reincarnation

[pianowolfi]

Do we have just one life or do we return to earth again, maybe several times? What are your thoughts?

[BoliverAllmon]

I believe in only one life. When anyone dies they go immediately into either Heaven or Hell.

boliver

[pianowolfi]

I believe in only one life. When anyone dies they go immediately into either Heaven or Hell.

boliver

Being in heaven I couldn't bear to know that at the same time another human being is condemned to hell for eternity. That's something I wouldn't wish even on my worst enemy. So heaven would not be heaven for me, sort of...

[prometheus]

I think it is a silly idea, but less silly than the idea of a one life afterlife. Heaven would get bigger and bigger as more people die.

But on the other, reincarnation probably has equally big problems. There would be a limited amount of souls. This means that when the population of earth gets bigger and bigger more souls are needed. then when population gets smaller again there are too many souls and they can't reincarnate.

I do not see what problem both of these ideas, let alone on what observations they are based. Souls have never been observed and they almost certainly don't exist. No afterlife has ever been found either. If there is one then it is very far away and it would take us a very very long time to reach it because of the limit of light speed.

Seems to be as a silly idea to try to delude yourself away from the fear of dying. I don't think it works either. These people still fear death.

[jas]

I believe in only one life. When anyone dies they go immediately into either Heaven or Hell.

boliver

How can you believe in heaven/hell but not reincarnation? Do you think the former is more plausible than the latter?

[bernhard]

I believe in only one life. When anyone dies they go immediately into either Heaven or Hell.

boliver

Whatever happened to Purgatory?

[bernhard]

Being in heaven I couldn't bear to know that at the same time another human being is condemned to hell for eternity. That's something I wouldn't wish even on my worst enemy. So heaven would not be heaven for me, sort of...

Which reminds me of a zen story:

"Once upon a time there lived a most saintly monk who helped everyone on his path and never commited any sinful act. When he passed away, everyone who knew him, knew for usre that he must have gone straight to heaven. In the same place also lived a most obnoxious character full of greed and who had thoughts only for himself. A powerful chieftain he was feared by all, since he wouldn´t bat an eyelid before invading a country to plunder its oil or killing innocent children if it served his purposes. Everyone was sure he was going to hell. And indeed, soon after the monk died, so did the chieftain. And sure enough he ended up in hell. When he arrived there to his great surprise, he met the saintly monk. He asked in astonishment:

"You! Here in hell? I know why I am here, but why are you here?"

"Because I asked to come here: it is where they need me the most."

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

I think it is a silly idea, but less silly than the idea of a one life afterlife. Heaven would get bigger and bigger as more people die.

But on the other, reincarnation probably has equally big problems. There would be a limited amount of souls. This means that when the population of earth gets bigger and bigger more souls are needed. then when population gets smaller again there are too many souls and they can't reincarnate.

I do not see what problem both of these ideas, let alone on what observations they are based. Souls have never been observed and they almost certainly don't exist. No afterlife has ever been found either. If there is one then it is very far away and it would take us a very very long time to reach it because of the limit of light speed.

Seems to be as a silly idea to try to delude yourself away from the fear of dying. I don't think it works either. These people still fear death.

Yes, but now you have fallen into the trap of extending your assumptions to places where they may not apply.

For instances, souls may not take any space at all, so the matter of the size of heaven becomes irrelevant.

Souls may be limited in number, but they may split between several people (a well known doctrine in Tibetan Buddhism). Again, who says everyone has to have a soul? (Also a well known doctrine amongst certain Sufi circles: you do not get a soul automatically when you are born: you have to manufacture one while on this Earth: this is actually the purpose of one´s life: to create a soul, and not everyone achieves it). That not everyone has a soul and yet is alive making trouble would explain people like Tony Blair and George Bush.

You see, I am not saying such doctrines are correct. I am just saying that if you conisder different assumptions on the subject you may arrive at very different conclusions.

Then again, some people claim to have observed souls. (Just like some people claimed to have observed X-rays, electricity, etc. just to be ridicularised by the top scientists of the time). But befreo we go into that hot water, one should define what the term "soul" means. At present there are so many different meanings and heavy emotional content associated with it that impartial discussion of the subject is all but impossible.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[pianochild]

Id like to believe in it, i think i can remember past lives !

