IF you Knew Life does not End with Death...

a reply to: andy06shake

i believe that its stressors that make organism strengthen and evolve, i believe that all the bad and the good are all relevant to our evolution as a species, many of us are ready to move on on to a more utopian society, but many others are not.
there could be many other permutations involved, but on the whole, we are on the right track, cause there only is one track.
then there is the possibility that that track has an infinite number of dimensions or layers, and just by thinking differently we may be in different worlds by the time you finish reading this sentence.

a reply to: Davg80

A Utopian society might not be all its cracked up to be after all Eden did not exactly suit our purpose.

Humans seem to require obstacles to overcome, its not even exactly like we have a choice in the matter, given the fact that they present themselves since birth.

Good or Evil seem to be rather Human constructs as to tracks(Different Timelines) there may be multiple different tracks or universe depending on the decisions we make. Not exactly very efficient a process all the same. I take it you subscribe to the multiverse theory?

If indeed our own universe is holographic and a simulation of a simulation that might not be that far from the truth.

Or on the flip side we may have it all wrong and we don't really even understand anything, god darn multiverse, decisions decisions, decisions.

Frankly i don't imagine Humanity is that important that our decision making processes have the ability to create multiple timelines, if that happens i imagine its natures bag more than anything else.

a reply to: Akragon

Life is synonymous with the body. In fact, it is the same thing. When the body ends, so too does life. Life without a body is not life.

But if there was some magical fact that life never ends, there would be no need to live, nor regard the living with any more respect.

a reply to: tigertatzen

That was depressing.

I personally feel I don't know f there is life after death. I was raised strictly Southern Baptist to believe in a kingdom of God; if you would say you believed in him. I tried really hard to believe that-even taught Sunday School.

Now, after much study of the Bible and many other religions, I can't say I know but I do know that try to live my life as a caring person. I don't live for self aggrandisement nor do those who question an after-life that I know live selfishly.

I am sad you feel that way about humanity. There will always be selfish, mean people but I don't believe the majority who question an afterlife become all about self absorption.

Reality Check:

Maybe I should make this my new thing: reminding people how the world works so that they can think more reasonably about it.

Fact One:

How exactly could you know how the world works. That is, is there any definitive evidence you could proffer to gainsay any other alternative?

Fact one is simple: you are always embodied - that is, wherenever you think, you think through the hardwre of a physical brain that does biophysical work i.e. is actively processing oxygen and glucose through an elaborate system of molecular dynamics to construct your moment to moment consciousness - what we experience as the "stream of mind".

Fact one says quite simply and irrefutably: you have no evidence that any perspective upon your experience you've had - such as astral travel - is possible outside the neurological pathways of your body. No evidence. Not a single human being has accomplished this task without being embodied - without having a brain with a history that began when it evolved from the neural tube as an embryo.

This fact alone should humble people, but wacky, moderately educated people with unbridled nervous systems (read, loss of the complex use of their orbitofontal cortex) are so caught up in the feedback loop that is their awareness - and make all sorts of unjustified - overly faith-based - claims about the nature of reality that they can be nihilists who nevertheless trick themselves (via their self-affirming conversations with like-minded others) into a faith - a faith which ultimately serves to let them feel so "above" the world they interact with, not yet recognizing how utterly defensive this procedure - the "unrealness" of death gives one a sense of distance - gives one the pretended idea that they can exist in the same way they exist in this life, or, even more naively, totally underestimate how tortuous existing can be.

Delusion comes very easily to Humans when Humans do not recognize the concept of feedback loops. If we are symmetrical - made of the same stuff and process it in the same way - then we have the same sorts of needs that are processed in the same sorts of ways: conversations.

See what the problem is here? Self-fulfilling desires. If we have the same affective need (irritation with poor people, say), and locate, or create, a semantic justification for its resolution (might is right), we are merely tricking ourselves that solution via the same sorts of "pathways" that lead to the same affective need, and thus, are vulnerable to converging through conversation upon an "explanation". Is this not what the so-called "Illuminati" are? People who've been deluded by the relational and ecological effects of power - registered within us as affects - and have come to religiously purge themselves of feelings that any normal human would feel - because the structure of the human being self-organizes from here by default i.e. with early life being the most natural example of responsive and intimate caring?

