Every description of the afterlife, I must confess,
sounds HATEFUL to me... the best I can hope for
is to lose my individuality, and become like a bee
or an ant?
Imagine being stuck someplace for millions of years,
as a servant (slave)... is THAT the meaning of life? Pretty
stupid universe if it is...
Surely there must be a way out of immortality, and
have the outcome of death be the same as if
mechanistic materialism were true... which, I increasingly fear, is NOT...

B-man

Hi Brendan -

Ah, there are so many who woulsd prefer to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. - - -  But it ain't that way either.

In regression, most regular folks re[port that they are at peace, can do pretty much whatever pleases them, and that they take another life in order to fix whatever they feel they want to work on. Sucxh slavery! That's worse than being a millionaire with all the toys in the world, eh?

However, advanced souls who regress are like the man who told me, "I feel like a drop in a bucket of water. I'm still the drop, yet I'm also the emntire bucket." His awareness extended outward past the planets and stars, and in the astral he was merged into God as part of the Oneness. Maybe the slavery was that he couldn't choose the color of the bucket into which he had merged?

Edgar Cayce put it a bit differently, but the same message. In the end, he said, "we become co-creators with God."

Boris is right. Here in earth is where we're stuck. But, the reason we're here is that this is the one state of existence in which an otherwise purely abstract spiritual being can take on binding limitations, and thus learn through cause and effect.  That means that we are being liberated by being imprisioned here.

The good news is, if we don't get it right, we get to come back and do it over again. The bad news is, if we don't get it right, we get to come back and do it again.

Fortunately, there is an escape. It's called satchitananda in Sanskrit, and it works.

dave

So... it's not becoming a "microscopic cog in the
God-machine" as some people seem to imply?
I am an extreme individualist and libertarian, and do not relish
enforced conformity. For example, certain Christian doctrines
say that to avoid eternal torture, we all have to
become carbon copies of Jesus Christ... Now, J.C.
might have been a good enough fella, but a world made
up of J.C. clones would lose its shiny pretty quick...
Also, if there are infinite universes like our own, there
ought to be (I hope) infinite late 20th/early 21st centuries to reincarnate
into. This is important, because from what I've read, we are at the absolute height of technological achievement that we'll ever reach, right now. The future holds nothing but a return to the Middle Ages, and ultimately to the Stone Age (Google for "Duncan+Olduvai Theory" to see what I mean...)
If I have to incarnate at some FUTURE point, I'll never get to use the INTERNET again, in all the billions of eternities to come. THAT would SUCK. (I can't begin to tell you how much BETTER my life is today, with Internet access, that it was before 1997, when I was mired in a morass of ignorance for lack of easy access to information. It would have really sucked to live back, say, in the 50's or before in any case...

B-man

Quote:
you are talking total shit, who are you ?

Hi Brendan-

Of course it's like becoming a microscopic cog in the God-machine. Or, as the Hindu would say, it's like being an idea in the Mind of God, or as Edgar Cayce would put it, it's becoming a Co-Creator with God. Since all of God is One, it's also like becoming all of God, and yet remaining your own self.

The problem is not that part, but that we want to become even More of God, so that we do it all even better, or so that, as Ramana Maharshi might have put it, so that we return to our True Self. It's the perfection of Self that we learn here.

dave

Hi Don -

Interesting notes on "permanent death".  I wonder whether this may have been metaphorical and misunderstood.

The problem with the idea of destroying anything forever and ever is that we live in a universe in which the information value, hence the definitions, remain forever as well. The definition of an electron (or a dewdrop) consists of the entire cosmos other than the electron (or dewdrop). That's how the holomorphism recreates itself in everything.

What can be destroyed must be that parts that are internally inconsistent. That is relatively clear, if you think of the idea that sinners etc get cast into the lake of brimstone or thrown into Gehenna in the sense that brimstone was the deodorant for Gehenna, which was the city dump, and stank. Then the "destruction" is that the parts that are internally inconsistent get "removed". Obviously, this is going to be unpleasant, since they would generally involve ago-attachments.

As an example, let's say that I kill somebody, and in that way gain his position and prestige. By definition, incorporated in the example, to gain the position and prestige means living in a world in which killing people in that position is normative. Thus, by taking that position I must expect to be killed. It's a self-contradictory situation. I would only be able to save myself by abandoning both the gains from the action and the attitude that caused it, a process usually called repentance and penance, allowing me a lifeboat, at a cost later to be determined according to the grief I've caused.

For a spiritual being who predicates spiritual existence on detruction of someone's spiritual nature, then the same thing must obtain, except that in the spirit world, there's no way to bail out because we're pretty much single minded. So the spiritual nature of the being gets destroyed. However, since all beings are God, there's something left over. As a bare minimum of leftovers, the being would have to start over and redevelop.

The alternative would be tthe implication that God is subject to destruction, which is at odds with the nature of God as the innate creative impulse (elan vital, if you like) by which everything starts.

For these reasons, I feel that destruction means that everything related to projecting individuality in a self-contradictory manner is liable to self-destruct, but that the innermost Self within the self remains, even if only as a dream flitting through the Mind of God.

dave

Hey, Berserk. Nice to see you again...
Interesting question for you. Say somebody became
a Christian... with the GOAL of being annihilated...
and prayed every day for it, AND it was the only
thing he prayed for.
(He knew he didn't want Heaven, but he ALSO
knew he didn't want Hell... so you can't say he
"chose" to go to Hell, here.)
Now, if Christianity is the truth... Might old Yahweh
honor that man's wish, WITHOUT putting him through the wringer of Hell-fire first? And if not...
well, WHY not??? What's Yahweh to gain from torturing the
poor schmuck, after all?
Just point His finger at the guy as he stands before
the Great White Throne, and ZAP... that's it, the guy
just doesn't exist anymore. Why not? And Yahweh could just "erase" him, as it were, from Creation and even His
own memory?
I mean, if it's legit to pray to Yahweh for your favorite football team to win, then what's wrong with this prayer? I mean, with the football prayer, you're asking Yahweh to inflict the agony of defeat on the opposing team... but the annihilation prayer harms nobody... it's literally "selfless" (at least the outcome is..!)
Why the "Hell" not?

B-man