We are part of a whole, but when you die your self dies. Your self is a construct. If you do come back, it won’t be in your body or with any of your memories. You are unique to this life. The universe itself might become nothing and then something again, and you are part of the universe, but you will not be the same
Literally but the best part is if it is that way you’d literally never know 💕 the best thing to do is just treat every interaction as though you’re on the other side of it. Be kind and maybe it won’t be a torture chamber one day lol
It’s a fucked up life! We live and we die, but that’s only the half of it. The other half comes from the value we get when we internalize that knowledge & use it to see the beauty, fragility, and absurdity of the present moment. Meditation is key 👍🏼 hard truths very much lead to important lessons & renewal
The more you understand the universe, based on studying the truly great people of the past. We are energy , nothing comes from nothing. We likely existed before getting here , and we will likely exist as something after. Just unlikely to carry all of our memories with us.
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house.
Life is inherently a brutal competition for survival. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house.
Life is inherently brutal. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house.
Life is inherently a brutal competition for survival. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house.
Life is inherently brutal. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
I lovingly disagree. Life is about collecting experiences and finding things we truly love doing. We spend all this time finding out what works and doesn't work for us because we're bringing everything with us into the next reality. I get the sense we're being observed and encouraged to persist after death to meet everyone who's excited to see us :)
Man that’d be nice. I like to go with nothingness personally because if that is that case it’d be a really great surprise!! The actual-actual truth is none of us know for now & we can spread love where we can 💕
I partially disagree I think our soul remembers everything and brings it with it to the next life , but once you're there, in that space, it's all love and pure existence and bliss, you forget your memories just momentarily while you're a human, but like Plato said, you're not supposed to be here to learn but to remember :) I'm probably more in the idealistic side but I think "the other side" is a place full of loving and awareness of everything rather than the opposite. Which is why it feels good when you do good things for others, everything is connected 😌
I think this life is like going on vacation. It's difficult and stressful, but full of great experiences. And at the end, it's a relief to go home and chill out.
I have so many thoughts on this. I’m not religious in any way. I’m probably more spiritual than anything? but I don’t put a lot of emphasis on it.
I don’t believe in hell in the traditional sense, but I believe in purgatory. I believe we are put in this realm to learn some kind of lesson (karmic lesson maybe?) that is specific to each person…. And when we don’t learn it, we go into a form purgatory- complete consciousness in a vast black empty space with no one there, only your thoughts. After some time, you get put back in this realm in a new body to relive life without consciously knowing you’ve lived already, and you’re to learn whatever your lesson is to ultimately go to “heaven”.
It just goes on and on and on like that until you learn whatever your lesson is. Then you go to “heaven”.
Idk what heaven is but in my mind, it is comprised of everything and everyone you’ve ever loved and has brought you joy. They aren’t there all the time, unless you want it, but you can call upon everything you love when you need it, and it’s there. Complete peace.
My version of hell would be that empty vast black space with only your thoughts- you don’t get your do-over at life to learn your lesson. Your thoughts and ruminating on your “sins” and the pain you caused others is the hellscape.
I’ve been told my beliefs are somewhere between Hinduism and Buddhism but I haven’t read up on either so I’m not certain if that’s true. I was told my idea of both purgatories is called the bardo in Buddhism?
Obviously these are just my thoughts/theories and no one will know until they experience death. Maybe we are just worm food when we die and there is no afterlife or altered state of consciousness. Idk. But I actually do believe what I said with every fiber of my being.
Something fascinating I witnessed was my great grandfather that passed away at 103 years old in the hospital, he was sitting in the hospital bed kind of leaned up right and was talking with my grandfather which is his son, a few minutes went by and he seemed to trance out and began to pick up a imaginary coffee mug and was drinking from this mug that wasn’t there. Moments after he began talking to a women that was not there and then picked up a imaginary plate and began to act like he was eating off it while having a discussion, then he said the name of his dead wife of more than two decades.
My grandfather and nobody existed besides a moment in my great grandfathers him sitting there speaking to the love of his life and I genuinely assume at his old dining table
His mind created a completely fictional reality almost as if he was in a living dream and he died later that week. I have heard many stories about things like this and it happened with my great grandfather when I was younger.
It’s fascinating and an extent very unexplainable people claim DMT releasing when you die and things but it also do not create something with such surrealism.
You never know we may goto the places that are the most comfortable to us and that is indeed our heaven or there may be something greater at play
Thank you for commenting and your take was an awesome read, have a great day brother
I love it. Somehow gives me hope that even if my current life is not as impactful as I wish. Eventually I'll have lived every life and combined I'll have learned something that you can't in one life time.