In short, beliefs are like "defenses". Think of them like genes, relative to the "metabolism" of the chemicals that exist around them, which in turn are guided by the particular environmental molecule needed by the organism. In the body, glucose will trigger proteins to activate genes that activate metabolic pathways that can extract useful energy from glucose. Same thing with the mind: the external 'sign' or symbol, be it a facial expression or a vocal tone, will activate what psychoanalysts call a "self-state" - a way of being within your body - way of expressing your self - that is most neurologically consonant with the external 'symbol': that is, your brain records reality, and then constructs it by activating "programs" that work primarily through the force of affects/feelings - the basic knowledge system of the Human social being. You cognition - symbols - beliefs - are like genes; just as genes exist to record useful metabolic pathways that work to metabolize external molecules (signs), so too does your cognition/symbolic mind exist to process the relational cues indicating by the external world.

Do you see what the problem is? Ancient Humans have been weaving fantasies that are very very plausible if you're ignorant. But with science, we are forced to face reality and thus disabuse ourselves of wanton fantasies that propogate nothing but a mental virus amongst the Human social-mind.

Finally. Does life exist after death? I believe so - but I do not describe my belief as "fact" - but as an intuitive feeling. I also do not have any sense of what that would be like - and nor would you or any other embodied Human being. We are all moving into the "black hole" of death - and we all move towards it with a similar degree of ignorance.

I did a thread just like this years ago. There may be some similar sentiment back then. Check if yer interested. I wonder of physical life would not cheapen. If you follow the alien/ufo threads at all you will know that the "greys" reportedly say that the body is just a container to be shed, so they don't really value it and don't care of they "die." Their perspective on life appears to be that it is no big deal. I'm also friends with a Vietnam Vet who was severely injured and "died" on the operating room table, only to be surrounded by some of his dead friends. He says he'll never be afraid of death again.

a reply to: schuyler

If you follow the alien/ufo threads at all you will know that the "greys" reportedly say that the body is just a container to be shed, so they don't really value it and don't care of they "die."

And why on earth would anyone take "their word" to be true?

If you think of it from a Jungian perspective, shorn of all the mythological babble, the gray would then be seen to be no more than a symbolic reflection of the self's own functionally structured constitution (meaning a life history has created this image). "Grey" as in "unsure". Alienated - outside the knowledge that makes a Human, Human. And it seems to get the sybolisms to a T: the orbitofrontal cortex is absent (the very part of our brain which generates a conscious control on the flow of feeling) and the parietal and dorsal areas of the brain have enlarged - as if the alien were a self-projected "prediction" that somehow communes back upon itself, just as the schizophrenic hears "disembodied voices", the grey is a reflection of the self's constitution - the object of its own creation - albeit, doing nothing more nor less than what its circumstances and affordances allow.

Self-reflection such as this should be a signal to pay attention, and perhaps, worry about the state of your being. And yet, knowing what I do about the delicate nature of our being, fear typically rules the day - especially powerfully in those with a flippant, dissociative and disconnected manner. They misunderstand - essentialize - their own way of being, as if in reality, they have achieved "enlightenment". No. Greyness doesn't work, because right and wrong exist - past and future matter, indeed, this is why we are able to do what we do in the world: we "re-member". We hold pertinent information learned in the past to structure a coherent response in the present. Similarly, we prepare for future circumstances by learning from the past.

Evidently, then, the "power of now" is only partial - a pivot point, for sure, but not something to be invoked to escape the exigencies of living with others - whose needs we must respect if our own are to be respected; and thus, the feeling we call "care" and "love", are in fact metabolic solutions - a phenomenologically emergent power arising between two actors - that serve to regulate the flow of energy between and within them. A bigger brain has the paradoxical consequence of increasing awareness of suffering. And awareness of suffering is quelled by turning to others to love and help us. A massage releases endorphins in Humans - and all social animals. Construction - and further complexification of structure - happens through connection, not disconnection.

