Well I have to be fair, I would analyze it. To be honest there are times when I have outright rejected something without giving it fair examination. But I try to quell such behavior and be as impartial as I can. I also don't give absolute knowledge over to any one person, weather it be friends or family or from strangers. Their wisdom or knowledge is all on equal par and I don't alter my opinion on a friendship bias. I have friends here on the board, but I challenge them all the same as with those who I wouldn't consider friends.
I respect those who can fire back at me (sorta speak)
I dont think you understood my question ,maybe it was my ship english.
My mother ,who was an atheist by the way, had dream about a train crash victim. I will add we all new about this crash. The names had not been released but she was visited in her dreams by a certain army officer, asking her to visit his wife and say goodbye for him, as he had on this one occasion not done so and had died in the crash. Now subsequently his name was published as one of the dead, two days later. How would you have handled this ? My mother never did contact her ,fearing she may think my mother a crank.
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Xris. I have seen cases, read stories, and even had friends family members who have "psychic" powers. I can't honestly say if a person is authentic or not but even if they are authentic, what does it do for us? What does it do that someone gets visited by some spirit? If you can't actually provide any evidence other than a personal claim, it does nothing for anyone else.
I was once told by a guy that my mom was the person that broke his nose off in Egypt. The great things you hear while walking on the streets of Seattle.
Why do you need evidence, just feel, you don't have to prove to anybody whether you are psychic or not, just feel, just do it. Proving it has got nothing to do with the experience.:poke-eye:
See Ya.
I think all cases like this or anything that might be considered metaphysical should be given a chance to take stage. However; we shouldn't just accept these things without some kind of investigation. We must be fair on both sides.
On a side note, is this any different than waking up in the morning with some kind of food in mind and then it so happens later that night you are eating what you woke up to? But you had absolute no say in the decision making for deciding that food choice?
Xris. I have seen cases, read stories, and even had friends family members who have "psychic" powers. I can't honestly say if a person is authentic or not but even if they are authentic, what does it do for us? What does it do that someone gets visited by some spirit? If you can't actually provide any evidence other than a personal claim, it does nothing for anyone else.
I was once told by a guy that my mom was the person that broke his nose off in Egypt. The great things you hear while walking on the streets of Seattle.
Having this experience begs certain questions, what questions does it pose for you. Its not the only one and after a time you cant help to start questioning your ability to rationalise them.
Well like I said, I play no favorites who is making the claim. If it was my mother or not, I would still approach it the same way, with skepticism.
If you told me that you had pancakes for breakfast. I couldn't prove or disprove that you had pancakes for breakfast. I would take you for your word. But if you told me that you had pancakes for breakfast while on board an alien space craft. I would be skeptical. Why? Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
If I just took you for your word then we wouldn't have any basis for any scientific discovery. We wouldn't be able to trust any work of science. Nothing that was ever written could be trusted. What we do when we learn something is trust that those involved have put forth great effort to provide evidence for their claims. We should do the same for any strange story or ability. If we started taking people for their word, then Elvis is still alive.
I am not calling your mother a liar, but there are too many possibilities. Maybe the name was similar? Maybe she did hear the name prior to hearing the story. Maybe she imagined hearing the name and assumed she heard it. There is just far too many points that could have easily misled her experience.
But there is a big blackhole in the middle of this thing. It is firstly the matter of 'life,' and then the matter of 'death.' What in the world is the problem with thinking that what has come to this state that we can call, and do call, being alive (be it a human, a chimpanzee, a mouse, a tree, or the moss on the parts of the tiles on my roof) does not die, if we use the word 'die'--for crying outloud !!
Ok, so what we can know, what science as a method allows us to be able to more fully understand as being the most likely event, is that a state of being alive--of having life--is a certain state, with a number of certain properties. This can be put together fairly well.
Now, those who want to say that we (and again, why 'WE' [or do we mean all life forms . . .]) never die, want to say the the personality, the consciousness, the knowledge of, and tendency to be aware of the possession of, a body and an individual mind, continue as is for all eternity.
Reincarnation, as well as the idea of having an eternally surviving soul (or in such form, living in heaven or hell forever,) is based on exactly the same concept. What we can learn through careful observation and scientific method, is about that which makes a living thing, and by extension, the essence of being alive, having 'a life,' and having a personality and consciousness. By our better understanding of these things, we can conclude that life after death (in the sense of a human's memory banks, personality, cognitive function and intelligence, consciousness state, and physical connection to mind and brain elements) is a false conception based on the emotional desire involved with the instinct to survive (from ages ago).
Here, xris, I ask for careful reading and consideration. The concept of life after death--alias, never dying--has been around for a long time before either of us had been born. I am talking about this general presented notion. It is most obvious that such conception had been imprinted on your mind from early childhood as well.
In all practical experience of recorded human activity and knowlege to date, the greater total of it all gives us a very determinable understanding of what life form is. . . and that is, terrestrial.
While you have tried to explain an interpretation of an experience you have had, and remembered, you have exactly claimed, by doing so, that there is life after death, and by doing so, as most do, you have claimed that you, yourself, as your cognitive and memory banks, personality and emotional constituents, will survive, as is, at death, in that state and condition.
If you do not mean such, then what would would have beeen the point of your having, on a number of occasions, gone out of your way to mention that you feel you had died, and yet had lived on . . . and now live? Your live is not meaningless, xris, even if you tend to not attach any meaning to living...the fact that you live, is meaningful !! So tell, me, do you think that a human, a bat, a frog, and the moss of my parts of the roof of my house all never die?