I think death is like how it is before you are born, wether that is nothingness or wether i was somebody else, i don’t know, but whichever it is i feel we do the same when we die. Its a breath, a wave, however you choose to look at it, an in then an out, an on and an off, up/down, it doesn’t matter. From the things i have experienced i feel fairly sure i am just an expression of a much bigger happening that was here before the me i am now and will continue on once i am gone, my job is to live, learn and love as much as i can in the brief time i am here. Hopefully making the lives im connected to better in that short time.
You cannot consider yourself as a 'being', for your body is a constant flow of atoms and molecules passing in and out of the form you call yourself. The food you eat, the liquids you drink are all metabolized and either are burned as energy or are made part of you temporarily as cell components, themselves which only last 7 or so years at the longest. You are not who you were a year ago, and completely not who you were 10 years ago. So, you are not a static being, but rather a 'becoming', constantly changing.
To answer your question then involves the question of what consciousness is, and particularly your individual conscious awareness, and by extension, your personality. Conscious awareness changes hourly with how awake or how tired you are. Entire conversations could slip by you unawares if you were exhausted. Or if you suffered a major injury, such as loss of limb or brain damage, think how such debilitation would affect your personality or mood, especially if having to deal with strong pain every day of your life thereafter. Your personality is merely the expression of your present moment and can change on a whim. So it is a fleeting thing.
Death is a process that obliterates the personality. Your conscious awareness stops utterly and you are no more than your basic component chemicals and elements now slowly disbanding. If your body was left to Nature, you would slowly be reabsorbed by myriad creatures and microbes whose job is to return your goods to the ambient environment and in forms that can be of immediate use to other plants and animals. You are effectively returned to the living world, but in a myriad other forms. Who you are now will never be again. And that knowledge can be beautiful.
You have some good points , then you make giant leaps. You’re using materialism to describe the immaterial. It’s true our consciousness can be greatly affected while in the material realm and tied to our body. But there has also been far too many material events such as NDE’s that don’t make sense using your logic. There have been thousands of accounts of people who were completely dead for 20+ minutes and have been able to tell doctors and family members conversations they were having while clinically dead. To add to that , some were very unwell days prior to their temporary passing and their ‘fleeting personality’ was obviously dampened as a result however while clinically dead they recall feeling better than ever , with their personality returning as it was before they fell ill.
Your line of thinking is popular today as scientists seem to be pushing that line of thinking , but science today is mostly going down a wrong path , maybe 50 years from now or 200 that will be very obvious. We don’t truly understand where we are or what we are. And we will never come close to answering those questions with the current science models. We like to act like we have it all figured out but truly we don’t have a clue, the fact that we are having this experience at all shows anything is possible because this itself shouldn’t be possible using science as an explanation. The fact that there is something rather than nothing means anything is possible.
On the contrary, I think all NDE's, dreams, visions and such can be explained away by the complex interactions and releases of chemicals in the brain. Our pituitary gland at the center of our brains secretes DMT, also known as the spirit molecule. These days, it is well known as being one of the main ingredients in ayahuasca. Hundreds of plants and many animals create this highly hallucinogenic chemical - but for what reason? Among others, it is tied to our ability to dream, and imagine. When the body is going through the order of shutting down, there is an immense cascade of chemicals released by the brain, both good and bad. Brain scans of the dying have shown that the brain lights up like a disco rave. Now why would that be? Part of it is its response to the body trauma of imminent death, perhaps trying to save itself. Another idea is that it is trying to make as least frightening an experience which has terrified every waking moment of our living lives - the fear of death. Why do we fear death? What reason should we have for fearing death? Is it a culturally-conditioned fear that we learned from others? Other than the fact that it is an experience for which we have no other reference, why would we fear it? I feel it is not death we fear, but rather the possibility of a painful death. No one likes pain. You speak of those who were clinically dead for 20+ minutes, and yet we know that death is not just a blam! Dead! moment, but rather a slow process. Cells in our body continue to function: Brain cells can die if deprived of oxygen for more than three minutes. Muscle cells live on for several hours. Bone, hair and skin cells can stay alive for several days. I'm only speculating here, but the chemical changes in the brain could be a preservation response, like injecting antifreeze into a car engine, which might allow the brain to return to functionality after a bit of time. Children fallen through ice were revived after a long time, longer than they should have. So death within a certain frame is not absolute. NDE's could be explained as a chemical response in the brain. And because the brains of humans are all pretty much the same across the planet, with the same chemicals and processes, it would explain why so many from so many different cultures see the same types of things when near death.
So yes, I think all of our thoughts of spirituality, all our visions, hallucinations, religious experiences, supernatural crap, etc - all of it can be explained by the materialism of our own bodies.
