Afterlife (Endings)

by dhw, Saturday, January 26, 2013, 14:28 (4317 days ago) @ BBella

BBELLA: I appreciate your digging deeper/asking questions about how I would like things to be. It helps me to look further into possibilities and the what if's, which I really enjoy doing.-Thank you. I'm always afraid the digging might cause offence. This post will be a higgledy-piggledy bush as I select extracts from your own, but it all revolves round identity.-Dhw: But how could this nice guy [Hitler] live with the knowledge of what he's done? Wouldn't the IBT [In Between Time] be full of criminals in agony? 
BBELLA: I'd like to think that every soul has a choice to fill a position or fulfill a mission (or just visit to visit) on whatever plane of material existence they choose to come into.-That means Hitler chose to become a monster ... which in my view already makes him a monster! It's like the piece about "karma" ... once you're bad, you're always bad. You wrote: "I would like to think that in the IBT there is no good - bad soul, just souls without judgment", but how could anyone remember what they've done, who they were, and yet be unaware of the concepts of good and bad they lived with and believed in during their past lives?
 
BBELLA: Possibly, such a situation as Hitler brought about, may work for Earth's evolving human nature, in the long run - learning by histories mistakes. So much goes on here that is horrific to the human conscience (as well as wonderful), and it definitely brings me comfort to think that in the IBT, it is understood the purpose and balance of it all.-In your ideal scenario, then, there is a purpose. Perhaps you see it in terms of love and happiness? But if you talk of history's "mistakes", doesn't that automatically involve judgement, and good and bad? And why would the before-and-after monster Hitler think it was all a "mistake"? -BBELLA: I can imagine that even if I knew for a fact that what I dreamed was real and I had killed someone in my dream, I don't think I would suffer here for the killing there (not to say it wouldn't filter thru now and then). Because I would understand that in that life, whatever I did was done because of what was going on in that life and not connected to who I am and what is going on in this one.-This corresponds to some multiverse theories, with umpteen versions of ourselves existing elsewhere, and to the quantum phenomenon, with one thing being in two places at the same time. But what will be your feelings when you get to the IBT and discover you really are a murderer? And your alter ego doesn't care? How can both BBellas be you without any conflict? For me, this is a nightmare, not a dream!
 
BBELLA: Most everything is perspective (if not everything), as science is closer to understanding, and will one day have to admit. So, it seems to me, it is true for both the material and the immaterial planes of existence.
 
This ties in with our discussions on subjectivity: ultimately no-one knows what constitutes "reality". However, when I go to the IBT, any new knowledge will still have to be subjectively processed (according to my perspective) if I haven't become an automaton. (See next set of questions!)
 
Dhw: I find it surprising that some people want to stay in the "IBT", as if they no longer care about the people they are leaving behind. -BBELLA: It isn't that you no longer care, or even will forget them, it's that you are moving back into your other identity, yet you aren't quite there yet. I would like to think that when you do finally make it fully into the other identity, you will remember everything. -Which other identity? We'll have had so many. (See below. Sorry to keep dodging around!)) You wrote that caring "would be different from the perspective of eternity", but if Hitler and his like keep choosing to be monsters, will the eternal perspective be "It doesn't matter"? What purpose can ANY experience serve then? What will be balanced with what in your ideal scenario?-BBELLA: I would like to think the reason a person can't imagine so many different lives and of being an eternal being with choices to incarnate here or there, is, for the most part, because we have limited capacity consciousness. Not because it is actually limited (because in some sense all consciousness is connected), but because the material brain is still evolving with the material world and so cannot imagine anything apart from the material world.-If I have such a thing as a soul, it has to be the me who directs the material brain (as opposed to a me created by and dependent on the material brain ... in which case there is no soul and no afterlife). But that soul still has to be limited if it is to be me and nobody else. If there are a whole lot of totally different "me's" who are reincarnated in different forms on Earth and don't remember being me, they might as well be a whole lot of other people. If they all come together in the IBT, as nice dhw's and nasty dhw's, loving BBella's, murderous BBella's, shan't we need the services of a heavenly shrink? And even then, what "me" will he/she come up with?