Lucy,

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I have also had this type of profound experience and know I have preexistence and that I am a very ancient being. Down here on earth, much of my higher self is left behind. Sometimes for a brief moment, I amalgamate with my higher self and feel joy or sorrow etc etc.

Memories of existence of other realms are there in my composite mind, but none relate to previous earthly lives. I remain open on this question and any skeptism on my part does not invalidate the truth thereof, if this belief is true.

alan

Alan

That is very interesting. Keene came to associate his experience with the life of a particular person, Gordon,  because the experience was specific to a place that had been highly significant to Gordon. At the time it happened he didn't have a clue what wasa going on.

I take it you don't have any reason to relate your experiences to particular events in C1 or to any other people.


Dave

Are you saying that life is an illusion so the point is so what if past life memories are illusions, it is all illusion anyway?

Alan McDougall wrote on Apr 7^th, 2008 at 2:18am:



Hi Alan,

I would take the position that everything is Grace, even karma.

That is, God's functionally infinite patience, support, love, preservation of 'continuity' in allowing each individuated being a limited free will to make 'mistakes' and self-correct, evolve on the road of self-discovery. In this way 'destiny' is just an unfolding of God experiencing Himself through 'us' from complete ignorance to full Gnosis.

Is there anything that is not of/fromGrace?

As far as afterlife and salvation, again, I am reluctant to make such distinctions - afterlife, beforelife, afterdeath, afterbirth, etc. - these all appear to be different 'contexts' in which consciousness is, and becomes aware of Self. If you want to call it salvation that seems fine, but i also think that salvation may take place right here in the physical where it may be more, or at least differently significant as we seem to need it more here.

By my way of thinking it is all unmerited, all an unconditional gift. Even the strictest, harshest form of karmic Justice on some level may be seen as a kind of Compassion because if and when absolutely necessary, it illumines and leads to greater perfection.


- u

What we call reality is better termed "opinion", and that, in turn, is contingent upon our social circumstances, physical equipment and sensorium, and what we've been taught to believe and what to reject. Then our life experiences define reality for us, adding another layer of distortion.

A typical classroom experiment is to draw two lines on a blackboard, line A slightly longer than the other line B. Then the class agrees to refer to the shortest line B as the longest, and vice versa. Next we bring in the innocent victim and ask which line is longer. After hearing everyone else say that line B is longest the victim will change perception and agree. Afterwards they usually say that it actually appeared as if that is how the lines really were.

People have experiences that generally cannot be explained. As an example, while asleep we are in a "world" that cannot be defined. Often it differs from the everyday world in important ways. In surgery we sometimes have OBE experiences that are difficult to explain away. Some people see the dead, others don't, some are highly mediumistic, others aren't. All of these are essentially personal peculiarities of perception.

When we talk about "reality" we casually overlook the numerous forms of reality the people perceive. In fact, there is no single "reality", because each of us sees it in a slightly different way. There are billions of aproximations to some ultimate ideal reality, but there are no total agreements. It follows that life, as we know it, is a very large number of similar things, but cannot ever be precisely defined without calling in the mechanisms of perception. So, in a sense, we generate life by the way we live.

Given that we cannpt define life, we can even less define death. I learned as a child that a dead bird made no song, and its head was kinda limp and dangly on its neck. And that's about all we know. We defne death negtively, in thesense that death is not life, death is not dancing, death is not going to the movies, death is not singing, death is not walking around, death is not . . . But we are stuck when someone asks, "Yes, but what IS death?"

So now we can say that we actually may have some good ideas, but still do not know what is life, nor what is death. The best we can do is to say that, "Something seems to be going on. As I experience it, it seems to be like this . . . " and then we give an opinion based on persnal experiences. And ultimately, that's the end - we just give an opinion.

My experiences seem to include past lives. That ismy opinion. Many other people have told me similar things, that they recall past lives, that they were somebody in another life,  that they can talk to other people's spirits etc. That is their opinion. We cannot test our opinions in a scientific manner because we cannot reach the data from which the opinions arise. Accordingly, it is just as easy to say "I believe" as to say "I don't believe".  And from the objective perspective of science, neither is a fact, but merely an opinion. That's about all we get - there's no way to do an objective proof with it.  Even if we look at the kids who are born knowing things about their neighbors (like where they keep their money) that nobody taught them, we still can't do much more than say that it seems highly unusual.

Personally, I believe that in the beginning, God had an idea, and we're it. At present the idea makes the world look like we see it, together with all of our various selves, so that everyone is living in what amounts to a Divine Dreamworld. The fact that my dreams relate to one another in the same manner as would physical objects doesn't prove that the world is real or materially objective, but merelythat that is how I experience it. The world-in-itself (ding an sich) is forever unknowable in an objective sense. 