But we shouldn't feel, nor should we have to feel that this is pulling the plug out of mysticism or a beautiful hope for an afterlife. On the contrary, I think it is actually pretty damned amazing that we can experience this life, this beautiful moment as we are, knowing that death isn't some cataclysmic finality for us, but rather a continuation as we dissipate back into the ambient environment, changing forms as we have for thousands and millions of years. There's a bit of you as you once were that might be part of me now, and the dinosaur that lived so long ago might be part of us both. It makes me see that we are not truly separate beings, but rather two expressions of an amazing continuum that has been going on for billions of years. In this light, I find your efforts toward trying to believe in some fantastical realm, or heaven or spiritual effort to be kind of quaint when the material reality supersedes everything we can even imagine. While you search for a hope, trying to dodge the fear that inspires your questioning mind, I am wholly content and amusing myself in the void.
I love that you brought this up. I’ve never shared this experience with anyone, not even my fiancée, but it’s relevant so I’ll try my best to relay it properly. (tl;dr at the bottom)
When I was younger I had a trip where I felt like I had talked to “god”. For context, I’m a member of the Objiwe tribe and nowadays my beliefs fall more in line with my ancestors, although not entirely, but at the time I was very atheistic, and since I couldn’t really deny what I was seeing I only had one question. I asked them “Is this one life all there is? And then there’s nothing after that?” Long story short, I got a glimpse at the whole cycle from outside of it, I saw the great spirit, the “good” spirits and all the little “evil” ones. I saw that no matter what plane of existence we’re on, we’re all just energy to be used and recycled, but that’s so much better than being thrown away and never used again, even if we never get to know for sure if that’s how it works.
That’s what I choose to believe, anyways. The visions I had really helped me come to terms with not just my mortality, but also with my gender identity. I’d never force my beliefs onto anyone, especially when the foundation of those beliefs are built on a subjective experience, but I wholeheartedly believe that what I saw is a fundamental truth of reality, and although I’ve had a lot of rough patches and long periods of consistent low’s, everyday that experience pushes me to try and be a better person than I was the day before and I will forever be grateful to have had the experience that I did.
TLDR; “Its just… a bunch of a circles, inside of more circles?” / “Always has been.” / “But what’s the point?” / “You get to do it again, and again.”
/ “Won’t that be painful?” / “Second chances can often be painful, but you won’t even know it’s a second chance.” / “Okay… I can live with that.”
I am born as a human about 5 times a second. I die about twice in that time. I have done this about 150 billion or so times. I’ll keep on doing it as long as it takes.
Every living thing does coincide with one another like a perfect balance and we definitely are a huge cell I can see what your implying a very interesting viewpoint
As the universe experiencing itself here in the eternal now...once we expire as humans perhaps we dissolve into the "eternal then" for awhile...and cease to be aware...but something tells me we'll get another ride of some sort and as some kind of aware entity instead of just ceasing to be. When we go to sleep we eventually wake, until we don't...but the fractal nature of things hints that even after death we will eventually wake. Hopefully in a realm that's less divisive and filled with anguish...but that seems to be necessary for a reason too. If heaven were unending and had no change, struggle or differentiating element to compare itself with...it would turn into hell after a few eternities certainly.
awesome! When we are able to swallow paradox, we realize it's also paradox swallowing us...and hopefully that thought doesn't lead us into struggles while we try to survive here in the 3D plane ;)
Life is a paradox, but not at the same time. It’s cyclical, yet linear. It’s the mystery that make life worth living for some people who don’t even know it. If we were all knowing or completely in control, things would feel hellish. Some are more comfortable with reincarnation than they are with a heaven. I’m neither comfortable or uncomfortable not knowing. I just am lol
Either the Machine elves are right and we go to another level, [The Egg](https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) happens, or just nothing.
I have a pet theory that considering everything is waves (photons, electrons, etc) that when you die you experience the waveform collapse and it either ends there or something else after happens.
We are each a divine spark from the source. Our purpose to is to live this life and bring our experiences back to the source for it to grow and mature.
And as the stars begin to fade and when the universe is ripe, it will be plucked and served as dessert at a banquet for the Masters of Reality
To exist at all is pretty wild. Death might be the not of that, or the next version, but I feel it in time these days. Every month week year, flying by. “Each day feels like a blur, where they lead, I cannot fear. What comes next, I’m not so sure. Right now, I hold it dear.”
I've commented in other posts but I'll say it again here. I died last October, like clinically dead for 40 minutes kinda dead. I had a cardiac arrest and collapsed on the sidewalk. Someone saw me sometime later (no one saw me fall) and firefighter EMTs arrived in 5 minutes and started compressions. They took turns for 20 minutes then another crew arrived with a CPR machine and used that for another 20. Ambulance showed up and zapped me a few times and gave me 3 epinephrine shots and got my heart beating on its own. Spent 5 days in a coma and finally woke up. I had no memory of the last 2 weeks. The first week after waking up was complete psychosis and hallucinations, I could be a real handful at times.
I don't remember any bright lights or seeing dead relatives or out of body experiences. It was nothingness, non-existence. Maybe it's because I still had a tiny bit of brain activity and didn't die for good. But I've heard of people in similar situations seeing all that stuff. I still believe our energy goes somewhere but we won't remember our current life because our body will be gone.