[prometheus]

Bernard, yes. I make assumptions because I am forced to do it. Those people that believe in souls or in heaven can't tell me what a soul or what a heaven is. So they believe in something but they don't know in what they believe. I can't really comment on it.

So either I just discard their idea as total nonsense, an idea not worth any thought at all since it is meaningless, appearing arrogant and not achiving anything, maybe even offending them. Or I turn their meaningless statements into something that does have meaning by making assumptions. Then I can actually say something about it.

So this is my dillema.

[pianowolfi]

Which reminds me of a zen story:

"Once upon a time there lived a most saintly monk who helped everyone on his path and never commited any sinful act. When he passed away, everyone who knew him, knew for usre that he must have gone straight to heaven. In the same place also lived a most obnoxious character full of greed and who had thoughts only for himself. A powerful chieftain he was feared by all, since he wouldn´t bat an eyelid before invading a country to plunder its oil or killing innocent children if it served his purposes. Everyone was sure he was going to hell. And indeed, soon after the monk died, so did the chieftain. And sure enough he ended up in hell. When he arrived there to his great surprise, he met the saintly monk. He asked in astonishment:

"You! Here in hell? I know why I am here, but why are you here?"

"Because I asked to come here: it is where they need me the most."

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

That's a really good story, Bernhard. And I noticed very well a certain allusion to a certain well known contemporary chieftain

[pianowolfi]

Id like to believe in it, i think i can remember past lives !

Seriously? I've read a lot of younger people claim to have recalls. Interesting.

[lisztisforkids]

Interesting..... My aunt is actually a practicing Buddhist and is studying with this woman
https://www.humuh.org/recogniz.htm.

 

Seems to be as a silly idea to try to delude yourself away from the fear of dying. I don't think it works either. These people still fear death.

 These people are not afraid of death whatsoever. Have you met someone that is near enlightment?   Total peace and happiness... I envy them... There has been many a time that I have wished to escape and devote my life to attaining enlightment. And why not?

Buddism is not so much a religon as a way of life and a goal. 
 

[zheer]

Buddism is not so much a religon as a way of life and a goal. 
 

  Hmmmmmm dont know much about Buddism, but if all else fails then yeah, eastern philosophy is the way, as you know there are Sh**t load of clubs in schools,colleges,Uni that teach those sorts of things. 

[prometheus]

Buddhists know they can't base their enlightenment on silly ideas like life after death. It doesn't work.

So yes, buddhists do it the same way as I do. Christians and the like don't.

[thalbergmad]

In previous existences, I have been an Irish priest and a pikeman at the Battle of Naseby.

Retrogressional hypnotism fascinates me.

It could be complete bollox, but after having it done 3 times, i have not made up my mind.

Thal

[arbisley]

Being in heaven I couldn't bear to know that at the same time another human being is condemned to hell for eternity. That's something I wouldn't wish even on my worst enemy. So heaven would not be heaven for me, sort of...

I think it is a silly idea, but less silly than the idea of a one life afterlife. Heaven would get bigger and bigger as more people die.

I think there was a story by Somerset Maugham where he talked about people arriving at the day of judgement. A couple had hated each other's guts for most of their lives because the husband really wanted to marry someone else, but until the end, they did not sin and stayed in their respective positions, and were looking forward to all going wonderfully into heaven for their virtues. Arriving at the gates of heaven, there is a philosopher discussing his the almighty power of God. He tells him that there is no solution to their problem and says that he cannot have power almighty over everything for heaven or hell. To this God replies by simply annihilating the existence of the suffering love-triangle, and all is clear!

This story has got quite a twist to it, even if I don't tell it correctly, and it seems to me that eventually we all vanish, when we are of no more use to anything or anyone. I personally like the idea that we go to heaven or hell depending on who remembers us and how they remember us. Once all trace has passef, we are finally annihilated, but then it doesn't matter any more, since all human being we knew is not on earth to mourn over us. We are in life everlasting in people's memories, and the more we give and are generous in our everyday life, the better people will think of us once passed the boundary of mortality.

I actually believe in everlasting life, but reincarnation is not necessarily present. It is more of what we want it to be. Example: my grandfather's name was Robin, and as we went camping once and I was on my own, a robin came to visit me three times. This is important to me because my middle name is Robin, and I believe that somehow delightful gifts are sent to us from those who are gone. It is just a matter of personal imagination and emotions, not necessarily of rational truth, since we are but human creatures.

