Is Belief In An Afterlife A Death Wish?

Afterlife gives me something to look forward to. VS. Being "DEAD" "THE END" "GOOD BYE"

 

^^



An ~Irminsul~Original ©™™

 

it can be.

what king would not want an army who had no fear of death?

what we think we know, we are playing with our mind,
but the possibility of there being nothing, while as valid as any other,
is still only one, among an infinity minus one, of others,
equally likely and valid.

to me, the unknown, being unknown, is comforting.
few if any, of the things people tell each other, whatever they call their beliefs, is nearly as much so.
no brand name flavor of belief is any exception to this.

 

I'm sure at one time or another everyone thinks about what happens when they "die." Personally and I don't want or expect anyone who has other views to agree with me, I believe that nobody ever "dies." Our body (host) stops functioning at what is called death. So in my opinion our life force (soul) at that point if forced to leave what has now become a dead and decomposing body.
I believe in reincarnation so that when the time comes for my life force to leave my body, it will be an exciting new adventure.

 

I could never understand reincarnation. If you are reincarnated, are you aware that it's you, or are you just someone or something else? Or maybe someone else with a vague, possibly hallucinatory, memory of being you? Seems to me that unless you're fully conscious of your past identity--and not in some vague Shirley MacLaine sense (Out on a Limb) dredged up through psychoanalysis, it's not much different from oblivion, and would be hard to establish empirically. If I were reborn as a rat or a cockroach, and I was aware it's me in a new body and that I ended up here because of all the bad karma I accumulated in a previous life, I could understand. But if I were just a rat or cockroach unaware of ever having been anything different, why would it matter? And how could anyone tell?

 

Another thing that puzzles me. The ancient Egyptians were really obsessed with the afterlife, envisioning a paradise waiting them if they could pass the arduous hurdles and give a good accounting of themselves when their souls were weighed against Ma'at's feather. But the ancient Israelites throughout most of their history followed the Babylonian idea that the afterlife was a dreary place where people had a drab, shadowy existence regardless of what they did in this life--worse than "the end, good bye". The Greek and Roman concept of Hades was pretty much the same: shadowy, drab and dreary. If religion is a kind of wish fulfillment, how did the idea of dreary afterlife for all get started?

The idea of resurrection into a just world where people would be rewarded or punished gained ground among the Jews after the Maccabees' revolt against the Hellenistic Seleucid empire. The idea was that surely the martyrs who gave their lives for Israel would not just be warehoused in Sheol. Also, while Palestine was a Persian protectorate, Zoroastrian beliefs in heaven and hell may have crept in. But also Judea and Galilee came under Roman domination, and to lots of Jews, this world had become a dreary place. Psychologically, they needed something to look forward to better than Sheol. If life is good, who cares that much about the afterlife, which you can't do much about anyhow. But if life is oppressive and good people are being persecuted and martyred, surely if there is justice in the universe that can't just go on uncorrected--in another life, if not this one.

More generally, a new interest in transcendent matters in the Jewish world as well as India, China, Persia, and Greece, characterized the period of history known as the Axial Age (8th-3rd centuries) in the early Iron Age. Before that time, religion was largely aimed at securing benefits in this world--wealth, health, longevity,etc.--by courting the gods with praise and sacrifices. Karen Armstrong sees "the great transformation" as a reaction to the turmoil of the previous era of empire formation and military campaigns that exposed people to key questions of life, death, and meaning.

 

On my first Salvia Divinorum trip, I got the impression of my consciousness being integrated into an interdimensional inanimate object, like some sort of gear. I had awareness but I didn't really form thoughts in any cohesive manner. I would say it was frightening but that sort of defined emotion didn't really translate either. It was quite bizarre.

It's the type of trip that made me consider an immaterial basis for consciousness or perhaps realize that our 'homeostatic' experience of normal consciousness is much more fragile than we tend to realize.

 

no more so then accepting the idea that death is a thing that exists. but it can be.
if someone is completely fatalistic, believing they have no effect on anything in real life, then the can develop a sort of fatal fascination with the idea of not being in this physical life.
and that is another danger of becoming obsessed with religious beliefs.
but the beliefs themselves, if you seek an understanding of what they're actually about,
they don't really require you to have this idea, that you have no effect on anything.

rather that just like science, its a matter of recognizing you don't live in a universe that bend to your own personal whim.
and i would add, no reason to assume you die into one that does either.

 

An halucination, maybe?

 

Sure but it felt of a qualitatively different nature than say a Hallucination on LSD. With LSD, there is usually some part of the mind which is tethered to objective reality in thoughts, visuals, and feelings, the hallucination is constructed in reality, for instance eyes appearing in a triangluar pattern on a marble countertop. With Salvia, it felt as if reality was flipping pages of a book coming up until there were no more familiar landmarks, so to speak, and then rendered a completely unique world, where any description is basically a facile approximation.

The drugs target different brain receptor sites and the fact that Salvia is smoked produces a rapid onset which I think makes it more difficult to get acclimated to but still having conscious experience of a world so unfamiliar and alien made me examine the nature of consciousness.

 

Interesting. If your experience led you to the insight that consciousness may not be just neurons firing, it was probably worthwhile. I'm thinking of my own conversion experience--no substances involved. No voices or visions either. Just a compelling thought that came out of nowhere and led to a chain reaction of cascading other thoughts, with the end result of leaving me a Christian. Psychotic break? Possibly. But I seem to function well enough in society, and from my subjective point of view, it's made my life and outlook so much better. This seems to be similar to the sort of experience of others who talk and write about such experiences--Saint Augustine set off by the voices of children singing "Read", geneticist Francis Collins with his frozen waterfall, making no sense to rational people. And theologian Marcus Borg, having feelings that many of us have on a beautiful, sunshiny day. Given the propensity of the human brain for aberrations and the psychological benefit of belief, there's always the question whether or not our subjective experiences correspond to objective reality. Life's a gamble, and I tend to place my own bets on the basis of personal experience, intuition, reason, and available evidence.