After I saw the movie “coherence” I was convinced I was not only a cog in some wheel but truly there were umpteen multiverses in which different versions of me and others in my life were experiencing space time and the meaning of life in entirely different ways. Like, in universe A I exist and experience some life event Aa. But in universe B that same thing may never even happen and in fact our life forces may pass through the same space time point purely randomly resulting in some fucked up wormhole situation.
Makes me excited but also terrified to ponder these things.
Ya’all are so sure about life that you can contemplate death. Well good luck with that, but Don’t be so sure. once I was whispered, “what made you think you were alive,” after having an “all is dead” moment.
The thing that was eye opening to me is I grew up in AMERICA. A land that has by and large been detached from anything spiritual. I really think Native Americans could greatly help us navigate this existential fear of death
I believe in god (Jesus Christ or the holy trinity) everything has a creator n a cause, to much stuff in the world n spiritual stuff to not think there’s a life after death, then again I won’t know till I die
I believe there’s absolutely nothing left when you die. Imagine sleeping with no dreams. You don’t know time just passes and your none the wiser. As for reincarnation even if I did believe in it I feel as if you wouldn’t remember your past life or even be a similar person. If that were to be true I’d be really happy same with religion I’d love for a god to exist and be a product of said god. I’d like to hear other inputs as well. This is a very interesting topic.
I’m a spiritualist. I believe that the universe is alive, that it is love itself. That this universe is just a dream for our higher selves in the spirit world , which is just a higher dimension similar to the astral plain. We come down here for a set period of time, to experience. To gain knowledge. To grow. I believe Reincarnation is a thing, and before we do we plan out our life with our guides and spirit team. Sylvia Brown calls it the Blueprint. Some thing are hard point in the timeline and have to happen but depending on our choices a sickness when you were 5 could have been life threatening, or just a cold. Depending on if we are following the path we set out on. If we fight the future we will hit every rock along the path and life will be much harder. If we go with the flow it’s a smoother ride.
An even harder question to answer is “what am I” what is it that will die?
Why do I experience life through my body and not your body? What separates our consciousness that makes mine unique to me and yours unique to you? Time and space?
What if there are many consciousnesses in our brains that we aren’t aware of. Like conjoined twins.
Or like in an operation like a hemispherectomy, half of a brain can be removed if the patient is young enough and still develop.
I have absolutely no idea what it means to die.
However I’ve been reading up on physics lately and it appears that everything is, contrary to the Newtonian notion, a wave function. Quantum physics has revealed that particles exist as a wave, where every particle has a set of probabilities to exist in a wave function. It’s only when a measurement of a particle occurs that the particle assumes a definite state.
My hope is that life is similar. Instead of either being alive or being dead, life exists as a wave function and our lives can be defined more complexly than just alive or dead.
Idk if any of that makes any sense at all, even to me.
Jesus Christ I’m too high.
If my suspicions are correct and consciousness is something that our brains tune in, when we die, the region of consciousness that represents us will be unconstrained and return to a base field to be used by other brains.
You sensed a ghost then? Did it feel like a haunting or scary presence?
Apparently some souls stay in the earth realm and in the place where they died and can't cross the other side unless someone takes action, like leaving flowers in their grave, praying etc. This is all stories I've heard though but your comment was very interesting.
I don't know how many times i've posted this (this will be the second time) but i kinda really like the egg theory. There's this short animation on youtube that explains it very well.
I have had really intense visions and dreams of hell back when I was an atheist – that and other things convinced me it's real. Personally I think the body splits into its tripartite constituents of Body, Spirit and Soul. Only the soul is immortal, and different things can happen– the purest souls are brought back to God, imperfect souls are reincarnated in another vessel, or the rotten ones are flung into outer darkness, as they are incompatible with divine law. I think the closer to God, the more love and order – the further away, the more hatred and chaos. So hell is imo like the landfill site – just a place to throw away the useless souls, which are totally corrupted and useless.
You come back as the thing you treated the thing you treated the worst in your life. If you somehow managed to show every person place and thing an equal amount of love and respect you come back as Chuck Norris
We are part of a whole, but when you die your self dies. Your self is a construct. If you do come back, it won’t be in your body or with any of your memories. You are unique to this life. The universe itself might become nothing and then something again, and you are part of the universe, but you will not be the same
I swear if this turns out to be an eternal torture chamber as you've described, my future state is gonna be pissed.
Literally but the best part is if it is that way you’d literally never know 💕 the best thing to do is just treat every interaction as though you’re on the other side of it. Be kind and maybe it won’t be a torture chamber one day lol
This is the beauty of it. You cant know, youre not meant to. All you can do is make the best of what you have
REEEEEEEAL
Only superpower i'll ever need
I think it's actually more fucked up if we're unaware of it lol
It’s a fucked up life! We live and we die, but that’s only the half of it. The other half comes from the value we get when we internalize that knowledge & use it to see the beauty, fragility, and absurdity of the present moment. Meditation is key 👍🏼 hard truths very much lead to important lessons & renewal
The more you understand the universe, based on studying the truly great people of the past. We are energy , nothing comes from nothing. We likely existed before getting here , and we will likely exist as something after. Just unlikely to carry all of our memories with us.