[pianowolfi]

In previous existences, I have been an Irish priest
Thal

pretty cool, do you know something about that fascinating old monastery on Skellig Michael? I randomly saw a doku on tv about that last night

[thalbergmad]

pretty cool, do you know something about that fascinating old monastery on Skellig Michael? I randomly saw a doku on tv about that last night

I have heard about the small monastery on the Skelligs, but randomly did not see the documentary..

Perhaps it was on at the same time as Coronation Street.

Thal

[ted]

I think all religious foundation myths, Eastern and Western, could have their origins in dreams and visions. I have had incredibly detailed, unforgettable and vivid dreams of living in other times and places. Sometimes these are in the historical past but others are futuristic, almost science fictional, but nonetheless very real and, funnily enough, always intensely pleasurable. I think it was Jung who proposed that people disillusioned with conventional religion should form new personal religious myths in accordance with such visionary experiences to restore positive meaning to existence.  At least that's how I interpreted what he wrote, which can sometimes be quite densely expressed.

[ada]

reincarnation, heaven and hell are all hocus pocus.

A belief in any of this IMO is just a natural attempt to stave off the fear of death and nothingness and a misguided and overinflated belief in our own importance relative to the rest of the universe.

We are just vehicles for our DNA. If we reproduce we pass on our genes so in that sense parts of us live on, but not our bodies or our consciousness.

Scientists have discovered the "god spot" in the frontal part of our brains. This is the area associated with religious and spiritual experiences. It can be switched on by meditation, fasting, drugs and chemical imbalances associated with psychosis.

That spot is also thought to be associated with near death experiences and so-called memories of past lives.

People just aren't that important in the scheme of things. We're a collection of cells that grow an die, like any other living organism.

[johnny-boy]

If the wonder of our existence can happen once why can’t it happen again? Of course, faith is required to believe in an afterlife – but then again it’s also required to believe we’re an end in ourselves. I’ll put my faith in the afterlife.

Best, John

[prometheus]

But it does, just not in the way you mean it. Your father was born. And then it happened again; you were born.

The big problem with your line is that once you die you are lost. I don't see why or how your individuality needs to be contained into something called a 'soul', which is than either transferred to the afterlife where it lives thanks to 'magic' or placed inside a new body. I don't understand how it is only natural 'for it to happen again', because that what would happen 'again' has not happened before yet. It is not about new life being created but about dead life being recycled.

If your existence happens again then it will be the first time for the even bigger wonder to happen. The recycling of a person. It would be a bigger wonder than the creation of a new one.

[ada]

Let's consider some of the logic holes in reincarnation.

Say for argument's sake we have "soul" which inhabits our body. Ok, our body dies and our "soul" gets "out" of our body. Where does it go then?

Does it float around  looking for a new body to occupy? Does it get to choose which one? Or is a new body arranged especially for it?

How long before it "comes back"? Does it go and hang out somewhere for a while, or does it get into a fertilised egg at the moment of conception? Does it "get into" a sperm or an egg even before conception? Does it slip through a wormhole in space and come back in a different time in history?

How does it know where to go?

What if there are too many souls for available bodies? Or too many bodies for souls? Are all souls recycled or just some?

Reincarnation is a lovely idea but it's absolutely riddled with problems as a viable theory of life and death.

[prometheus]

It seems that it is somehow possible for religious people to leave all that stuff out. How can you believe that you will exist in an afterlife if you do not believe in your soul either travelling, teleporting, floating to a place that is either here, there, anywhere. I mean, it is totally unclear. They do not believe in any process that accomplises this afterlife they believe in. So there is a gaping hole.

So considering this; what, in this case, is the difference between believing and hoping?

[ada]

Well I suppose that's the whole thing about faith, it doesn't have to make sense.

Which is of course the biggest problem, because then you can argue absolutely anything, even flying spaghetti monsters.

[johnny-boy]

"The big problem with your line is that once you die you are lost"- prometheus

I think we were just as lost before we existed in the first place - but there was some marvelous mechanism that got us here.

This is fun to discuss but the bottom line is none of us know diddly-squat about our existence prior to life, nor afterlife. We have three choices in what to believe;  an afterlife, an end of existence, or don’t know. Since I’m an optimist I believe in an afterlife.

