It is reasonable to accept the existence of an afterlife. .

[82_28]

http://www.dailygrail.com/Guest-Article ... -Afterlife

In 1963 this young man lost control of his car and collided with a brick wall. His injuries were severe enough to fracture his face and sinus cavities and to break his jaw. Badly hurt, he sat on wet grass near the destroyed vehicle and then drifted into unconsciousness. As you read this, note the calmness with which he describes his experience as well as the presence of a very powerful out-of-body experience that seemed to indicate to him that all would be well in his life despite this near-fatal accident. Here’s his story:

I was in a severe automobile accident several years ago. The steering wheel smashed my face. The accident happened in a rainstorm, and I ran off the road and hit a tree.

For a while after the crash I felt nothing, and then the pain started to burn in my face. I got out of the car and lay down, hoping it would make me feel better, but it didn’t. Finally I just blacked out. When I awoke, I couldn’t see anything because my face was covered, but I could tell I was in a hospital from the sounds and the fact that I was on some kind of bed.

I don’t know how long it was, but I had the distinct sensation that I was floating out of my body. I saw my parents, who were there at the bedside, and could feel their emotional pain. It was strange. I should have been in pain but wasn’t. Instead I was standing next to my parents trying to console them as they looked at their darling son, whom they had just been told was going to die. It was horrific, but there was nothing I could do about it. I stood next to my mother and tried to get her attention, but I couldn’t because she didn’t know I was there. I looked at my own body but wasn’t interested in what I was seeing. I actually felt like a fly on the wall.

Something in my mind finally clicked as I realized that they would eventually discover that I was not in pain, whether it was here on earth or not. At that point my empathetic pain went away and I focused on my experience. I remember thinking, “So this is what death is about,” as I rose further out of my body.

A light came into view and became larger and brighter as I drew closer. I knew this was it, the end of my life, and I wasn’t afraid. But as I drew near, a voice shouted at me to stop. And I mean shouted. “No, not yet!” the voice said.

When that happened I felt myself return very hard into my body. I gasped very loudly, but I knew I was going to survive after that. When they say it’s not your time, it’s not your time.

When I first read this man’s account of his near-fatal automobile accident, I was taken by the calmness with which he described the sense of peace and painlessness that came over him in the hospital. I was also intrigued by his description of the light that formed the boundary between life and death, as well as the strong voice that stopped him from crossing into the light.

This man came back from his experience with the ability to “intuit people’s feelings” (his words) as well as understand their emotional logic. Intuiting people’s feelings may be one type of psychic experience. I would encounter many more NDEs describing psychic experiences in the future.

Much more at link.

http://www.dailygrail.com/Guest-Article ... -Afterlife

[slomo]

It is reasonable to accept the existence of an afterlife. .

No. But it is not reasonable to reject the existence of an afterlife either.

From most angles, if you consider our physical reality closely enough, you will come to the conclusion that consciousness is more fundamental than (or at least equally fundamental as) what we understand to be the known constituents of the physical world (molecules, atoms, quarks, photons, and the like). The only angle from which this seems not to be true is the distorted and willfully ignorant perspective of modern Western materialist culture.

So some form of Consciousness persists through eternity and sustains physical reality. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and Bell's theorem (with experimental results supporting "no-go") would seem to imply that.

However, there is no reason to suppose that such a Consciousness would preserve an individual human "soul" that, from the perspective of deep time, exists only in an instantaneous momentary flash. In fact, our consciousness changes so much during the course of one earthly incarnation that it would be hard to argue the existence of a soul that lasts more than 5 minutes.

I have a meditation instructor who has described what he believes to be the structure of our "bodies", ranging from the physical to the so-called Buddhic. The Buddhic, according to him, is preserved, but the others are not. I don't know how to fit his model into what I understand of science, but that is more a matter of detail rather than disputing the overarching idea of eternal Consciousness. I do know from experience that there is a part of my consciousness, accessible only during meditation, that seems very "old", that stretches back into deep time. But all of the other parts of my soul seem to be constantly shifting and dancing around that central point.

[slomo]

Somewhat tangential to the OP, here is a fascinating editorial, a must-read for people who want to collect evidence for a world-beyond-the-veil, who seek a rational perspective on the question of ultimate reality:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ib/parapsychol ... r_science/

Imagine if, way back at the start of the scientific enterprise, someone had said, "What we really need is a control group for science - people who will behave exactly like scientists, doing experiments, publishing journals, and so on, but whose field of study is completely empty: one in which the null hypothesis is always true.

"That way, we'll be able to gauge the effect of publication bias, experimental error, misuse of statistics, data fraud, and so on, which will help us understand how serious such problems are in the real scientific literature."

Isn't that a great idea?

By an accident of historical chance, we actually have exactly such a control group, namely parapsychologists: people who study extra-sensory perception, telepathy, precognition, and so on.

There's no particular reason to think parapsychologists are doing anything other than what scientists would do; their experiments are similar to those of scientists, they use statistics in similar ways, and there's no reason to think they falsify data any more than any other group. Yet despite the fact that their null hypotheses are always true, parapsychologists get positive results.

Emphasis is mine. Consider this argument very carefully. What this gentleman is saying is that no amount of data, collected in as scientifically rigorous manner as, say, experimental data from psychology and behavioral microeconomics, will ever be admissible as evidence for a position that is assumed, prima facie, to be false.

Of course this is not science, this is ideology.

This ideological position is the keynote of our culture. Where does it come from? Did it arise organically, being naturally selected for over the centuries as the needs of State required humans to be confined, as much as possible, to the physical world? Or has it been engineered? I don't know. What I do know is that it is the primary roadblock to liberation of any real kind.