My personal view of death is that as we abandon those properties that isolate us from God we merge back into God. Thus, at death, we abandon the idea of being materially living beings until we're ready to get reborn. In this sense, life is a belief system, and so is death, and all that really exists is God. And how do we know that God exists? We actually can't prove that either.

dave

Dave,

Your quote

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Highlight 1,Yes Dave no objective proof is possible, so belief any belief including reincarnation is just held together by faith in it.

Hight light 2 is absolutely in accord with my belief that we are a thought in the mind of god or "small meme in fact"

alan

This is a quote from a work-related survey I took today:

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Your perception is your reality.

I guess it isn't suprising that a business group would take note of that; advertisers have been perfecting the art of perception-manupulation for quite a while now.

Well now, Sweet Thang, you mention that you're reading Unobstructed Universe which I fully enjoyed. And you ask if what we're doing is "useful". 

I have two kinds of responses to that. The first is that so long as we can have Crab Louie with Champagne, and make love in the dark by the fire, then whatever helps us to get there is useful.

The other response looks at what it is that we're trying to do. Do we really care what the afterlife is like? Or is this merely an academic exercise in which we enjoy fiddling with ideas? Or does anyone really get off on the notion of perpetual rebirths etc? I'm not sure that there's any benefit in this area for any of us.

To start with, we have essentially no objective data except the occasional, very rare, situations in which someone has unusual abilities and understanding that we are not able to otherwise explain. By not having any other information, the sole way to be certain that we have some idea of the uiverse and its qualities is to model everything, from nothing in the beginning, to the present, in which case we can say that reality lies in that collection of concepts somewhere. That was my approach, and while I can tell you a great deal about the way knowledge is generated, and that there are wholly logical ways in which an afterlife makes sense, I have no more proof than you'd get from flipping a coin or reading tea leaves.

Buddhism looked at the problem, and Siddhartha's solution was to limit himself to the present life. He simply pointed out that because we tend to get hung up with spinning our wheels running processes that don't work, we tend to have frustrating lives. Get rid of the activities that don't work, and we'll feel better, said he, and darned if it isn't true. But that has nothing to do with the afterlife.

However, as we start to look at the various ways in which the universe might be cobbled together, we discover, as Alan said, that were our Source to cease to support us, we must disappear. And, since we manifest God, there is no likelihood of us forgetting God, so God is not dependent upon us, and especially not in the way we depend upon God.

God, however, presents just as great a mystery as anything else in life. Rather than deal with the afterlife, we might simply ask who believes in God. - And conversely, who believes in a reality, with a continuity leading from nothing and nowhere to the present, and how can this be handled except by sincere belief in God? Or, for those who don't like "God" let's use a different term, such as "a Creation", or perhaps "an Uncaused Cause", or even, "thermodynamics of potential states". It's all the same.

At this point I can say with certainty that if you wish for something, you're likely to get it. And that's not because of ignorance, agnosticism or athistic apathy, but because there's some kind of causal and organizational principle behind all this mess that we call Reality. This is testable. Christian Science, regardless of its peculiarities, daily proves that prayer works, and well controlled scientific experiments similarly have proven prayer to be effective as a healing force. These are actual facts that can be chewed on by number crunchers. That being the case, we must extend our beliefs beyond the obvious.

How far do we extend our beliefs? That's the original question, just in a different form, asking what ultimately exists, and why we should have faith that we have a spiritual nature, what can that nature offer us, and where do we go next.

My personal solution is to act as if physical experience is the nec plus ultra criterion of reality. But I also harbor a belief that that cause of all of this is in our emanation from God, as manifestations of God in the world, and that as such, we have an eternal destiny.  This accounts for prayer and lots of other stuff, and it does it without long and involved proofs. The image I have in this is of a world in which we have three basic dimensional aspects, process, structure and relationships. In the material world, these are three separated elements that manifest a dynamic that we take to be the operation of the natural world. This is physics, the study of extended objects.

At the same time, those three same aspects combine together to form an ntegrated whole, which is evidently what we have internalized as our sense of the world. Thus, we have the endless universe inside our heads as an integrated unity, allowing us to conjur up dreams, imagination, hypothetical scenarios, and at the same time, we live in a world in which those same dreams, scenarios and imaginary scenes can be manifested in a way that we recognize as "extended", somehow bringing our inner and outer experiences together.

In this context, I can accept anyone's ideas as essentially correct, at least to the extent that they are an oprganized repetition of either the inside being made outer, or the outer reality being introjected. But this is not a proof, merely it demonstrates that there seems to be at least one way in which we can make sense out of life. There are other ways to make sense as well, so again, we lack proof. For my mind, this is trivial - I'm happy to believe my memories and the reports of unusual things that occur. And if you disagree? Great - glad you have an opinion - But what can this tell you about ultimate states of being?

dave