John

[prometheus]

No, then we still have to come into being. Your experiences that you didn't have yet do not exist yet. Your brain and all its neurological patterns does not exist yet. It gets formed during childhood. But then the brain decays. If you are going to have a new life something special needs to happen. Something that didn't happen in the fist place.

[ted]

I agree with ada and prometheus that logic and reason are deeper invariants over all human understanding than either mystical experience or religious dogma. Anybody of any religious persuasion can reason or perform a scientific experiment and get the same result as a person of another persuasion.  Therefore reasoning is a deeper invariant and consequently more important for human interaction.

On the other hand, mystical experience and irrationality are, as ada has just pointed out, also properties of our brains and we have to enjoy them (as we do with our music !), put them to work creatively and to the full within a safe structure of reason and kindness. The trouble is that it is very difficult for an intelligent person to be optimistic that it will ever happen globally. Perhaps it will only ever be possible for certain individuals but not for society as a whole. I don't see it happening in my lifetime, that's for certain.

[prometheus]

Didn't Dostoievsky say he wouldn't want to miss his 'religious epileptic attacks' for anything in the world? They may be fake, but I guess they are like dreams, they can be amazing.

I think someone else mentioned dreams already. Last night I had a dream about some mysterious monkey that was found somwhere. The monkey, though it was clearly not an ape, did have anthropomorphic features. I am not sure, the dream was unclear, but the monkey was either discovered in some temple of an ancient civilisation, think Atlantis, or it crashed with its space ship on earth. The important thing about this monkey was that it had an amazing and strange talent.

And then I was visiting the place where lived a lady that knew a lot more about this creature. She had chests and chests of books written by the monkey. The books were filled with amazing calligraphy of all kinds of characters. It was endless, book after book after book. The books all looked old and tattered buy once opened they were all perfect. The art expressed in these books, the pallet of different kinds of pictograms, hanja, kanji, Hànzì, Hangul, hieroglyphs, runes, etc was amazing. One could not imagine that one individual could express such a broad creativity. In a way this creature could conceive of any creative thought on this subject that could exist.

So while I was looking through all these books I was up for another suprise. The monkey was still alive and it lived with this woman. But then the dream took another twist. The house of this lady, with all the books, literally a mountain, and the monkey, turned into a submarine. At this point the dream became shady and less interesting.

So I kind of met and saw the work of the Sorabji of calligraphy and she was an extraterrestrial monkey. You don't want to miss out on that, even if it is just a dream, ie fake.

[ada]

whoah prometheus what have you been smoking?   

[bernhard]

Let's consider some of the logic holes in reincarnation.

Say for argument's sake we have "soul" which inhabits our body. Ok, our body dies and our "soul" gets "out" of our body. Where does it go then?

Does it float around  looking for a new body to occupy? Does it get to choose which one? Or is a new body arranged especially for it?

How long before it "comes back"? Does it go and hang out somewhere for a while, or does it get into a fertilised egg at the moment of conception? Does it "get into" a sperm or an egg even before conception? Does it slip through a wormhole in space and come back in a different time in history?

How does it know where to go?

What if there are too many souls for available bodies? Or too many bodies for souls? Are all souls recycled or just some?

Reincarnation is a lovely idea but it's absolutely riddled with problems as a viable theory of life and death.

Actually there are well-thought answers to all of that. I personally do not have these sorts of questions, but if youare interested (rather than just asking rhetorical questions), you should investigate what Tibethan Buddhists have to say about it. They have precise answers to all of it.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[bernhard]

Personally I am intergued by the idea of the "Myth of the Eternal Return". It does not contradict reincarnation, but complements it.

Say you were born in 1930, lived your life to the full, with all of its experiences, and then died in 2005. The very moment you died, you were born again in 1945 and went through your whole life again lived through the same experiences, and died in 2005 just to be born again in 1945. Eternally. Forever.

If anything, it would explain the experience of "deja vu".

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[johnny-boy]

No, then we still have to come into being. Your experiences that you didn't have yet do not exist yet. Your brain and all its neurological patterns does not exist yet. It gets formed during childhood. But then the brain decays. If you are going to have a new life something special needs to happen. Something that didn't happen in the fist place.

