Afterlife (Endings)

by BBella , Wednesday, January 30, 2013, 04:24 (4096 days ago) @ dhw

It may well be that this is the key to all my questions and all your answers! Everything revolves around identity. -I've known all along that identity is your main concern when it comes to my afterlife scenario. And, again, I do appreciate the questions as it helps me to delve deeper into my own blissfully shallow ideals for the Afterlife which I've never really ventured very far into. Just to rehash what you already know, but maybe just to clarify - at the time that I created my scenario, it was in reaction to the realization that ideas about the afterlife are man made and that no proof of any one idea/religion/philosophy/etc of the afterlife actually exists (that I know of), except for maybe NDE's. The thought that this life is all there is, I admit, frightened me. And since I knew that proof could not be had about an afterlife, I decided to create my own ideal scenario of the afterlife that made me feel comforted. Over the years I've allowed others personal experiences (NDE's etc) and my own dreams to add to my evolving hypothesis. -> 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). -Yes, I think of it as the material brain holds the Earth identity/memory gained in the lifetime here, and the subconscious is the go between of the soul identity and earth identity thru which we can be guided in our material life.->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! -It would be no different than what we experience in our material life because consciousness is consciousness. As we've discussed in prior discussions about consciousness, we are only conscious of one moment at a time, and I would think it is the same in the Afterlife. I have the ability to remember dreams/memories/identities any time I choose, but I only identify with who I am conscious of being, one identity at a time, even if I have the memory in my dreams/past life of being someone else.->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. -As a soul, we may never choose to visit Earth since we would have many options in the All That Is of places to go and things to do. Or we might choose to visit once or twice, etc. It would seem if we spend a lot of time coming back here as different people we may be on a learning curb as a soul or might have a mission to help the material Earth evolve. ->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"?-When you are in the IBT you are no longer any of those people that you incarnated here on earth to be, just like I am no longer the people in my dreams when I wake up. If I were in the IBT and remembering lives I've lived, I am remembering lives that are now dead, just as my dreams are done and over when I am awake. I am who I am, even tho when I go to sleep tonight and dream I might be someone else. But when I wake up I am still who I am living only this life. -As I said before, if in the future science proves when we dream we are not just experiencing dreams we are actually experiencing other lives, we would still only be who we are when we awake. The knowledge that our dreams are real and not just dreams would not change or effect who we are in this life (except possibly thru our emotions). What happens in the other lives happens because of the scenarios in those lives, not because of what's going on in this life. In my thinking, it would be very similar, if not exactly the same, waking from a dream if science proved we are truly transitioning into other lives when we dream. -Why would a soul even choose to live a life on Earth? I would think it would be for two reasons: 1) Because they can. 2) To experience something a soul could not other wise experience except by entering life within matter on Earth. Eternity is a long time. Possibly Earth may have been created for no other reason than for souls to experience the very experiences we experience here.->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!-Ironically, you are speaking from the life of dhw with his perspective (and not the perspective of your soul life -duh)so when you say, "I" might just as well not have an afterlife" - from dhw's perspective you are correct, because the life of dhw will no longer exist when you die. So in that sense, dhw doesn't have an afterlife. So in that sense you are right. The only difference in the way we see things, about the IBT, is I've imagined an eternal soul identity that when I die, I will awaken into and for whom this life on Earth that I've lived was only a dream for. Yes, this life will have ended, but my consciousness continues on in the life I had before I came here.