Concepts of God (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by BBella , Sunday, April 10, 2016, 08:23 (3148 days ago) @ dhw

You are right, many people have experienced this sense of one-ness and separateness, both in eastern and western religions and philosophies. -Yes, an overwhelming amount of people say they have experienced something similar to this sense - no matter their philosophy - or no philosopy.->But in some eastern philosophies, there is no all-powerful individual being who deliberately created the universe and life (let alone centring his attention on the production of humans). And it seems to me that the Hindu moksa and the Buddhist nirvana, for instance, with their emphasis on the abandonment of all self-centred desires and goals and the end of the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, might as well be equated with extinction. The Buddha explicitly rejected this, though, and Chinese Buddhists apparently regard nirvana as a state of eternal bliss. I really haven't a clue how I could ever be in a state of bliss if I was no longer me. You can achieve loss of self and earthly desires and goals and a oneness with All That Is simply by being dead. If, on the other hand, there is a single Creator who is me but is not me, and if I am to be one with him when my body dies, it seems to me that one of us is going to have to give up his identity. And if it's me, once more I might as well as be dead. But as a mere human like yourself, I must acknowledge that I am far too limited in my thinking to conceive of eternity and infinity, let alone the possible identity/identities of an infinite and eternal mind! (Though as David will confirm, I still keep trying!)-So the next question, what happens after we die? It can be answered with it's own facts. The diversity alone should be as much considered a fact about the afterlife, as it would be if all testimonies/religions agreed on only one belief/philosophy. -So diversity itself is a scientific fact about the afterlife. So what if in fact the this fact of diversity is simply a factor (or an aspect) of the multi-level possibilities of the afterlife - in the same sense that there is a multi-leveled possibilities of types of beings and experiences on the earth itself. From the most simplest organism to the most complex, etc - the diversity of what is experienced here on earth is on such multi-levels it cannot be categorized easily if at all. -So why not the same about the afterlife? Simply, if our world that we know is filled with such diversity of levels and experiences of all that it can be (all possibilities), why not the unknown in the afterlife be the same? Could not that which is above be the same as that which is below? -Maybe, between the separate i-dentities and the ONE I-dentiy of God, is a multitude of levels of states of being that we humans can experience (on some level) while here. This could account for our experiences that seem so different from each others experiences, though sometimes they seem similar (kind of like the fable of the blind men feeling the different parts of the elephant and giving different accounts of what they feel).-Also, it could be a fact that the very fact of these differing accounts that might cause a person who has not experienced any of these experiences (never even felt an elephant), very skeptical that there is anything of truth to any of it - that all of these experiences must be a figment of billions of peoples imagination. In other words - there is no elephant. Possibly?