What will you be doing in a Million Years?

reply to post by platipus


It's a hard thing to do without mutual understanding, but I know I'm not alone in this supreme wish or goal. It's high time we got to the end of our "programming" and re-discovered just who and what we really are. That's when heaven comes to earth, and when God lives within and among us, as per original intent and design.

reply to post by sykickvision

The only way I can see it not getting incredibly old and boring, would be if you were just reborn as someone or something else - with no memory at all of ever having existed before.

Ah, the Hindu solution, but certainly germane to the discussion.

In philosophy, after we get past why there is something (rather than nothing), we can confront the vastness of eternity, and wonder how anything could possibly be in "eternity", god, ourselves, etc., to begin with.

Perhaps at a young age, we were told about "god", or the universe, or musings about what could have preceded the Big Bang, but however we encountered it, once the impact of eternity truly hit us, we should never have been the same.

Reincarnation to me is a such cop out. So many people believe in it, and yet, it's as hollow as any of the other attempts to resolve this huge problem of existence.

No memory, pretty much nullifies the benefit, as has been pointed out many times before. Even if a person should posit some kind of Karmic computer, keeping track of it all, allowing "experience" to somehow accumulate, even without particular memory, they're still not too far from plain, old, standard versions of a "god" who makes it all right in the end. So, why not skip the reincarnation, and go straight to the "predetermined" Judgement Seat?

Albert Camus, the apostle of the "absurd man" said a whole lot in his "Man in Revolt" (as is most often translated). Because he wrote in French, there was another rendering of that translation that was basically a pun, The Revolting Man. He is who I think is the best in the tradition of the "true atheist", so logical, and yet, so bleak.

Besides things like "love", that insinuate things beyond, another important, and very human trait should also be accounted for. That is, the simple desire for "peace". While the grave is the symbol for that, could we come up with some idea of a "peace" that was somehow "eternal"??

JR

"I think", maybe a guardian angel. To be assigned to a new born baby on earth.
To watch over and protect them. If they are a spiritual person, be able
to spiritually guide them.

REV.
I am referring to John he bowed down to an angel.
The angel said, bow down not to me, as I am your brother.

reply to post by wisintel


In the afterlife we assist other living spirits in life. Some people are assigned to one person while others might look after an entire species depending on the knowledge they learnt in life. The species could be animals to people or any living thing.

If one believes in a higher power they have a quick stay in pergatory which is were we deal with our death.The spirit is stronger than people realize.

In death we are wise from the learning we achieved in helping others.

I think after a certain period, we are born again in reincarnation according to our deeds!

Perhaps a lonely fragment of my soul will drift in space, perhaps it will settle on to an unsuspecting plant, and my consciousness will be alive again in a whole new world, where all my thoughts, dreams, and memories will play themselves out among all the other creatures, where I can interract in the minds of other beings, shaping the collective consciousness. Perhaps I will be lucky enough to be an ancestral memory in the incarnation of a sentient being, providing my insights and assisting them with thier own problems, and as they die, we will combine into an even more complex being, eventually expressing itself in the next generation. I would think that eventually all the beings would turn into one being, with all their memories and experiences, and when the universe is reborn, our collective experience will manifest itself into the new life forms of the various planets that form in the next universe - and so an and so fourth.

I think the beauty of it is not knowing what is going to happen, not caring whether we are going to live for one second, live on for eternity, or whether or not this is our one and only chance at life.

This is something that I've mulled over a lot recently, and opens up the door to a lot of speculation, and to a lot of confusion, but here are some of the things that I've come up with.

First, we (as Christians, that's my perspective) believe that the afterlife is spent with God. But God is eternal and exists outside of time, so we, too, will exist outside of time. How that works, I'm not sure, but one point that I've seen over and over is to think of it as "everlasting life", rather than eternity. In other words, time has nothing to do with it, it just doesn't end. In that sense, there is no "million years", you just simply "are", without aging or other manifestations of the passing of time. Think of playing cards with your family -- there is no time, so you simply play until you are not playing any longer. Did an hour pass, or a week, or a century? There is no answer to that question.

Part of the distance from time is a distance from Earth. If I were to die today, I would likely take advantage of whatever opportunity I might have to "come back" and see how my daughter, parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, etc are doing. If my daughter has any children in the future, I might keep an occasional eye on my grandkids, but I can see it kind of petering out from there. Just as no one will visit my grave in a couple hundred years, I'll likely have little interest in visiting the Earth in a couple of hundred years. So I'll stay in "eternity" and nothing with denote the passage of time.