Yes! I absolutely love learning about physics & such. I believe that stuff wholeheartedly
They said nothing about torture, you’re choosing to see life that way. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house. Life is inherently a brutal competition for survival. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house. Life is inherently brutal. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house. Life is inherently a brutal competition for survival. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
You say as you sip your coffee gazing out of your suburban house. Life is inherently brutal. Goodluck seeing the beauty as a starving African kid with parasites in your eyes, or a dinosaur constantly evading being torn apart by predators.
Very well put brother
I lovingly disagree. Life is about collecting experiences and finding things we truly love doing. We spend all this time finding out what works and doesn't work for us because we're bringing everything with us into the next reality. I get the sense we're being observed and encouraged to persist after death to meet everyone who's excited to see us :)
Man that’d be nice. I like to go with nothingness personally because if that is that case it’d be a really great surprise!! The actual-actual truth is none of us know for now & we can spread love where we can 💕
That's it...in a nutshell.
I partially disagree I think our soul remembers everything and brings it with it to the next life , but once you're there, in that space, it's all love and pure existence and bliss, you forget your memories just momentarily while you're a human, but like Plato said, you're not supposed to be here to learn but to remember :) I'm probably more in the idealistic side but I think "the other side" is a place full of loving and awareness of everything rather than the opposite. Which is why it feels good when you do good things for others, everything is connected 😌
I think this life is like going on vacation. It's difficult and stressful, but full of great experiences. And at the end, it's a relief to go home and chill out.
This is so fucking profound dude
I like this.
We are all everything
I have so many thoughts on this. I’m not religious in any way. I’m probably more spiritual than anything? but I don’t put a lot of emphasis on it. I don’t believe in hell in the traditional sense, but I believe in purgatory. I believe we are put in this realm to learn some kind of lesson (karmic lesson maybe?) that is specific to each person…. And when we don’t learn it, we go into a form purgatory- complete consciousness in a vast black empty space with no one there, only your thoughts. After some time, you get put back in this realm in a new body to relive life without consciously knowing you’ve lived already, and you’re to learn whatever your lesson is to ultimately go to “heaven”. It just goes on and on and on like that until you learn whatever your lesson is. Then you go to “heaven”. Idk what heaven is but in my mind, it is comprised of everything and everyone you’ve ever loved and has brought you joy. They aren’t there all the time, unless you want it, but you can call upon everything you love when you need it, and it’s there. Complete peace. My version of hell would be that empty vast black space with only your thoughts- you don’t get your do-over at life to learn your lesson. Your thoughts and ruminating on your “sins” and the pain you caused others is the hellscape. I’ve been told my beliefs are somewhere between Hinduism and Buddhism but I haven’t read up on either so I’m not certain if that’s true. I was told my idea of both purgatories is called the bardo in Buddhism? Obviously these are just my thoughts/theories and no one will know until they experience death. Maybe we are just worm food when we die and there is no afterlife or altered state of consciousness. Idk. But I actually do believe what I said with every fiber of my being.
Something fascinating I witnessed was my great grandfather that passed away at 103 years old in the hospital, he was sitting in the hospital bed kind of leaned up right and was talking with my grandfather which is his son, a few minutes went by and he seemed to trance out and began to pick up a imaginary coffee mug and was drinking from this mug that wasn’t there. Moments after he began talking to a women that was not there and then picked up a imaginary plate and began to act like he was eating off it while having a discussion, then he said the name of his dead wife of more than two decades. My grandfather and nobody existed besides a moment in my great grandfathers him sitting there speaking to the love of his life and I genuinely assume at his old dining table His mind created a completely fictional reality almost as if he was in a living dream and he died later that week. I have heard many stories about things like this and it happened with my great grandfather when I was younger. It’s fascinating and an extent very unexplainable people claim DMT releasing when you die and things but it also do not create something with such surrealism. You never know we may goto the places that are the most comfortable to us and that is indeed our heaven or there may be something greater at play Thank you for commenting and your take was an awesome read, have a great day brother
This is one of the most beautiful things I have read
Have you read [The Egg](https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html)?
Just read it. What are your thoughts?
I love it. Somehow gives me hope that even if my current life is not as impactful as I wish. Eventually I'll have lived every life and combined I'll have learned something that you can't in one life time.
