Pondering the Afterlife

I've been wondering about reality for a bit in the past weeks, really my whole life, but these questions in particular more intensely recently.

I've tripped quite a bit, and in a more peaked time of usage, I would've probably said, yes reincarnation and other dimensions are real definitely. Now that it has been some time since, I wonder if that was just the power of my imagination or complexities in the subconscious related to a survival instinct for both the individual and the human species as whole.

I have to wonder about reincarnation, so we are talking about Buddhist teaching here, that is what I've read and meditated most on. Now Buddha's teachings have been around for some time, some 2,000+ years. So now only one person or at best very few have achieved nirvana. You're telling me that everyone just keeps coming back to this "material realm"? Seems unfair, and seems like it's going to get crowded here in this dimension, if it is not the only one. The human population has increased quite significantly since those teachings were first delivered.

For that matter, I was raised in both Eastern and Western Christianity, which both teach the dimensions of Heaven and Hell. Though it seems ridiculous as well, because ultimately the way God arranged it is like, there's no way that everyone will make it to Heaven. Seems like most religions and spiritual constructs are, while filled with intricate art and philosophies, products of the human imagination, and that perhaps is the best way to devise a social construct to prevent people from acting too much like the beasts we supposedly evolved from. What I mean by that is people tend to be more loyal to cultural and spiritual values than legal constructs. That I think is a good thing, because the laws of governments tend to lack empathy and reasonable human emotion in many ways. It seems though, that most priests and devout Christians pride themselves on the possibility that they will go to Heaven, and supposed evil doers will go to Hell. I don't suppose they're terrible people for that, but if you spent most of your life preparing to go to a paradise, while others did not, I suppose you would feel like you deserve it more.

So what do you think? I'm not suggesting that people like Buddha and Jesus came up with these constructs in their imagination and said to themselves, "well I will go out to the people and teach them this as if it is real." I think that they thought it was real because the human imagination is that powerful, but when you hold up these cosmic order models to common sense, well they don't always seem to make sense.

I think some people need religion in its methods to keep a sense of control in their lives, and to help them sleep at night. Sure I think there can be a collective consciousness, telepathic energy, and we can meet each other in our dreams, but nothing to me suggests that will continue after death. Who's to say that any of those things were ever exclusive to human beings? Maybe colonies of ants have collective consciousness, as they all seem to have a job and do not communicate with a spoken language. Now fast forward thousands of years in the evolution of life, and as of now, I would say that simply human beings developed a more complex mind, filled with powerful imagination, subconscious, memory capability, emotions, and dreams, but how can anyone really say there is anything else?

Those places you may have seen in an out of body psychedelic experience, that bare similarity to natural near-death experiences, perhaps that is simply a way for the mind to ease your death. When you consider what death is, well it can be pretty scary, it would make sense that the brain would release something like DMT to ease your fears and let you go gently.

Well... yeah that's what I've been pondering lately.

 

Nice to read such a cereberal post. Not being be so intellectual , I can only report my own experience. Being a ghetto Coke truck driver , oral not nasal , I've been robbed several times at gunpoint. Once you have locked eyes with the hoodster ; you can pick him out of a line up. He should kill you. You are the only witness. You will believe.

 

Interesting experience, but sounds still like survival instinct to me...

 

Near-death experiences are almost certainly the product of the dying brain. The interesting question is why they evolved at all. They certainly convey no evolutionary advantage according to the tenets of natural selection - they don't add to reproductive success. However, the idea of natural selection being the only method of evolution is (finally) under threat now.
More interesting, I think, is that near-death experiences could be the origin of the ideas of heaven and hell: the sensation of rising up to a great light is similar to the Christian idea of going to heaven. People have also reported negative NDEs, which could have suggested hell.
As for the afterlife, who knows? Logically, there can only be nothing: metaphysically, the idea of nothingness seems wrong. The idea of eternity is beyond our comprehension. Religions offer eternity, science offers nothingness and we are all probably a bit uncomfortable with both.
The best attitude is that of the British writer Christopher Hitchens, an athiest, who said as he was soon to die, "There is absolutely nothing to suggest that there is any continuation after death, but, hey, I like surprises".

 

Did you know that this post would appear. Don't be confused.

No permanence is possible unless you are consistent now.

 

Let the pondering continue. Ever been thus. Probably will remain so.

 

Speaks to it's effectiveness. But if you expect answers you get farther. There is having thoughts and thinking which are matter of mental polarity. But precisely so scratcho not everyone wants to know. If knowledge were more urgently desired the gap between the knowing and ignorant would be less, but that some know is space in the mind for everyone to ketchup.....

 

Too easy to become hidebound ,it seems. One becomes ones observed position. Nothing new under the covers. Now and again, the whole is seen, says ego.

 

Okay can't teach old dogs new tricks, I understand. I am tired of keeping things under wraps. Have you seen what you want to see?

 

Through the prism of my own experiences. Which amount to absolutely nothing. "Funny" is and has been self described quest and then ego sidetracks into other "absolutely nothings".

 

Funny is the congruence of yes and no so it is possible to have missed it I suppose. A seed was planted in me about which I was enthused and has grown to become a shrub of substantial yet indefinite dimensions to the effect that the birds of the air, (those that highly aspire) come to make their nests in the shade of those branches. I am sated of sensation and therefor can't seem to contain myself. I apologize if I seem rude.

 

You've never been rude. Only valuable. Feed those birds.

 

You have been good to me.

 

To me death is nothing more than being splattered around the universe. Sure, there is reincarnation. The building blocks you are made of will be recycled over and over again until ultimately they cease to exist. Everything will break down at some point.
I do not believe the 'mind' will be reincarnated into another 'body'. That just seems silly and contemporary hope or will to me. People believe those kind of things because of where and when they are born.

Everything will break down at some point.
From dust we come and to dust we will return. Such is the essence of all and nothing.

But I am probably wrong since there are a near infinite other options.

 

I have no idea what happens when we die. But when I think of what some people hope will happen, that they will be with their deceased relatives forever...then I think they're not being really realistic about death. NDE experiencers talk about how they experience timelessness in death. Which would be necessary, because there's no way you could sit around talking to your relatives for an eternity. Especially if you all know that death doesn't exist or that God exists.

It seems like death would render us all equal, and equality doesn't really work on Earth. How would we maintain our personal identities if we all know everything?

 

By recognizing each other.

 

What intrigues of course is that there are other ways of living.

 

The funniest thing about it (to me) is... that so many people have opinions on either what they think will happen or what they want to happen to both- but there is nobody (nobody!) alive who really knows at all. It's a surprise.

 

Whether we're important enough to survive may not be as profound a question of if we're important enough to die. Maybe we just take ourselves waaay too seriously and none of this shit even means a thing.

 

Nothing is needed so there is no limit to the value you can place on things.