This morning, I posted a collage related to the issue of afterlife AND of
major historical crossroads going on in the US today (but NOT at all unique to the US!):
i do NOT take a definite position on which is true: "cosmos as a great mind," or on Einsteinian realism versus some kind of multiverse. But in ALL cases, life at the level of experience and biology, I do assume and build upon the theory of noospheres spelled out in three papers I published last year, which you can see just by clicking:
Quantum Measurement, Consciousness, and the Soul: a New, Alternative Position (Activitas Nervosa Superior)
Cosmos and History)
This builds on Dante's basic idea that we humans are "half beast, half angel," and thus that old age is when we really prepare for losing the beast (a major part of the self we know) and becoming something else, but WHAT and HOW?
Just a few days ago, at a small meeting in our living room, I got to speak to an old friend who, among other things. led the last major unclassified computer modeling of the global future of the earth (future political, economic, social, technological, etc., future), housed in the Joint Chiefs of Staff after Carter's Global 2000 project died. Like me, he sees amazing parallels (WORLDWIDE) to the standard patterns of decline described by people like Spengler and Toynbee,and a disturbing gap in deep analysis of this life or death issue in recent decades. But I do see SOME hope that big changes both in computers and in the content of our noosphere might prevent the obvious worst case paths looming in front of us, which would imply the extinction of the human species.Many are wallowing in the ancient neurotic defense mechanism, denial, described in detail in Valliantrs great longitudinal study -- a certain path to death as our game changes, as has happened to MANY species on earth before. But I for one will never just give up on light, love and life -- even as "life" may mutate a bit in my own personal case (whether in one year, or 30, not to be ignored in the analysis).
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P.S. I am not a follower of Gurdjieff, but there is an obvious fit between his most important claim and what I see and deduce here: the claim that the "angel" which survives varies a LOT from person to person when they die, and that the noosphere also contains other "cell assemblies" like archetypes which vary in nature from personality images to Platonic forms like the concept of truth (a concept which reflects some very basic principles of any intelligent system, from fish brain to noosphere principles which they also apply to everything else). (Notice that there is a kind of hall of mirrors effect here, a chain of approximations: from what the brain SEES, to the image it creates in its mind, to the image of the basic principles of HOW it creates the image by learning the truth about what predicts its experience.)
Some folks basically fade away into dust, like the old musician in the Disney cartoon Coco, but others build more basic and enduring connections -- the great Shrine of Connection in Sanzan Shinto, and the great tree they use as an image (as do the Mayans!!), and like The Green Man (the Druid answer to that tree, a bit more human). Just a few examples.
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