Hi,

I am new to all of this, though I have read a few books concerning the afterlife. I have not done any experimentation, and am waiting for my birthday money in July to be able to get Bruce's books.

What I wonder about is how will I know that what i experience is real or not?

I am sure this has been answered elsewhere.

The other thing I found quite fascinating was that Focus 27 sounds like a place you can read books, and watch films etc. Not much different to the life I live now really...LOL.

Why then does it still make me feel uncomfortable?

Sorry that this message is a bit incoherent.

Dave

Thanks for the reply.

All I have done so far is listen to the Going home tapes put together by Elizabeth Kubler Ross/Robert Monroe and Charles Tart.

These are set to take you to various focus points, but I have not experienced anything that would for me provide any proof these things exist.

I am afraid that I seem as sceptical as I ever was to a certain extent.

There is a part of me that would dearly like to believe, but all the tapes do is make me feel a little more relaxed. I have not experienced anything that would indicate life after death.

On balance of all the circumstantial evidence I would say there is something, but I would like to find more experiential evidence of it.

Dave

Hi Duboisuk-
You've asked the ultimate question. I earnestly hope that you'll keep on asking it, because it leads to discovery of the ultimate nature that "That Which Is Real" - which defies description.

We do not learn by afirmations, but by bumping into things, by stubbing our toes against lumps of unexpected reality.

Physically we acquire descriptive knowledge by frequently encountering clusters of phenomena, like Pavlov's dog, who associated food and a ringing bell until the bell alone suggested food. Then we learn choice through reinforcement, like B F Skinner's pigeons who were given corn each time they turned to the right, until they were deliberately dancing in right handed circles. This is useful for getting through the world, but it is not the deep certainty of reality.

To paraphrase Descartes, an "evil genius" might be manufacturing a world out of wax, so that you believe in it, yet it is not truely valid. The world of drug addicts is like that - a make believe world of hedonic gratifications that seems real, yet which dissolves when the supply of drugs runs out. Descartes decided that the best that he could "know" was that he was a "thinking thing". (Literally, "une chose pensante" is the Duc de Luyns translation.)

In his introductory stanza to the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tze pointed out, "The Way that can be described is not the actual Way."

Ramana Maharshi continuallty asked the same question, but in the form, "What am I?" Ultimately he arrived at an idea of the "Self".

The best we can say is that we learn through adversity, by colliding with contradictions between our prior ideas of reality and the immediate experience of the moment. That is good for getting through the world, but it fails to tell us what is real.

The philosopher Georg Hegel attempted to reduce everything to a transcendental phenomenology in which the primitive state was both necessary and sufficient to develop the rest. His Philosophical Propadeutics is well worth reading (and very clear). 

The Church Apologists, such as St Thomas Aquinas, attempted to develop models of reality out of an initial postulate of an "Uncaused Cause".  Nowadays the politically correct term is "Friedman-Lemaitre Big Bang Model", but it boils down to the same thing.

Philosophy gives a "descriptive model of reality". Perhaps the model is totally correct. (I doubt that!) Then, as the late semantacist S I Hayakawa never tired of telling us, "The map is not the territory." In the same way, a philosohical model of reality is not the reality that is being modeled. Knowledge of quantum mechanics is not the same as a direct experience of the world of atoms, electrons and photons.

Perhaps the best that anyone can say is, "This seems real at the moment," and then we move on, expecting change. Having no ultimate grounding point, reality is what you take it to be.

May you keep asking that question, and as you ask it, may the reality you experience bring you love, joy and wisdom.

dave

Dave,

"What I wonder about is how will I know that what i experience is real or not? "

From my experience the only way to know is to gather some kind of evidence that can then be tested to determine the answer to that question.  For proving to one's self whether or not this place called the Afterlife exists I recommend using this Basic Premise.

1.  Find a way to contact and communicate with a person known to be deceased.
2.  Gather information from this person you have no other way of knowing except via this contact and communication.
3.  Find a way to test the validity and accuracy of this information.
4.  To the extent you can accomplish step three, you have gathered evidence that this deceased person exists, somewhere.
5.  Continue this process until your own, direct experience convinces you the Afterlife exists.

This process is easier than most folks believe, almost anyone can learn to do it.  I haven't found any other way, and no one else's evidence seems to have to same effect.

Bruce

duboisuk wrote on Jun 12^th, 2006 at 12:58pm:


I have this exact worry too..

Bruce-

I would add just one caveat to what you say- Yes, we can verify that the afterlife exists.  But how can we verify that the information we receive is from a reliable source?

Swedenborg warned repeatedly about the extensive deception that exists in the afterlife.  As you know, he devoted most of his adult life exploring the other side and cautioned that many things that he thought were true turned out to be false or misleading.  Initially, he believed his sources to be highly credible.  It wasn't until he became an accomplished explorer that he realized the extent to which he was deceived.

So the question is, even if we contact our departed Uncle Fred, and he tells us something about himself that we ourselves didn't even know and that subsequently turns out to be true, how do we know that it was in fact Uncle Fred with whom we were in contact?  Suppose it was an imposter instead? 

I just think we need to be open to all possibilities, including the possibility of deception.