Ultimately, this is as faith-based as evangelicalism. It cherry picks information and posits all sorts of claims about the nature of reality to support its position. And having brought forth that knowledge, the narrative emerges - the self begin to feel calmed and assured by its own explanation".

And God - Universe - Nature - laughs. Surely, if there were a reality beyond us - some superior organism or being, the behavior of humans on this planet is monstrously self-confused. It doesn't understand itself - and resents, having tricked itself into thinking that hatred and anger can good for you - as opposed to being the very affective mediums which charge shoddy self-confabulations.

I know reality is difficult - particularly when you've lived so long on the other side. The relationality of being therefore turns an effort to "self-correct" as a disgusting, hateful, difficult, or depressing effort. From the vantage point of Cain, the biblical figure, having made a mistake - having the memory and affective valence of that mistake - casts yourself in a shameful light. The mistake is hated even more because the self can then reflect on the creator who made the possibility for him to make this mistake, and now expects a return from the mistake, even though its hard and difficult.

This is what a dynamical system is about. Negative feelings are representations of dynamical activity - i.e. metabolism. A system must "search" a platonic phase space before it can chance upon a solution - and discover a more stable, robust and complex organization.

It's that interim period that everyone fears - and which leads to reifications about self, identity, and the informing nature of affective experience: as if the more audacious beliefs the self has could be sustained under certain affective experiences - as if experience wasn't emergent i.e. could not be controlled by the direction of a disembodied and alienated center.

Were followers - no matter what direction we take, we follow.

originally posted by: Astrocyte
a reply to: schuyler

If you follow the alien/ufo threads at all you will know that the "greys" reportedly say that the body is just a container to be shed, so they don't really value it and don't care of they "die."

And why on earth would anyone take "their word" to be true?

If you think of it from a Jungian perspective, shorn of all the mythological babble, the gray would then be seen to be no more than a symbolic reflection of the self's own functionally structured constitution (meaning a life history has created this image). "Grey" as in "unsure".

You lost me right there with no need to read any further. I have no interest in Jungian psychobabble. I take this stuff at face value. As far as I'm concerned, you are completely and totally off-topic in terms of the original subject matter, which has nothing to do with archetypes or symbolism. If you want to live in that cave, by all means knock yourself out, but you're not dragging me into that cesspool with you. Why not start your own thread on this and see how many people will follow your line of thinking?

a reply to: Akragon

Due to my experiences, I'd say I wouldn't change anything. Assuming that there is life after death, my opinion wouldn't change because what's the worst case? I end up being sent to the Pearly Gates and be told to earn my wings, or a scalding hot place to be tortured until someone decides I've had enough? (NOTE: Michigan drivers on snowy roads is enough torture).

What I would see in this Dystopia is a greater acceptance of death in general. I'd also expect to see more risky behaviors (Oh darn, what's the worst that could happen...I die? Pfft, I'm robbing a bank!). Heck, there might even be a religion centered around dying, or a new branch of science devoted to finding out where you go when you die (I don't count modern-day ghost hunters).

Life would still matter, because assuming no-one has found out what happens when we cross over, I'd imagine people would still want to accomplish as much as they can before that time comes.

Finally, I'd say overall, it would be for the better, if only for the fact that people can stop worrying if there is an afterlife or not.

-fossilera

a reply to: schuyler

My position is biophysical. I only mention the "jungian" part because it has arisen - or the idea has arisen - as a function of something called "intuition".

Since this thread is about death, and my position in an earlier post questioned the basis for the OP's belief that he has gained some perspective on existence independent of the body's processing - that is, he has seem himself without the mediation of his brain (an impossibility), I have already addressed the OP's theme.

I sort of unconsciously took this information from my first post, and went out into the la la land you've seem to ventured into, so its ironic that you would see in my post a "jungian position" (if you read it, you would see from where my argument begins) and then proceed to denigrate it and me, when you have sort of nonchalantly spoken about gray aliens as if they were real i.e. outside the brain of your which mediates your consciousness. Ergo, if they were to be real in any sense, it would have to be a continuation of you and your functional dynamics i.e. life history, as a Human creature.