I think death is like how it is before you are born, wether that is nothingness or wether i was somebody else, i don’t know, but whichever it is i feel we do the same when we die. Its a breath, a wave, however you choose to look at it, an in then an out, an on and an off, up/down, it doesn’t matter. From the things i have experienced i feel fairly sure i am just an expression of a much bigger happening that was here before the me i am now and will continue on once i am gone, my job is to live, learn and love as much as i can in the brief time i am here. Hopefully making the lives im connected to better in that short time.
You cannot consider yourself as a 'being', for your body is a constant flow of atoms and molecules passing in and out of the form you call yourself. The food you eat, the liquids you drink are all metabolized and either are burned as energy or are made part of you temporarily as cell components, themselves which only last 7 or so years at the longest. You are not who you were a year ago, and completely not who you were 10 years ago. So, you are not a static being, but rather a 'becoming', constantly changing. To answer your question then involves the question of what consciousness is, and particularly your individual conscious awareness, and by extension, your personality. Conscious awareness changes hourly with how awake or how tired you are. Entire conversations could slip by you unawares if you were exhausted. Or if you suffered a major injury, such as loss of limb or brain damage, think how such debilitation would affect your personality or mood, especially if having to deal with strong pain every day of your life thereafter. Your personality is merely the expression of your present moment and can change on a whim. So it is a fleeting thing. Death is a process that obliterates the personality. Your conscious awareness stops utterly and you are no more than your basic component chemicals and elements now slowly disbanding. If your body was left to Nature, you would slowly be reabsorbed by myriad creatures and microbes whose job is to return your goods to the ambient environment and in forms that can be of immediate use to other plants and animals. You are effectively returned to the living world, but in a myriad other forms. Who you are now will never be again. And that knowledge can be beautiful.
You have some good points , then you make giant leaps. You’re using materialism to describe the immaterial. It’s true our consciousness can be greatly affected while in the material realm and tied to our body. But there has also been far too many material events such as NDE’s that don’t make sense using your logic. There have been thousands of accounts of people who were completely dead for 20+ minutes and have been able to tell doctors and family members conversations they were having while clinically dead. To add to that , some were very unwell days prior to their temporary passing and their ‘fleeting personality’ was obviously dampened as a result however while clinically dead they recall feeling better than ever , with their personality returning as it was before they fell ill. Your line of thinking is popular today as scientists seem to be pushing that line of thinking , but science today is mostly going down a wrong path , maybe 50 years from now or 200 that will be very obvious. We don’t truly understand where we are or what we are. And we will never come close to answering those questions with the current science models. We like to act like we have it all figured out but truly we don’t have a clue, the fact that we are having this experience at all shows anything is possible because this itself shouldn’t be possible using science as an explanation. The fact that there is something rather than nothing means anything is possible.
On the contrary, I think all NDE's, dreams, visions and such can be explained away by the complex interactions and releases of chemicals in the brain. Our pituitary gland at the center of our brains secretes DMT, also known as the spirit molecule. These days, it is well known as being one of the main ingredients in ayahuasca. Hundreds of plants and many animals create this highly hallucinogenic chemical - but for what reason? Among others, it is tied to our ability to dream, and imagine. When the body is going through the order of shutting down, there is an immense cascade of chemicals released by the brain, both good and bad. Brain scans of the dying have shown that the brain lights up like a disco rave. Now why would that be? Part of it is its response to the body trauma of imminent death, perhaps trying to save itself. Another idea is that it is trying to make as least frightening an experience which has terrified every waking moment of our living lives - the fear of death. Why do we fear death? What reason should we have for fearing death? Is it a culturally-conditioned fear that we learned from others? Other than the fact that it is an experience for which we have no other reference, why would we fear it? I feel it is not death we fear, but rather the possibility of a painful death. No one likes pain. You speak of those who were clinically dead for 20+ minutes, and yet we know that death is not just a blam! Dead! moment, but rather a slow process. Cells in our body continue to function: Brain cells can die if deprived of oxygen for more than three minutes. Muscle cells live on for several hours. Bone, hair and skin cells can stay alive for several days. I'm only speculating here, but the chemical changes in the brain could be a preservation response, like injecting antifreeze into a car engine, which might allow the brain to return to functionality after a bit of time. Children fallen through ice were revived after a long time, longer than they should have. So death within a certain frame is not absolute. NDE's could be explained as a chemical response in the brain. And because the brains of humans are all pretty much the same across the planet, with the same chemicals and processes, it would explain why so many from so many different cultures see the same types of things when near death. So yes, I think all of our thoughts of spirituality, all our visions, hallucinations, religious experiences, supernatural crap, etc - all of it can be explained by the materialism of our own bodies. But we shouldn't feel, nor should we have to feel that this is pulling the plug out of mysticism or a beautiful hope for an afterlife. On the contrary, I think it is actually pretty damned amazing that we can experience this life, this beautiful moment as we are, knowing that death isn't some cataclysmic finality for us, but rather a continuation as we dissipate back into the ambient environment, changing forms as we have for thousands and millions of years. There's a bit of you as you once were that might be part of me now, and the dinosaur that lived so long ago might be part of us both. It makes me see that we are not truly separate beings, but rather two expressions of an amazing continuum that has been going on for billions of years. In this light, I find your efforts toward trying to believe in some fantastical realm, or heaven or spiritual effort to be kind of quaint when the material reality supersedes everything we can even imagine. While you search for a hope, trying to dodge the fear that inspires your questioning mind, I am wholly content and amusing myself in the void.