An interesting observation about time in the afterlife came from a woman that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (founder of the modern hospice movement, and a psychological researcher into what happens as, and when, we die) observed. This woman was in a panic as she was dying, because she greatly feared being separated from her husband, who was with Kubler-Ross at her side. Moments before she passed away, she became calm, and a big smile came over her. When her husband asked what she saw, she said "It's okay, you're already here" --- he was the one who had come to help her "cross over". Now, there is a bit of incredibility in that, and one can easily say that she was seeing what she wanted to see, but if the afterlife is outside of time, then it is possible that the husband, who died after the wife, knew that seeing him would stem her panic, and was thus really there.

The final piece addresses the concept of "boredom". Irregardless of the time aspect, I agree that, given enough time to do things, one will eventually run the risk of being bored. But this is an attempt to fit the infinite (eternity) into the finite (our reality,) which is where it falls apart and we see the possible boredom. As a result, either the infinite needs to become finite (which Christ, in teaching "everlasting life", says will not happen) or the finite needs to become infinite. In other words, the reality that is heaven or the afterlife must be a realm of infinite possibilities.

What that means, I don't know, but I do know that it will be interesting!

Hopefully, I'll be in heaven doing whatever there is to do in heaven.

I don't know if waiting to die in this physical body in order to experience "heaven" is a good approach. From what I've been able to gather, the idea Jesus seemed to have, as well as others, was that the kingdom of heaven is something to be realized in the now, through the present ie: we must become as little children to enter in.. or we must be born of the spirit, to "see" the kingdom of heaven - that kind of thing.

And of course, anyone who "sees" this, would also see and have the felt experience that death has no meaning, thus obviating the need for reincarnation ie: it doesn't matter at that point either way.

reply to post by NewAgeMan


If that were the case, then I am not sure I know anyone who is going to enter the kingdom. I don't know anyone that really gets it that death is no big deal. Many people ascribe to believe in this theory or that religion that teaches life after death.. but I don't know anyone that truly believes it.

Think about it... if Christians truly believed that we would all be together again in heaven... there would never be a tear of sadness at a funeral.

reply to post by wisintel

Seriously we have all existed since the beginingless begining as Divine Consciousness Itself. Our form seems to change endlessly. Occasionally we remember our True Nature only to
forget It again. There are no separate beings. "Everything has already died.This is the Other World."-AD
We will all be doing the same thing we are doing now,forever.
Sounds like Hell,doesnt it?

reply to post by wisintel

I once spoke with a person who'd had the 5MEO-'___' experience, and i said as much to him, about how death has no meaning, and he said EXACTLY!
Too bad that we all coudn't have this living-death plunge into the Akashic Field experience at some point in our adult life - it would change the world.

We all must die. Why not get it over with in a death to self, while still alive? That's what I'm working on these day, learning how to die, so as to be more fully alive.

Again, it's all in the Jesus teaching, but as soon as I mention that name, all the assumptions about "religion" jump up for people, blinding them to the truth.

"He who keeps his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for my sake, will find it again."

reply to post by NewAgeMan


I had never really thought about it in that way. I have been studying more and more the life and teachings of Jesus lately. Not from the Christian perspective though, I am trying to view it as an event in and of itself without any of the Dogma that has been attached to it over the years. I am also trying to find teachings of Jesus that didn't make the bible.

I think Jesus, Buddha and other famous religious figures really just figured out and truly saw reality for what it is and when they tried to explain it to people it got confused and distorted over time.

reply to post by wisintel


Yes, that's a good way to go about it, and I agree that these guys came to see reality as it really and truly is. Jesus is in my view, just like Buddha, except placed within a family context or what I call "the relativity of human being".

You will find more of his teachings and wisdom in the Nag Hammadi Library.

The extraordinary conclusion one must draw from examining these things deeply, is that the human being stands tall in the creation, and if we can just fix our minds and our dualistic POV, then we're "in", and everything then starts to become clear, only "problem" at that stage being the world we live in, and the rest of humanity who's minds are totally warped from a false premise about the nature of themselves and the world they inhabit.
I've even come to the conclusion that part of the problem may involve the very wiring in our bicameral brainmind and it's propensity to project duality onto the world, whereby these guys, like Jesus and Buddha, through some quirk of fate, circumstance, or extended period of meditation, managed to break down the barrier and form a new type of harmonious neurological interconnection between the left and right hemispheres, and there's indication of this in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas in the Nag Hammadi Library, where Jesus says that to see the kingdom of heaven, the male must become female and the female, male.