I'm thus sticking to physics, to atoms, to molecules, macro-molecles and networks of relationships that constitute the life cycle of every cell, and thus, every organism.

I'm saying, then, that his image of a gray alien - which so many people of this website seem to be mindlessly obsessed with - is just another way of expressing an alienated state of self i.e. the image arises as a function of the sort of feelings which animate i.e. structure, your mental life.

Instead of being defensive, why don't you reflect on the meaning of this?

Luckily there isn't a lick of evidence for eternal life, or reincarnation for that matter (beyond the concept of perpetual energy in it's simplest form - simplest, not complex like a mind, or something that can generate thought processes).

I love life, and I have always wanted to live forever (in the generic sense). But that is just because of my narrow concept of time. I can divorce myself enough from my own concept of time (and desire to avoid death) to know that eternity is long, like a long that can't even be fathomed. I have a multitude of interests, more than I could ever get to in 3 lifetimes, but even 3 lifetimes is nothing when compared to eternity. Heck, 3 lifetimes is nothing compared to 2000 years, which would seem torturous once you actually think about it.

And if your concept of 'life after death' is being reborn into something else without the knowledge of your past existence then there is no 'life after death'. If there is no remainder of former self then there is no remainder. This isn't Westworld. And how long does that go on for? Until the Milky Way collides with Andromeda? What then after our galaxy burns it's way into something new (and in a way that life as we know it could not survive the transition)? What are you born into then? What happens when there are no more living creatures to be reborn into?

And what about deterioration of the mind? If you live long enough your memories fade as your mind breaks down (if this is evidence of locality I don't know what is). After you die do all your memories come back? Many people can't remember a good amount of their life at 90 years old if they make it that far (not universal, but generally true). Do you live on as just a scant group of memories that happen to still exist?

I chose reality. We will all be forgotten in 2-3 generations from now.
Life is beautiful and short and it means very little... except what you make of it, which can be beautiful.

That movie ghost with Demi Moore and swayze freaked me out, worried that shadows might pull me to hell but less concerned after a NDE. Saw my body, was floating away, only knew it was me because I returned. Which now gives me no pause about how or what I do in this life, would of preferred it like a light switch but close enough I suppose, I'll flick my own switch in due time with no worries now

a reply to: tigertatzen

As always, a rich and wise post.

The percentage of people with a moral fortitude strong enough to deny going down the selfish and egocentric path when there are no spiritual or physical law consequences to keep them in check would be very low indeed.

Yeah I know were all sent to this prison planet to figure out How To Be Enlightened.

Just hope Jesus Christ knows your name.........I already know he knows mine. And it's not the name on my Social Security card.

Your Friend Jenkinswasher.

"Could you walk through life knowing that death isn't the end..."

If life after death exists then what is your opinion as to how life like that can be?

What is real and given individuals exist could have something to do with individuality.

Gonna tell you Jackasses that the next life is the one we're living. Just here to make sure I pass the Judgement.

I would party likes its 1999.

originally posted by: LesMisanthrope
a reply to: Akragon

Life is synonymous with the body. In fact, it is the same thing. When the body ends, so too does life. Life without a body is not life.

I have to say there IS something after this physical Life. I have been on Several Out Of Body flights in to the Astral Realm. It is Me, My life force, spark of existence, if You will, and have interacted with many from that Realm, while I was there. If one can leave Their shell, look down upon it, then go into another plane of existence, would that not signify there is something after this Life?

From You:"But if there was some magical fact that life never ends, there would be no need to live, nor regard the living with any more respect."

The need to Live would be to experience every 'level', Life, after this one! I used 'level', for not knowing what other word to place there....
Also, I have always tried to treat People with Respect, when they deserve it or not. I see no need to change that if in fact Life, in it's many possible forms, never ends!

Syx

Shameless bump?

a reply to: Akragon

Indeed life doesn't end with death, it begins.