You're thinking in terms of your existence on Earth (and the knowledge you acquired while here on Earth). What if there are elements to life hidden from view such as the "soul" - which could possibly be pure thought with no physical substance. Can't you at least admit there could be possibilities us mere mortals can't conceive of.

You’re forming your opinion of death via the decomposing of the brain. Maybe the “soul” is like an invisible USB device that stores our brain data; thus the essence of whom we are.

Just remember there are things that we know exist today that couldn’t be conceived of a century ago – like cyberspace for instance.

John

[Waldszenen]

I believe in only one life. When anyone dies they go immediately into either Heaven or Hell.

boliver

Normally I find it hard to agree with people in this place

[jas]

Normally I find it hard to agree with people in this place

I just don't understand how a person can claim that heaven and hell do exist, as though it's fact, but reject the idea of there being an afterlife as nonsense. I can't see the reasoning behind that at all. But I suppose if you're arguing religion sense doesn't really come into it much.

[pianowolfi]

Personally I am intergued by the idea of the "Myth of the Eternal Return". It does not contradict reincarnation, but complements it.

Say you were born in 1930, lived your life to the full, with all of its experiences, and then died in 2005. The very moment you died, you were born again in 1945 and went through your whole life again lived through the same experiences, and died in 2005 just to be born again in 1945. Eternally. Forever.

Pooh, I would find that very boring and depressing. Do you mean with "intergued", you like this idea?

But whatsoever, the combination of "Eternal Return" (btw wasn't that invented by Nietzsche?) and "reincarnation" reminds me of my own attempts to find a way to think the ideas of reincarnation and uniqueness of only one life together. I myself do believe in reincarnation but also am convinced that our life is unique and can't be repeated the same way. So in every incarnation you would be a new personality and new body and always make new experiences.

[pianochild]

I have lots of memories of lives before this one.

I have been on holiday before and seen places im sure i lived in, and i remember doing things i know i didnt do in this life. I can remember being an adult, and im 15 now, so i know thats not from this life. I think that ii have had 5 or 6 lives before this one, and i would like to hope that i am reincarnated as i dont want life to end when we die. Its like what will happen in 100,000 years when the planet blows up. Where will everyone go? Will new life start? Will there be any existence of us now? Will everything vanish?

I also find it amazing that the world carries on for ever and ever. THe solar system cannot stop, as there will always be something behind it !? Is there other solar systems with planets where life is active?!


My head hurts now 

[pianowolfi]

Didn't Dostoievsky say he wouldn't want to miss his 'religious epileptic attacks' for anything in the world? They may be fake, but I guess they are like dreams, they can be amazing.

I think someone else mentioned dreams already. Last night I had a dream about some mysterious monkey that was found somwhere. The monkey, though it was clearly not an ape, did have anthropomorphic features. I am not sure, the dream was unclear, but the monkey was either discovered in some temple of an ancient civilisation, think Atlantis, or it crashed with its space ship on earth. The important thing about this monkey was that it had an amazing and strange talent.

And then I was visiting the place where lived a lady that knew a lot more about this creature. She had chests and chests of books written by the monkey. The books were filled with amazing calligraphy of all kinds of characters. It was endless, book after book after book. The books all looked old and tattered buy once opened they were all perfect. The art expressed in these books, the pallet of different kinds of pictograms, hanja, kanji, Hànzì, Hangul, hieroglyphs, runes, etc was amazing. One could not imagine that one individual could express such a broad creativity. In a way this creature could conceive of any creative thought on this subject that could exist.

So while I was looking through all these books I was up for another suprise. The monkey was still alive and it lived with this woman. But then the dream took another twist. The house of this lady, with all the books, literally a mountain, and the monkey, turned into a submarine. At this point the dream became shady and less interesting.

So I kind of met and saw the work of the Sorabji of calligraphy and she was an extraterrestrial monkey. You don't want to miss out on that, even if it is just a dream, ie fake.

cool , do you have more dreams like that?

[pianowolfi]

I have lots of memories of lives before this one.

I have been on holiday before and seen places im sure i lived in, and i remember doing things i know i didnt do in this life. I can remember being an adult, and im 15 now, so i know thats not from this life. I think that ii have had 5 or 6 lives before this one, and i would like to hope that i am reincarnated as i dont want life to end when we die.

