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Thu 24 Apr, 2003 03:05 am
.... or have you?
Do you just waken into another life, is there just eternal darkness ???????
What are your thoughts
Not sure if I care, I don't want to be there when it happens...
To be honest, I believe that your body is a write-off, but your life essence (soul, if you will) returns to the spirit realm, and is reborn in an unknown new life (could be human, animal or plant), with no knowledge of it's past existence. Suppose I believe in reincarnation then (recycling at its finest moment)....heaven and hell always seemed so Eurocentric and self-absorbed to me...
I'm going up to the spirit in the sky....
That's where I'm gonna go when I die....
When I die and they lay me to rest...
I'm gonna go to the place that's the best...
It almost sings doesn't it?
I believe that when the body dies, everything dies with it. Since in nature, nothing is wasted, whatever is left of the bodily remains is recycled. As far as the "soul" or "spirit", although it is a lovely idea, I cannot conceptualize the entire idea as more than a flight of human fancy.
What does remain, is whatever the person has accomplished during his/her lifetime, that has touched other people. This is passed on to the ensuing generations. To me, THAT is immortality.
I think tthe answer lies in nature. Ifyou look around .
If a butterfly could, would it remember its life asa caterpillar?
Phoenix, pointed as always...I agree as well. Ultimately, soul or not, that indeed is true immortality.
However....what of nature? The unexplainable forces that keep the world in balance despite our efforts to tear it down? Doesn't the very concept of inspiration and memory imply something more than just firing neurons?
Gelisgesti, check out this topic.
the afterlife, near-death experiences, reincarnation, etc. It's got some interesting thoughts on the subject.
at the foot of a saguaro in the Sonora desert feeding the critters
I don't know -- and I suspect neither does anyone else alive.
But that last part is just a guess.
Phoenix's observations appeal to my sense of reason. I would like to believe that there is some sort of life after death, but I haven't encountered any convincing evidence in my lifetime.
If there is life after death, perhaps it comes with the ability to transcend time & space, which would probably enable us to (re)visit our lives... or the life of anyone else for that matter. Imagine, we could be watching ourselves right now - from a time & place that doesn't exist.
cav dusts off his microscope....good points Phoenix, but what is it that actually inspires us to bother trying to figure it all out?
Cavfancier- The big difference between us and the rest of the animal world is that our larger brains enable us to learn much more than we need to merely survive. By accumulating more knowledge, it leads us to a "thirst" for greater and greater knowledge.
The more knowledge we accumulate, the more we harness our environment. To a great extent, animals are at the mercy of quirks of nature. We have learned how to deal with natural occurrences. (Not completely, but to a great extent) A bird, in the middle of a hurricaine, will probably be killed. Humans build houses for protection from the elements.
One way that people acquire new knowledge is through curiosity, which is seen in other animals, but not to the same extent as in humans. Many important findings and innovations have happened when people were attempting to learn something else. When we learn, we pass on the information to following generations who then build upon what was learned in the past.
So a product of evolution then....I would agree there, but still contemplate what we currently do not know, and how those questions got into our heads...
cavfancier- Yup- you contemplate what you don't know- Let's say that you figure something out. You tell your neighbor, he calls the media, and you end up letting a lot of people know about your findings. You write a book- Someone sees the book, and it sparks a related idea in him. And on and on it goes.
I think that the reason knowledge is escalating so quickly is the speed with which information is disseminated to so many people.
Just think about the evolution of information dissemination- word of mouth, writing, printing press, radio and TV, and now the internet. Information that might have taken months to reach other people far away, is relayed instantly, all over the world. I think that we live in a very exciting time.
For each of us, there was a time before we recognized our existence. A time we don't remember, hidden in a place before our birth. It is to this place that all must return; a place we are now, but do not recognize.
hmm . . . . . I think that if there is no soul that goes on there isn't a dark nothing afterwards either. I mean do you think of yourself living in a dark nothing for all of time before you were born. I like the idea of returning to the state of unborness. What that state is I'm not sure. It wouldn't bother me all that much if it was just all my energy/resources returning to the life cycle or some kind of soul that is reincarnated, etc. I figure death will be what it is no matter what I believe about it.
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