us dealing with our own problem of existing, and attempting to make existence less of a crap sandwich.


That's definitely the full half of the glass...

My dad's nearing 75, has stayed in great shape in terms of weight lifting regularly and hitting the gym, but he has stroke risks. Recently he had an episode where he believed he'd had a couple small strokes in the space of the week and this past Sunday he passed out while drinking a glass of water, struck his forhead on the corner of a marble window ledge, and had bleeding to the point that we had to get him to a local in-patient clinic to get the bleeding stopped and get him stitches.

The good news was that we think rather than strokes (recently at least) that he was on too many blood thinners rather than having any TIA episodes. Before we knew all of that even it seemed like, and I would see this as most 'normal' people's reactions, that he was reflecting on all the family calling one another, being worried about him, and seemed both self-conscious and annoyed as well as a bit embarrassed.

Whether its a test run or the real thing of our bodies breaking down on us, it still part of 'business as usual', and IMHO so is dying. In a sense though, as I think you may have been alluding to above, we're all immortal, just that its in a more merciful way of that being so (being a permanent part of the space-time structure) rather than having eternal consciousness.

well i can not see how i could retain my identity after i die.
the only thing that i find possible to understand is a hindu idea that our consciousness is like a droplet of water that falls back into the sea of consciousness after i die.

i would like to see my parents again, but their separate identities are gone i think. the bodies of my father and mother have been buried, and i can not understand how i could see their likenesses after i die.

separateness is an illusion i believe, and i think i will never see any one i knew who died (during my life) after i die.

with that in mind, i can not really desire eternal consciousness. who knows. it is very late here, and i will return to this topic when i wake up after a long sleep.