Afterlife (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Thursday, December 01, 2011, 04:03 (4742 days ago) @ dhw

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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!

If you've ever read Chinese history, this shouldn't seem so alien. At one point in their ancient history, they forced everyone to get an education. What it created, was an environment where the only way to get ahead was to pass government exams... to the point where the ONLY way you could advance was by passing government exams... China has always had a problem with excessive government, it seems...

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.

Agreed.

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.

I have read the works of Buddha Shakyamuni. I have read what all the modern leaders of the Buddhist religion currently have to say. (Dhali Llama, Thich Nhat Hahn...) There is, in what I've read, a consensus that all there is, in terms of Buddhist doctrine, is psychological states.

Both the writers I mention, represent differing traditions of Buddhism. The Dhali Llama represents Mahaynana Buddhism, in the form of Tibet. Thich Nhat Hanh represents a syncretism of Mahayana with Theravedan Buddhism.

Both writers stress that Buddhism, as it infiltrated areas that didn't previoulsy exist--assimiliated beliefs based upon the areas it joined. In the Dhali Llama's case, Buddhism assimilated the ancient Gods of northern Tibet. Similarly, in China, Buddhism absorbed the Gods of Taoism.

All teachers of Buddhism assert the idiom of the raft: Whatever it takes to get you on the raft, that is acceptable, because "the Buddha" will eventually take the raft away.

Both the Dalai Llama, and other Buddhist leaders decry all incarnations of deities as illusory. Again, in modern writing, I have not seen any reference, either from Shakyamuni, nor of his disciples that discuss of an afterlife in any traditional manner that I am accustomed to. (Buddhism in the 17th century is NOT the Buddhism of today.)

In Buddhism, the doctrines deny you the right to a "self," in a Western sense. You are only a manifestation of the whole... so your death is nothing more than a return to nature.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"