So it's as much a brain problem as it is a problem of false perception based on bad training, and our adoption wholeheartedly, of the Newtonian, Materialist Monist paradigm or worldview, which again threw us out of paradise still FURTHER. This btw, is the viewpoint adopted and guarded by atheists in support of their claims, but from what I've been able to discern from all my studies over the years, this wordlview is a core part of our problem, and it, even moreso than "religion" is the ultimate defence mechanism against having an authentic spiritual experience or unitive experience.

Add to that what a poster here by the name of Michael Cecil calls the duality of the thinker and the self, yet another trap, but those two ways of "looking" those would be the last to go. For example, notice how aticulate everyone here at ATS is in talking ABOUT these things, and thinking ABOUT them, but how few, when you read between the lines between the lines are actually BEING what they talk ABOUT - that's MC's thinker/self at work.

P.S. One last thing - once again I would like to remind everyone that we are in eternity, already, and once in it, there is no escape.

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
You will find more of his teachings and wisdom in the Nag Hammadi Library.

No, you won't. You'll find Gnostic revisions of Christ's teachings that, in most cases, are completely contrary to what he is reported to have said in the Bible, and represent a reality that is far from Christianity and the teachings of Christ.

That's fine, if that's what you're looking for, but if you're going to accept a 2nd century fictional account of what Jesus was "really" doing here (and with the understanding that you cannot receive the actual hidden knowledge, since the Gnostics died out 1800 years ago) why not take out the middle man and just make up your own stories?

Case in point:

Add to that what a poster here by the name of Michael Cecil calls the duality of the thinker and the self, yet another trap

Yeah, well, Michael also believes that he is the current incarnation of Abraham, and that women in his life are all significant religious figures from the past like Elijah, Jacob and Muhammed, so I'm not sure how much credence the rational person should put in any of his theories.

reply to post by wisintel


Most likely turning to dust in the ground, well my soul may incarnate, however if the an opt out plan I am taking it!!!!!

reply to post by adjensen

I've read the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas and they sure seem pretty Jesus-like to me. We know the whole thing is shrouded in the fog of myth and oral tradition, so what's wrong with another early source. By some accounts, parts of the Nag Hammadi may contain elements of the hypothesized Q-source document from which the four Gospels were written, and who knows what the early Church did when they were setting down the Biblical Canon. What on earth is wrong with exploring these things and sifting through them..? Jesus even speaks to me through the Bhagavad Gita in the person of Krishna for God's sake!
On some of these things some of us will no doubt differ.. and that's ok.

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
reply to post by adjensen

 

I've read the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas and they sure seem pretty Jesus-like to me. We know the whole thing is shrouded in the fog of myth and oral tradition, so what's wrong with another early source.

I wrote a response earlier today to someone who said pretty much the same thing, check my profile to find it, but, in effect, no. If one doesn't see the Greek influence in that particular piece, then one either doesn't understand Judaism, or Platonic dualistic philosophy, because the two are inherently opposed. The Gospel of Thomas is a second century forgery (in the sense that it wasn't written by the apostle Thomas, despite the implication) that combines restated phrases of Christ taken from the NT Gospels, mixed in with clearly Gnostic beliefs which are contrary to both Christianity and Judaism.

You can claim that Christ speaks to you from any source you like, but when he directly contradicts his own teachings, in ways that no Jew would even contemplate, it cannot be Christ who is speaking to you.

reply to post by adjensen


Fair enough, but hopefully, in a million years, "we" will have become the very thing that the religions of the world pointed to, as God realized beings, spirit filled and living in harmony with one another, the world, and even our galactic neighbors, maybe even taking at that point, a lead role, in some new and as yet unfathonable endeavour, that is my hope and prayer, sent from here, at this moment, into that future..

I'D TO THINK that if we continued to evolve, we would eventually evolved into a form of energy. And from that point on, our main and only objective is to help other lifeforms throughout the entire universe to develop (without any kind of direct interference).

The awesome thing about the mechanism that creates and destroys reality, from moment to moment, is that we will all eventually find a way to get exactly what we want / deserve from it. That means that some people are going to get to "reign" over others with Jesus at their side, and some people are going to reincarnate into a dog or butterfly.

The downside of trying to grok the mechanism from inside a human head, is this: as soon as we *think* we have it all figured out, we immediately try to superimpose it over everyone else as well. We also tend to get violent when they don't appreciate our hard work and effort on their behalf.

It's all a big dumb show.

I plan on growing my own batch of humanoids. In a million years they should be ready for agriculture and perhaps even a rudimentary written language.