[82_28]

BTW, the thread's title is just a little quote I lifted out of a sentence in the story. I wanted more of an ellipsis or quotation marks, but ran out of room. Isn't a statement by me expressly.

[slomo]

BTW, the thread's title is just a little quote I lifted out of a sentence in the story. I wanted more of an ellipsis or quotation marks, but ran out of room. Isn't a statement by me expressly.

I figured that... I was addressing the general question, not (necessarily) you. It's an interesting and important question, but not necessarily for the reasons most people think.

[23]

[slomo]

Yes, exactly.

[17breezes]

"The Buddhic, according to him, is preserved, but the others are not"

A rather elitist claim though common to most religious beliefs.

[slomo]

"The Buddhic, according to him, is preserved, but the others are not"

A rather elitist claim though common to most religious beliefs.

Ummm... you might be misunderstanding what I wrote or meant. He is not saying that Buddhists are saved (and, say, Christians are not). He is saying that there is a model of consciousness where every human individual has (at least) five bodies, so-called physical, astral, mental, causal, and "Buddhic" (which you could easily rename "eternal" or some other word that is less culturally loaded). According to him, when you die, the physical is destroyed (obviously), so too the astral and mental, but the causal recoils into the Buddhic, which is eternal. This is true of every individual, no matter the belief system entertained during incarnation. Of course, how aware one is of the Buddhic realm may vary according to cultural and/or religious training.

Again, this is the model one particular person teaches. It is not elitist, though it may be wrong in part or in whole.

[23]

Elitism is an interesting notion.

It generally connotes, to many people, that one entity is superior or preferred to another one. Whether that entity is a living being or thing or thought or idea.

Elitism, to exist, requires the belief in the existence of such separate entities.

When you don't have separate entities, however, you have no playground for comparison. And no playground for elitism, which is a function of comparison.

I can never be superior or elite to you... if I am you.

[barracuda]

It's also perfectly reasonable to accept a purely physical basis for consiousness. As Francis Crick says, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." His thesis is that consiousness is basically an effect of the processes involving retention of short-term memory via visual stimulus of the brain, nothing more.

Understandably, this position is far more difficult to reconcile with the concept of the self than is a purely supernatural one. But is it really any less fantastic a proposition, that our lives in all their complexity and depth are the mere resonances of electro-chemistry? In many ways the idea adds a sense of urgency to our actions, which is diminished by an afterlife. However, the implication is that the soul is based upon the sum of it's amazing parts, and when these fall apart, there is nothing but dust.

[JackRiddler]

I'm sure you're fully aware of this, barracuda, but your "nothing more" is misleading in that Crick's speculation on consciousness doesn't say that consciousness isn't real, or deny that it's totally awesome - only that it's an effect of biological processes in the organism, rather than an effect of a universal consciousness, or of a soul bestowed by a deity. (If you think about it, in all of these cases you're still an effect, "nothing more.") To think that one possibility is more desirable or meaningful or magical than another may be an unwarranted prejudice. It may make it impossible ever to feel right in our own skin. Crick's idea doesn't sound unlike certain mystical concepts of the universe blinking in and out in quantized time-bursts, only that it's our perception of it blinking in and out in biologically defined quanta.

My reflex is always to at least try rejecting dichotomies of physical vs. metaphysical, or natural vs. supernatural. Anything that exists, including any vision of god if it exists, is physical. Not necessarily in a way we could ever see, measure or understand, but it's also true that until recently we could not have seen, measured or (probably) understood radio waves. A universal consciousness would still exist in a medium, even if it seemed "immaterial" to us, even if we will never come upon a way to see or conceive of it (because it's all one string vibrating through 11 dimensions, or whatever). To me the real dichotomies are known vs. unknown, or knowable vs. unknowable, or comprehensible vs. impossible to understand (even if known to exist), etc. My only problem with "faith" - the attempt to assert or intuit the unknowable - is when it's presented as diktat.

Occasionally even a fugitive war criminal provides insight:

The Unknown

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

[MacCruiskeen]

Some interesting stuff here from the Journal of Consciousness Studies on the "hard problem" of consciousness:

[M]any commentators have pointed out that although there has been undoubted progress in the study of the neural correlates of consciousness, there is still an "explanatory gap." What sort of theory would it take to bridge the gap between brain processes and phenomenal experience?

Philosopher David Chalmers gave eloquent expression to this at the first Tucson conference, when he drew a distinction between the "easy problems" (cognitive functions like discrimination and the focus of attention) and the "hard problem" (why should any of this be accompanied by phenomenal experience?)

http://www.imprint.co.uk/hardprob.html

[Wombaticus Rex]

I say "Yes" for a simple and personal reason: consciousness is so ubiquitous I think it's reasonable to assume it's persistent.

It really is a single-sentence deal for me.

[17breezes]

"The Buddhic, according to him, is preserved, but the others are not"

A rather elitist claim though common to most religious beliefs.

Ummm... you might be misunderstanding what I wrote or meant. He is not saying that Buddhists are saved (and, say, Christians are not). He is saying that there is a model of consciousness where every human individual has (at least) five bodies, so-called physical, astral, mental, causal, and "Buddhic" (which you could easily rename "eternal" or some other word that is less culturally loaded). According to him, when you die, the physical is destroyed (obviously), so too the astral and mental, but the causal recoils into the Buddhic, which is eternal. This is true of every individual, no matter the belief system entertained during incarnation. Of course, how aware one is of the Buddhic realm may vary according to cultural and/or religious training.

Again, this is the model one particular person teaches. It is not elitist, though it may be wrong in part or in whole.

Ok thanks for the clarification.