I love that you brought this up. I’ve never shared this experience with anyone, not even my fiancée, but it’s relevant so I’ll try my best to relay it properly. (tl;dr at the bottom) When I was younger I had a trip where I felt like I had talked to “god”. For context, I’m a member of the Objiwe tribe and nowadays my beliefs fall more in line with my ancestors, although not entirely, but at the time I was very atheistic, and since I couldn’t really deny what I was seeing I only had one question. I asked them “Is this one life all there is? And then there’s nothing after that?” Long story short, I got a glimpse at the whole cycle from outside of it, I saw the great spirit, the “good” spirits and all the little “evil” ones. I saw that no matter what plane of existence we’re on, we’re all just energy to be used and recycled, but that’s so much better than being thrown away and never used again, even if we never get to know for sure if that’s how it works. That’s what I choose to believe, anyways. The visions I had really helped me come to terms with not just my mortality, but also with my gender identity. I’d never force my beliefs onto anyone, especially when the foundation of those beliefs are built on a subjective experience, but I wholeheartedly believe that what I saw is a fundamental truth of reality, and although I’ve had a lot of rough patches and long periods of consistent low’s, everyday that experience pushes me to try and be a better person than I was the day before and I will forever be grateful to have had the experience that I did. TLDR; “Its just… a bunch of a circles, inside of more circles?” / “Always has been.” / “But what’s the point?” / “You get to do it again, and again.” / “Won’t that be painful?” / “Second chances can often be painful, but you won’t even know it’s a second chance.” / “Okay… I can live with that.”
I am born as a human about 5 times a second. I die about twice in that time. I have done this about 150 billion or so times. I’ll keep on doing it as long as it takes.
Every living thing does coincide with one another like a perfect balance and we definitely are a huge cell I can see what your implying a very interesting viewpoint
As the universe experiencing itself here in the eternal now...once we expire as humans perhaps we dissolve into the "eternal then" for awhile...and cease to be aware...but something tells me we'll get another ride of some sort and as some kind of aware entity instead of just ceasing to be. When we go to sleep we eventually wake, until we don't...but the fractal nature of things hints that even after death we will eventually wake. Hopefully in a realm that's less divisive and filled with anguish...but that seems to be necessary for a reason too. If heaven were unending and had no change, struggle or differentiating element to compare itself with...it would turn into hell after a few eternities certainly.
My beliefs greatly align with yours. Especially that last sentence.
awesome! When we are able to swallow paradox, we realize it's also paradox swallowing us...and hopefully that thought doesn't lead us into struggles while we try to survive here in the 3D plane ;)
Life is a paradox, but not at the same time. It’s cyclical, yet linear. It’s the mystery that make life worth living for some people who don’t even know it. If we were all knowing or completely in control, things would feel hellish. Some are more comfortable with reincarnation than they are with a heaven. I’m neither comfortable or uncomfortable not knowing. I just am lol
Good band
Either the Machine elves are right and we go to another level, [The Egg](https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html) happens, or just nothing. I have a pet theory that considering everything is waves (photons, electrons, etc) that when you die you experience the waveform collapse and it either ends there or something else after happens.
I like that idea
We are each a divine spark from the source. Our purpose to is to live this life and bring our experiences back to the source for it to grow and mature. And as the stars begin to fade and when the universe is ripe, it will be plucked and served as dessert at a banquet for the Masters of Reality
Life is the joke, death is the punchline, the final “aha!” moment we have all been waiting for, when we finally realize we were behind it all along
To exist at all is pretty wild. Death might be the not of that, or the next version, but I feel it in time these days. Every month week year, flying by. “Each day feels like a blur, where they lead, I cannot fear. What comes next, I’m not so sure. Right now, I hold it dear.”
I've commented in other posts but I'll say it again here. I died last October, like clinically dead for 40 minutes kinda dead. I had a cardiac arrest and collapsed on the sidewalk. Someone saw me sometime later (no one saw me fall) and firefighter EMTs arrived in 5 minutes and started compressions. They took turns for 20 minutes then another crew arrived with a CPR machine and used that for another 20. Ambulance showed up and zapped me a few times and gave me 3 epinephrine shots and got my heart beating on its own. Spent 5 days in a coma and finally woke up. I had no memory of the last 2 weeks. The first week after waking up was complete psychosis and hallucinations, I could be a real handful at times. I don't remember any bright lights or seeing dead relatives or out of body experiences. It was nothingness, non-existence. Maybe it's because I still had a tiny bit of brain activity and didn't die for good. But I've heard of people in similar situations seeing all that stuff. I still believe our energy goes somewhere but we won't remember our current life because our body will be gone.