Pianochild, i really appreciate your memories and thoughts and find them very precious

Its like what will happen in 100,000 years when the planet blows up. Where will everyone go? Will new life start? Will there be any existence of us now? Will everything vanish?

I think it depends of us humans what will happen, of our behaviour. When the planet blows up we should have learned to live without it somehow, I think. Nothing will vanish but transform itself to another layer, another form of being maybe.

I also find it amazing that the world carries on for ever and ever. THe solar system cannot stop, as there will always be something behind it !? Is there other solar systems with planets where life is active?!

I think there are other planets where life is active but it's physically impossible for us to go there respectively we need to find other ways to get in contact with them, if they exist f.e. mental exercises etc.

My head hurts now 

have a nice walk or read a nice reincarnation joke likehttps://www.jokecenter.com/jokes/Insults/810.htm

https://www.mail-archive.com/funny-jokes@yahoogroups.com/msg00274.html

[gilad]

i believe in the here and now. not the thereafter and the wat will be.
i think it was a george orwell book where the crows spoke of candymountain. i am tired though so i might be wrong. basically i think you should live with hope and fantasies of whatever you want to happen after you die. if that will make your life here more bearable and enjoyable it is worth it. i dont think there is anything. just one big long peaceful sleep, and i dont know about you, but that is heaven for me.

[prometheus]

You're thinking in terms of your existence on Earth (and the knowledge you acquired while here on Earth). What if there are elements to life hidden from view such as the "soul" - which could possibly be pure thought with no physical substance. Can't you at least admit there could be possibilities us mere mortals can't conceive of.

Yes, possibility in the sense that we can't rule it out. But what does it mean when you can't rule something out. There is a long long list of things one can come up with that we cannot rule out but no one really wants to believe are possible.

The point is that people propose that there is an afterlife, but they leave out how all this happens. To me this is a big problem. To me the idea of an afterlife is meaningless until it is completed. Really, I can't know if it is true or not, no one can, for the sole reason of its uncompleteness. No one can logically comment on the idea because it is incomplete. First it has to be completed. If it is not completed the idea should just be disregarded.

The only way to comment on it is for me to fill the gaps with thinks I know about, earthly things. If you propose the gaps should be filled with non-earthly things then you propose to fill the gap with things we know nothing about, either because they don't exist or aren't part of our reality, which probably makes little difference. So you aren't really filling the gap. Instead of leaving it totally open you say 'it just magically happens in ways we cannot comprehend because of our earthly knowledge'.

I can't do anything with ideas like that. They aren't part of our reality and I doubt they will ever have anything to do with it.

You’re forming your opinion of death via the decomposing of the brain. Maybe the “soul” is like an invisible USB device that stores our brain data; thus the essence of whom we are.

I have made this argument again. No one really knows what a soul is and what it does. But generally the soul does something during a persons whole life. We know the brain largely works through neurological cells, that are connected through neural-nets. But lets say humans also have souls. This would mean that the soul has an interaction with the neurons. Because the neurons operate through electrical signals and neuro-chemicals, which both can be measured, the soul needs to use either of the two to influence the neurons. If the soul does this it will no longer be 'invisible', it is observable. For something to be truely invisible it needs to have no interactions at all with our reality. It has to have no mass, no charge, it must not reflect photons, etc. If something does that then we cannot see it, but it can also not see us. This means if an invisible soul would exist it couldn't do anything and its existence would be irrelevant.

Just remember there are things that we know exist today that couldn’t be conceived of a century ago – like cyberspace for instance.

What is cyberspace? You mean the way people connect through the internet. Well, that is a really a sociological developments. They can never be predicted and will be hard to be conceived. If we talk about a soul then we talk about a new form of energy or matter. Phyisics involves the most simple things in the universe. Human behavior is the most complex thing in the universe, beyond any doubt the most complex of all, more complex than amino-acid folding and the like.

The fact that we can't predict human behavior doesn't mean that we can't exclude a new form of matter or energy that has been sitting in our brains all the time we considered the standard model.

But if you are proposing new matter or energy, be more concrete; what is it? How does it fit in the standard model. Is it made of particles? Mass? Charge?

[johnny-boy]

Yeah, I'll be the first to admit I don't have any answers. I'm just saying there are probably possibilities we can't even imagine. The possibility of an afterlife is still a subject that's stimulating to think about.

