Passage ...... Where do you go after you die

When you die, if you've been good, you to to a large banquet hall, filled with tables overflowing with your favorite comestibles, and scantily clad young members of your preferred group of sexual partners hand feed you, alternating with full body massages and long, langerous baths.

If you are bad, you go a small room with a locked exit door, a lesbian couple who no longer love one another, and a dull-witted middle class man who doesn't deal well with spare time on his hands--all of this while a French existentialist philosopher with poor articulation skills and slurred speech drones on about his totally irrelevant beliefs on a static-laden public address system.

You are all bad people, but i shall remember you as i dine.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Sooner or later you get down to proving your own existence .... an action that introduces self doubt. 'I am' .... to me is truth and requires no evidence ...... other than the passage of the words through my lips ...... 'I am'.

or "I was." c.i.

Gelistgesti,
..On the first page of my, "Tao Teh Ching", only the first two lines are the same as yours. Are there different versions?

truth
Gel, when one looks very carefully, "I am" is not self-evident. It is a cultural axiom, I grant you that. Self-evident truths are the substance of metaphysical philosophy: propositions that only need to be understood to be considered "proven", e.g., "Cogito ergo sum." But this is a cultural invention that only SEEMS true. It "seems" to me (perhaps because I was ineffectively enculturated on this point) that the only self-evident truth here is "AM" (instead of "I am"). The "I" part is a very problematical assumption/addition. "I think therefore I am" might also be phrased as "I think that I am thinking therefore I think that I am." Or perhaps more accurately, "There is the thought that there is an "I" who is thinking therefore there is the thought that one may conclude that the "I" that is thought to exist does SEEM to exist."
And so on.

Naw.....Hell naw! I'm not goin' for that. Um thankin' therefo', Um is. So there. ......Er...that's respectfully submitted of course, JL, ol' Buddy.

JL and Boo, there is another option.
I'd like to prove that nothing exists.

In between each of the things that allegedly exist,
there is nothing.
If it were to turn out these alleged things don't actually exist, then what is there?
There is nothing.

In either case, nothing exists. It is here, it is now.
And that's all I need to know.

What do I think about that? Nothing.
And just who do I think I am? ... :wink:




*poof!*

a
CI, if enough of you remains to say 'I was' ... you still are.

Boo, there are several translations, mine is from 'Jane English'

http://www.daily-tao.com/


JL, how about 'my reality is'?

Code, do you mean that instant between day and night
when the sun reveals it's secrets from eons ago
then blast them from your memory before they
register. That awe inspiring abyss between
yesterday and eternity that takes a lifetime
away from a man in a heart beat .... then
repays him with an understanding of how life
exist outside of time ..... that life is not
measured by time and only proceeds when you
step outside the flow of time.

The crack of dawn!! Then, you've heard it too?
That's it exactly.... only I twisted something when I fell in,
so eternity passed me by and time snapped me like a whip
until I was back in the present, dazed and confused,
just my usual self again.
So much nicer being at One. There's fewer nothing
and far more to flow between we sleep.

time
Codeborg, sorry, I slipped into my metaphoric mode without caveat lector.
There is an area of the brain that manages 'time perception'.
http://www.adders.org/research12.htm

I am going to cheat a bit here and paste a link from Abuzz because there is no way that I will paste the whole thread ... but it is a very interesting discourse.


From Abuzz:

Kara,


OK, too much symbolism .... damn it Jim I'm a poet, not an astral
physicist

Time as a dimension has a border if not borders ...
infinitesimally measurable lines of demarcation. 'Here' gives now
a point of reference and a point of reference only, a static
measurement, a place marker that begins here and ends over there
somewhere.
There is a thin grey line between black and white but a line none
the less. A point exist where you begin to go from one to the
other, a border you cross.

I began to count my present incarnation 1,723,397,760 seconds
ago, it has been 134 seconds since I calculated that "now', if I
repeat that calculation every 134 seconds am I creating a series
of nows exactly 134 second in duration?

To your question: would it help to think about it this way ....
we have vanilla time, sidereal time daylight savings time,
eastern time, Barbours time, Darkcloud time, etc etc. All
defining the same thing, not time but the passage of time because
we can not see into the future so we can only measure what has
past. Calling it now or whatever will not change it any way but
conceptually.

There has got to be a transitory period between what we know, the
past, and what we don't know, the future.


I don't know how else to say it, Between 12:00 and 12:01 is 60
seconds, Each tick of the clock converts one second of the future
into the past. There is a point between 12 and 12:01, like
12:00:30 where past and future touch, lie back to back .... in
that infinitesimal space the past and the future cease to exist,
call it a transition period, call it the brink of two eternities
if you will.

I can't remember saying there was no time, that does not mean I
didn't say it ... could you refresh my failing memory?



http://nytimes.abuzz.com/interaction/s.247101/discussion


The point I am trying to make is that there exist a place where nothing exist, be it crack of dawn, crack of noon or whatever

This was a duplistic period for me :
gelisgesti aka darkcloud.

Gelisgesti -- There are so many ways of speaking! :-D Let's celebrate!