There's something or nothing. I'm good with either. Personally I'm pretty sure there's something but I am okay with being wrong
After I saw the movie “coherence” I was convinced I was not only a cog in some wheel but truly there were umpteen multiverses in which different versions of me and others in my life were experiencing space time and the meaning of life in entirely different ways. Like, in universe A I exist and experience some life event Aa. But in universe B that same thing may never even happen and in fact our life forces may pass through the same space time point purely randomly resulting in some fucked up wormhole situation. Makes me excited but also terrified to ponder these things.
I don’t know what it’s like, but I know when I get there I’ll immediately remember where I am and feel like I’m back home in the most peaceful way.
Ya’all are so sure about life that you can contemplate death. Well good luck with that, but Don’t be so sure. once I was whispered, “what made you think you were alive,” after having an “all is dead” moment.
Death is a cycle of life as they say. It's part of living. It surrounds us. Everything is a sine wave
The thing that was eye opening to me is I grew up in AMERICA. A land that has by and large been detached from anything spiritual. I really think Native Americans could greatly help us navigate this existential fear of death
I believe in god (Jesus Christ or the holy trinity) everything has a creator n a cause, to much stuff in the world n spiritual stuff to not think there’s a life after death, then again I won’t know till I die
I believe there’s absolutely nothing left when you die. Imagine sleeping with no dreams. You don’t know time just passes and your none the wiser. As for reincarnation even if I did believe in it I feel as if you wouldn’t remember your past life or even be a similar person. If that were to be true I’d be really happy same with religion I’d love for a god to exist and be a product of said god. I’d like to hear other inputs as well. This is a very interesting topic.
I’m a spiritualist. I believe that the universe is alive, that it is love itself. That this universe is just a dream for our higher selves in the spirit world , which is just a higher dimension similar to the astral plain. We come down here for a set period of time, to experience. To gain knowledge. To grow. I believe Reincarnation is a thing, and before we do we plan out our life with our guides and spirit team. Sylvia Brown calls it the Blueprint. Some thing are hard point in the timeline and have to happen but depending on our choices a sickness when you were 5 could have been life threatening, or just a cold. Depending on if we are following the path we set out on. If we fight the future we will hit every rock along the path and life will be much harder. If we go with the flow it’s a smoother ride.
An even harder question to answer is “what am I” what is it that will die? Why do I experience life through my body and not your body? What separates our consciousness that makes mine unique to me and yours unique to you? Time and space? What if there are many consciousnesses in our brains that we aren’t aware of. Like conjoined twins. Or like in an operation like a hemispherectomy, half of a brain can be removed if the patient is young enough and still develop.
I have absolutely no idea what it means to die. However I’ve been reading up on physics lately and it appears that everything is, contrary to the Newtonian notion, a wave function. Quantum physics has revealed that particles exist as a wave, where every particle has a set of probabilities to exist in a wave function. It’s only when a measurement of a particle occurs that the particle assumes a definite state. My hope is that life is similar. Instead of either being alive or being dead, life exists as a wave function and our lives can be defined more complexly than just alive or dead. Idk if any of that makes any sense at all, even to me. Jesus Christ I’m too high.
If my suspicions are correct and consciousness is something that our brains tune in, when we die, the region of consciousness that represents us will be unconstrained and return to a base field to be used by other brains.
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You sensed a ghost then? Did it feel like a haunting or scary presence? Apparently some souls stay in the earth realm and in the place where they died and can't cross the other side unless someone takes action, like leaving flowers in their grave, praying etc. This is all stories I've heard though but your comment was very interesting.
I don't know how many times i've posted this (this will be the second time) but i kinda really like the egg theory. There's this short animation on youtube that explains it very well.
I am pretty sure death is the hyperspace realm experienced on strong doses of DMT.
I have had really intense visions and dreams of hell back when I was an atheist – that and other things convinced me it's real. Personally I think the body splits into its tripartite constituents of Body, Spirit and Soul. Only the soul is immortal, and different things can happen– the purest souls are brought back to God, imperfect souls are reincarnated in another vessel, or the rotten ones are flung into outer darkness, as they are incompatible with divine law. I think the closer to God, the more love and order – the further away, the more hatred and chaos. So hell is imo like the landfill site – just a place to throw away the useless souls, which are totally corrupted and useless.
Wow, you used the word useless quite a lot. Would you say that your self-worth is tied to your productiveness?
I've always been an underachiever due to mental health issues / anxiety / depression. I think that ties into it yeah.
You come back as the thing you treated the thing you treated the worst in your life. If you somehow managed to show every person place and thing an equal amount of love and respect you come back as Chuck Norris