Afterlife (Endings)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 12:06 (4102 days ago) @ BBella

Once again, your post is full of rich ideas, but I'd like to confine this response to the following exchange between us, because there's obviously a major point I'm missing.
 
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.
 
dhw: 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?-BBELLA: Sorry, I am completely lost with your last paragraph.-It may well be that this is the key to all my questions and all your answers! Everything revolves around identity. If there is an afterlife, it must be the soul, not the material brain that is the seat of our identity (because the material brain dies). But even in the IBT this soul has to be limited to whatever makes me different from you and everyone else. Otherwise we would all be the same! However, in your ideal scenario, we have all chosen to live on this Earth with lots of different, sequent identities/souls, and we only remember them all when we get back to the IBT. And so although I am dhw now, in earlier lives I may once have been William Shakespeare (yes, please), Isaac Newton, Napoleon, Gustav Mahler, and Micky the Murderer. Now in dreams I may do all kinds of things I don't do in "real" life, but as you say yourself, when I wake up I am dhw again. However, when I get to the IBT, according to your scenario, I really WILL be Shakespeare, Newton, Napoleon, Mahler, Micky and dhw all rolled into one, so which of them is "me"? Alternatively, if you're saying ALL of those identities were dreams, who is the "me" that remembers the dreams? If the afterlife "me" is not dhw but somebody else, "I" might just as well not have an afterlife!-Many apologies again if I keep missing your point, but I guess clarification is what we're always looking for in these discussions.