1) My last post (about the crack of dawn) was a metaphoric description of a meditation or journey, my sense of being "at one" with the universe.
2) The post before that (proving that nothing exists) was more like a semantic riddle, wordplay used to delete the universe, by fiddling with definitions.
3) Now, your interesting links (thank you!) pull me into a scientific mode.
----------------


NOW AND THEN ...

We can measure time with our stopwatches. But clicking into the next second only approximates the constant fluid movement of time. Our calipers and measurement systems may make a clicking noise, but time itself does not.

So, "now" is an infinitely thin region of time, continually flowing. Like a line or plane, "now" is a theoretical idea for argument and calculation only. It represents our current location within the measurement system.

You won't see or experience "now" any more than you'll hold a true plane in nature. You can constantly shave something, closer and smaller, to get a better approximation of the theoretical ideal. But you'll never actually attain it because it has zero width.

You could say a line or a plane do not exist at all, physically, so it's impossible for them to have color or temperature or character of any kind. There is no substance there. They are infinitely thin, literally, nothing.

But the *perception* of time is very different -- a brain thing, a physical/electrical pattern in the neurons. It's an act of comparing memories, finding rhythm, matching up cycles within the flow. "Did this minute seem longer or shorter than the other minute?" We are only comparing two recordings we made, and there's a certain part of the brain that's good for that.

But the perception is just a mechanism, not the actual thing being perceived.

So yes, there is nothing actually there, in such a precipitious moment as "now". The dramatic transition from future to past is a moment of pure zero, where not even a gray line could fit. Yet everything passes through it at some time or other. Everything. "The brink of two eternities" makes a wonderful soaring image, but which language/mode we use depends on what we want to build, or where we want to go.

I like the poetry, and science is good too.
Where do we go after we die? Perhaps we become the zero
that we so struggled to measure, understand, and acheive.
The holy grail of measurement, being absolutely in the current moment and nowhere else, having zero width. We finally become nothing.

Just like the entire universe is, right ... "now".
We are there.



I don't know... does it make sense?

JLNobody wrote:




Yes it's hard to get to it, maybe impossible, because it's like trying to state the unstateable, or speak the unspeakable. That is, I think JL (et mois) is trying to point out the illusory self,............from the position of this illusory self, that's the paradox.

This (small, ego) self is attempting to point out its own false nature, trying to self de-construct, or working towards self--deconstruction. (even though there's nothing to deconstruct except maybe an "attitude" or perspective).

If awareness cannot be observed, then there is no "observable self" that is seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking etc. There is only, seeing, hearing, thinking, tasting, feeling, smelling, etc.

The 'self' that appears to be doing the perceiving and thinking is actually a construct of the perceiving and thinking, and is nothing other then a percept itself. And the 'awareness' because it is nothing (observable) appears as an attribute of this small pseudo self.

Yet all along that 'self' is being observed, so it can't be the real self since it doesn't observe anything, it's the "observed"

Essentially there is no doer, and so when JL talks about meditating one can ask,

"Who's meditating"?

And I guess that's the point of meditating; there's no meditator, there's only meditating. Meditating just happens. And no one is observing, 'observing' just happens.


Gelistgesti wrote:

JL, how about 'my reality is'?


There's no one to 'own' the reality, there's no duality.

reality
Gelisgesti and Twyvel, I hope neither of you will be offended by the following characterization. I have the impression that one of you is just having fun, indeed, mischieveously rendering simple things complex and obscure--or at least making them more obscure than they are. The other of you is trying very hard to make very obscure things clear and simple. These are only my impressions, but can you guess which is which in my mind?

None of the above ....... how about two people wth Rorschach psyches that are at first confusing to the clay bound spirits.Once the clay bound release their grip on the clay that binds them, a cloud is lifted and new viion replaces the temporary.

truth
Gelisgesti. Thanks for a very clever response.

Mischievous ? Not I.

Yes good reply Gelisgesti.

........and when the spirit is released from the clay it realizes it was never held...........

Let's see, you are embalmed if your family can afford it, then you are buried approximately six feet underground where you eventually, though ever so slowly with the embalming fluid taking hold, rot.

I like to optimistic about it all, A living body is not life. So just maybe you are still there. underground. the life of you, restricted as it now is. no basic funtioning but still alive somewhere in those original atoms, those particular atoms that for some unknown reason hold your life, too small to be destroyed. "spirits in everything" could now be true in a sense. How Joyous! Who needs religion with that attitude! * sarcasm lasts only so long before it's just passe'*


^^
(0)=
-

What is it that draws kindred spirits together? A truth sense to be fleshed out and gradually understood? I think in this instance too few chefs inhibit the flavor of the work in progression .... Frank, Snood, Terry .... I could fill up a page as the names drift through ...... Chaiya .... you all know and sense our need ..... each with one hand clawing for a grip in the clay and the other stretching to the heavens for understanding ... Kara .... .
In all your thoughts lie answers to unspoken questions ..... understanding is ascension.

NNY wrote:




Yes, but I don't think a spirit needs atoms or matter to be what it is.




Gelisgesti, ..." ..... understanding is ascension."




But enlightenment, wakening is always sudden.


A sudden realization of the obvious.