Afterlife (Endings)

by BBella , Friday, February 01, 2013, 07:11 (4312 days ago) @ dhw

&quot;Life&apos;s a dream&quot; is of course a clich&#195;&#169;, but clich&#195;&#169;s usually have some truth in them. It often does feel as if it WAS (though never IS) a dream. So life is one long sequence of soon-to-be-unreal experiences that subtly change us into what we &quot;really&quot; are in the present, which rapidly becomes an unreal past (Matt will like this.)-dhw: &quot;life is one long sequence of...experiences that subtly change us&quot; <-- Behind the meaning of this sentence may be the answer to the question of identity. The body in which your consciousness resides is what changes over the years, but the conscious/observer/witness of those changes does not itself change. The conscious energy that brings the body to life observes and holds the memory of the life lived. Who we truly are is the conscious observer that observes all that the body experiences and feels. And wherever and whatever that conscious observer experiences, whether it is here, there, in dreams or wherever, it is still the same conscious observer. ->I can therefore fully accept the continuous sequence of realities that turn into dreams as we move ever onwards. However, what still doesn&apos;t make sense to me is the idea of a dhw present in the IBT who is not me. -It&apos;s not the body of dhw that will be present in the IBT, it will be the conscious/witness/observer of dhw&apos;s life that will be present in the IBT. When you&apos;ve ended a story of a character you&apos;ve written/created and all is said and done, the witness/observer/creator of that character still lives on even tho the character himself is no longer present in your life. You have his whole life stored in your memory, but you are no longer him. It is the same with dreams, and could be the same with the afterlife.->You say &quot;the life of dhw will no longer exist when I die&quot;, but it&apos;s the consciousness (not the life) of dhw that constitutes my identity/my soul, and I cannot see how MY consciousness and subconsciousness can move into an identity that is NOT mine. -It&apos;s not two separate identities that you are moving into, its one consciousness observing a life on it&apos;s journey through time or whatever the soul experiences. Aren&apos;t you &quot;moving into an identity&quot; when you create a new character in a story? Yet when you move out of that identity nothing has changed except your memory of that characters life. Without you that character wouldn&apos;t even be. The you that has observed and stored the memory of your life here is who will be leaving the body at death. Then you will journey thru the experience of re-membering your previous IBT life along with your new memories of the life of dhw stored in your memory bank, which could be recalled just like any memory. It would be the same or similar as you remembering the character you created&apos;s life, or me remembering a dream that I woke up from. ->That makes me into somebody else&apos;s dream, -Without you dhw is nothing but dirt. There&apos;s not two identities only one. &quot;You&quot; have given your body life, because you wanted to experience what you have and will be experiencing here. Without you, the you I am addressing, there would be no dhw or soul to move on into the afterlife. So you are not someone else&apos;s dream, you are you, living this life now, whether you came here from the IBT or live on in an afterlife or not. I would like to think, if I see you in the afterlife, I would recognize you as dhw because that is our common memory, unless we already had common memory in the IBT together before our lives here. I would then know you as both dhw and however I know you there in the IBT. We may even have had a few lives together we could discuss in the IBT, and may have decided to touch base here since we both chose to come here at the same time (we said, gee, how fun would that be? lol). -> and so I become his/her memory without any presence of my own. -The only presence you have leaves when you decide to vacate your present body. This is true whether there is an afterlife or not. The difference is, I&apos;m saying I&apos;d like to think that your life did not begin in this body of dhw and it will not end when you no longer reside in the body of dhw. That your conscious soul, that which observes all that you experience, haves a life much longer than just the 100 years or so you will have lived on this earth. ->In other words, it&apos;s the gap between my current soul and this different, &quot;eternal soul identity&quot; that I can&apos;t bridge intellectually or imaginatively. -There is no gap, because you don&apos;t have a current soul (altho you do have a current body in which to reside). You have only one soul. Whether it be the eternal soul that entered your body at birth and animated it into a life called dhw for which you have lived thru till you decide to leave the body of dhw and continue on your journey, or whether it be the only soul lived here as dhw. There is only one.->Perhaps ... if I&apos;m not trying your patience too much ... you could explain again what this &quot;eternal soul identity&quot; is comprised of, if it&apos;s not my own conscious and subconscious selves.-It is one and the same. The soul is what animates the body and gives it life - consciousness and subconsciousness, and the soul is what leaves the body when it&apos;s time to move on. I hope you have the picture now, no problem if you don&apos;t. I appreciate the exploratory surgery of my conception of the soul and the afterlife. I&apos;m learning as I go.