Best, John

[prometheus]

There is a possibility, or rather there is no impossiblity. But there is no probability of an afterlife. This is because there is no evidence supporting a theory of afterlife. There isn't even a theory of afterlife, like you admit.

There are many things that are stimulated to thing about. Things that have no basis in reality. And I think about those quite often. But I do not believe them at all.

[bernhard]

Pooh, I would find that very boring and depressing. Do you mean with "intergued", you like this idea?

But whatsoever, the combination of "Eternal Return" (btw wasn't that invented by Nietzsche?) and "reincarnation" reminds me of my own attempts to find a way to think the ideas of reincarnation and uniqueness of only one life together. I myself do believe in reincarnation but also am convinced that our life is unique and can't be repeated the same way. So in every incarnation you would be a new personality and new body and always make new experiences.

I meant "intrigued"

I find it interesting to speculate on what kind of world we would inhabit if Eternal Return was indeed the case. That is, postulate it as being true and then investigate how ti would work. For a start everything would have to be static, and only consciousness would move. Consciousness would be trapped within a circular path delimited by birth and death. Birth and death would actually be the same event - it is interesting to note that although there is much speculation about what happens after death, there seems to be almost no interest in regards to before birth. And so on and so forth.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[lisztisforkids]

I would just like to point out that Nirvana(enlightment) is a measurable physical thing.
  If you were to take a meditating monks brain and compare it to a average persons brain, you could the difference..

I know these arent the best sites, im in a rush...


https://%20www.innerworlds.50megs.com/enlightenment.htm
https://www.ajna.com/articles/spirituality_and_science/enlightenment_and_the_brain.php

[johnny-boy]

There is a possibility, or rather there is no impossiblity. But there is no probability of an afterlife. This is because there is no evidence supporting a theory of afterlife. There isn't even a theory of afterlife, like you admit.

There are many things that are stimulated to thing about. Things that have no basis in reality. And I think about those quite often. But I do not believe them at all.

But then again this isn't reality as pertaining to our lives on Earth. I reckon some knowledge is just out of our reach.

Maybe a theory in its broadest sense, i.e., abstract thought.

To me the concept of living a lifespan followed by eternal death doesn’t seem logical. We develop our skills and knowledge over a lifetime; then it’s the end of the story – I doubt it. Believe what you want, but I believe there is more than meets the eye.

I think most people would live their lives quite different if they were certain they were facing eternal death – even you probably would Prometheus.  A little splinter of doubt can have quite a colossal affect on a person’s life – can’t it?

Best, John

[bernhard]

There isn't even a theory of afterlife, like you admit.

Actually there are many (you may think they are all BS, but they exist). The most interesting ones are the Tibetan Buddhist ones, which describe in great detail the world of the dead (Start with the "Tibetan Book of the dead").

Have you ever heard of Mircea Eliade? He wrote extensively about these things from an anthropological/sociological point of view.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[prometheus]

I guess that if one things life is a test of following religious dogma and not to be experienced as a life then you could say it could have quite an impact.


And about eternal life being logical. An organism only needs to procreate before it died. Doing anything more in life requires mor explenation. There is no reason for one to continue living, according to darwinism which 'designed' all life, after we have procreated.

So there is really no need for a life after death. Life is not about learning skills and gaining knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Actually, it can be, we a free to choose what we decide to fill our lives with, but it doesn't matter at all how much skills you learn and knowledge you gain. A very large majority of life isn't even capable of learning skills and gaining knowledge.

And then about an afterlife being eternal. Nothing is eternal. There is nothing logical about eternal. Even if there is an afterlife, it can never be eternal. You claim that we can't rule out that there is no afterlife. I think we can rule out at least an eternal afterlife.

Death isn't eternal either. One isn't death. One dies. And once one has died one is no longer. Someone that has died can thus not be in a state of eternal death.

[prometheus]

Actually there are many.

Well, ok. But is this theory falsifiable? And have people tried to refute the theory? This is what I mean.

I didn't want to deny the fact that cultures have intricate ideas about afterlife from the perspective of antropology. I wanted to say that if you want to understand the world they don't provide much. I know that the ideas of eastern religion are a lot less abstract than those of monotheistic religions and that they are thus more enjoyable from a literary or antropological perspective. Chrstianity doesn't explain anything about the soul itself. Judaism even leaves open an afterlife alltogether.