Here is another way to look at the life after death theory.
What if I do not want to live after this life ends? Do I have that option? Do I have the option to terminate that existence? Or do I have no choice but to exist for ever? If I can die in the next existence because I do not want to continue existing, wouldn't that be considered a death after death?
If there is a death after death then what determines that death? Is it just a wishful thought or can you be murdered too? Can someone simply think themselves dead, or can they think someone else dead and they die? See these types of questions pose paradoxes in reasoning. Where there are paradoxes there shortly follows a fallacy in logic. This calls into question the validity of the whole concept then.
The only logical conclusion is that there is no life after death.
Did you ask to be born, can we alter the nature of things, I have no idea but does that make the possibility of life after death illogical? I dont think so. If you are looking for a defined truth you will be sadly dissatisfied.
I didn't ask, but I also didn't just spontaneously arise either. Something had to occur to produce my brain that believes itself a being. I think I was taught that I am a being. I think I was taught that I have existence. I had no part in my existence, I also still don't have any part in my existence. My body does as it wants when it wants. I have very little control over this body. My thought processes rely on this body. I highly doubt that these thought processes will continue after this body falls to the ground for the final time.
If I exist for ever after this existence, it would be hell even if it were heaven.
Science tries but its a bit difficult trying to prove that death is anything other than a morbid, full stop. Those who believe by experience, like I, should not be suprised that it is an impossible task, to convince others that life could be just a transition from one state to another.(bold mine)
i am assured there is more than this life by my experiences ..
I have never heard anything of scientific value that can discount the "I" or the ego or what i call the soul...
. . . it does not help my belief in a soul or the individual "I".(bold mine)
I have never said i have died and lived on
You are contemplating the result of believing in possibilities, I cant tell you if you will be bored shirtless for eternity or we have an eternity of living and dying, i dont know. Why deny discovering a new world just because it may have no beaches.
As I have pointed out in other threads, I don't think the criteria of 'evolution by adaption' is sufficient to explain human genius, as there seem to be human characteristics that go far beyond anything required by the exigencies of survival.
Linguistically, it can be taken here that you are saying you have experienced that death is not a 'morbid, full stop.' As that fits within this thread, at least, we can take that as your saying you have experienced life after death. Add to that, the likes of . . .
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[/INDENT]From the above, and a number of other posts of yours, xris, it is evident that you hold that which is the cognized awareness of self being and self possession, that which is the result of brain build and all that builds towards that cognitively acknowledged state, to equate a soul. Then, from the above, and a number of other posts of yours, you have expressed in so many words that you consider it a fact (or in some posts, a possibility) that a soul (that "I") continues living in absence of the physical body and its organs.
Therefore, while in the strictest sense, you have not claimed to have died and lived on, it can neither be denied that you have very strongly implied that you have had an experience which had led you to believe that brain function demise does not occur at death.
I am not sure the latter portions of your post in question (that linked to in that last quote, above) have that much bearing here along the lines of reasoning which you appear to be trying to take it, in that post.
In the event of brain damage that changes an element of a person's brain build in such a way as to cause personality change, we would often hear expressions of the like of 'he's just not the same person anymore.' The reality of the circumstances is that that brain build/state has changed compared to what had been its normality, but other organs remain basically the same--the face, the skeletal structure and muscle structure do not change (although if the defect causes loss of muscle activity, the affected muscles will atropy over time)--and in this sense, and in the biological entity sense, the person is the same person.
What has been come to be more securely reasoned through the aggregate of careful study (which is experience where the 'objective' meets 'subjective') is that a single, individual brain, is just that. If removal of a brain structure causes explicit and most implicit memory to fail from that point onward (past memories up to that point in tact), then that brain will never ever be able to build memory. If that structure were to be removed at birth (simply to offer an avenue of a more concrete conceptualizing of the situation) that brain would never ever record memory either--thus to that extent that person, as they grew up otherwise, would always be an infant. (consider what conclusions can be reached)
To make a long explanation shorter, it is a fact that because of brain build/state we smell, taste, hear, see, feel, cognate, have emotion, volition, self-identity and possession, and have recall. As brain degenerates, these too degenerate in varying order and degrees. As brain decays, these too decay. It follows more logically, then, that with the total decomposition of brain, the total decomposition of these as a composite of that individual brain will have occurred. This is what is gleaned from the empirical knowledge demonstrated though scientific method, and in this sense, then, science cannot only not agree that there is life after death, but can show that such is most likely not the case.
If we were to throw away the 'old world' concept of 'a soul,' on the other hand, and say that by having arrived from earth (uncountable collective noun), and pointing out that what it is that makes us, goes back to earth to possibly work towards other earth-based entities, then we can say that there is life after death in that that which is us participates in. In this sense, we could say that science agrees with the concept of there being life after death--many, many, MANY living entities have died on this planet over the past several hundred million years . . . with extremely little new material coming in from outerspace, and extremely little material leaving from the gaia system . . . it's all here still.
Yeah but my whole point is, what if i don't want to go to the island? So can there be a death in the after life? It pokes holes in the whole concept. If there is a death in the after life then what is the after life? A pseudo life? A place where you can kill yourself if you want? Or are you a permanent resident? You are stuck in the after life for ever?
