Afterlife (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 19:11 (4720 days ago) @ xeno6696

I’m combining responses to Tony and to Matt, as there’s a good deal of overlapping.

Dhw: The cycle being imposed from outside presumably entails a god/angel/spirit who is interested in me and is guiding me. Same problem as before, since I remember nothing, but perhaps this means I’m not one of the chosen few. Alternatively, nearly 7 billion of us are only just starting out on Stage 1.

TONY: Why? Why would it not be possible to have 7 billion people all at various stages?

Because if we can’t remember anything from a past life, we’re starting out from scratch. I’m assuming that most of the world’s population won’t remember their past life either.

TONY: So the idea of re-cycling until you attain spiritual perfection could be seen as simply learning until you have an extreme degree of spiritual excellence according to a given standard.

How do you learn if you don’t remember anything from your past lives and mistakes?

DHW: I have a huge problem with the term “spiritual perfection”. I really don’t know what it can mean.

TONY: Eh, its the perfection bit that trips people up, because it is really such a hard word to define. However there are a couple of definitions from Merriam-Webster that I really like: the quality or state of being perfect: as
a : freedom from fault or defect
b : maturity

I understand “perfection”, but I don't underatand “spiritual perfection”. I think you missed the point of my questions: Does it entail my no longer being me? Does it entail finding perfect peace, and being at one with BBella’s Gaia? If so, death as the end fits on both counts. In other words, when I’m dead, buried and non-existent, I shall be free from fault or defect. So who needs reincarnation?

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MATT: Of note, those who experience NDEs in the east, India, China, Vietnam and Japan, all report many more instances of meeting their deities/incarnations than they do former loved ones. I find this cultural split fascinating, as I think it highlights the incredibly arbitrary nature of these experiences...
Hindu experiences are discussed here.

Matt, thank you for these links (please see xeno, 30 November at 03.25). I hope everyone interested in this subject will read them in full, because they’re fascinating. The wide variety of experiences and teachings seems to suggest that you’ll find what you believe in. A few comments:

1) I was horrified to learn that many of these eastern NDEs involved a clash with bureaucracy (“functionaries who then discover that a mistake has been made and send the person back”). Ugh, some things never change!

2) “Hinduism, Buddhism and other southern Asian religions portray the samsaric process [cycle of death and rebirth] as unhappy.” (See my response to Matt below.) Moksha = release from this cycle, when the individual Atman merges with Brahma. “Rather than losing one’s individuality, the Upanishadic understanding is that the Atman is never separate from Brahma; hence individuality is simply waking up from the dream of separateness.” When you wake up, you're conscious, but if you're not conscious of yourself as an individual, the level of consciousness must be very low – probably what we imagine to be that of insects. So you may as well be eternally dead.

3) Devotionalism entails a loving God, and the afterlife is spent in a “blissful round of devotional activities”. Can you imagine spending the rest of eternity praising God? I know I’m cursed with limited knowledge and imagination, but I’d have thought even God would get fed up with it after a few millennia. This is a major problem with regard to any form of conscious afterlife: what do people do for the rest of time?

MATT: I have yet to read a teaching of an actual "rebirth" or "afterlife" of any kind in Buddha's teachings. Everything is allegory for one's own transformation to Buddhahood. The Book of the Dead is unique, in that it discusses the mental states of death. In the Buddhist view, the fact that our bodies are made of stardust and will be reclaimed into the world around us is simply another allegory for what will happen to what we mistakenly call our "soul."

Clearly there are just as many branches of Buddhism and Hinduism as there are of Christianity, so I don’t think anyone can talk authoritatively of “the Buddhist view”. Under 2) there is explicit talk of “successive lifetimes”. But I must say that if I had to choose the one that made most sense to me, it would be yours – along the lines Tony has described: “Even if you do not believe in an afterlife […] your elements and energy will eventually wind up becoming part of the aggregated compilation of another living being.” Not necessarily even a living being. As Hamlet observes of Alexander the Great: “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth unto dust; of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?” I think all of us can agree on such recycling as a possible form of “afterlife”, but a richer subject is those forms that suggest the survival of conscious individuality, as apparently experienced in many NDEs both eastern and western. I really don’t see how an afterlife without conscious individuality can be any advance on eternal death.