My middle way response to a debate about what happens when we die

Previous;y Ram raised the question: after ordinary mortal death, do we just disappear (as in the usual mundane "materialist" view)

or do we just stand there in some other world, as in many beliefs about reincarnation and afterlife? 

I replied that I strongly believe in the "noosphere species theory," which I explain at werbos.com/religions.htm. This idea implies that PART of us may live after

mortal death (the "soul" part in our local noosphere), but there is a huge variation from person to person, just as Gurdjieff tried to explain. 

For those of us over age 70, mortal death is a VERY inconvenient truth. For the few of us who try to be rational about it, It makes sense to try to understand what it is really about, and to ditch the obvious misunderstandings propagated by people trying to keep other people under control. (As I type this, I think of the story of a Celtic cross we saw in Ireland last january. The story of how a certain Saint Patrick had a meeting with the high king, telling him that fear of hell could be used to reduce the civil strife which was pulling the country apart. The message engraved on the cross was so simple: behave, and you get heaven. Rebel, and you get.hell. To this day, Irish priests are a strange mix of oppressive people who focus just on heaven versus hell but obedience, and others with deep sensitivity often in tune with Teilhard de Chardin. Some of them told me "they don't call us catholic for nothing." But all nations on earth have such political biases.)

So what does it look like from a more scientific view, grounded in noosphere species?

First, of course, we are all just guessing. I was so happy years ago, when certain folks echoed a cdrtain dualist Hindu party line, and Alex mengtioned Aurobindo: "Could it be that what survives are just SEEDS, lots of pieces of our former soul which scatter to the far winds?" Like Buddha's comments about how the water in a drop survives, but not the drop itself. There is also the Egyptian Book of the Dead,which says we actually split into two parts, ba and ka, which live on in different ways at different levels. Orson Scott Card wrote a simple enjoyable science fiction series 

https://www.amazon.com/Gatefather-Orson-Scott-Card-audiobook/dp/B0147CRJVY/  which gets deeper into the ancient Egyptian view, which makes sense in its way. Why should our traces in the noosphere be just one integrated lobe?

Long ago, the original Bible contained a book, the Book of Esdras (an Apochrypha), which suggested that some people basically just get burned away after death, llke the worthless chaff from some farms in Egypt. This idea horrified the political authorities, but logically, if a certain lobe of the noosphere contains useless information, wouldn;t the noosphere, being an efficient information processing system, contain a "garbage collection" subroutine which simply deletes useless stuff? Human egos naturally get horrified at the insult, but the logic of the evolution of noospheres strongly supports the idea, as do centuries of reports from before the political spin doctors calculated what worked better for control. After all, who removed that book from the Bible?

When does a lobe of the noosphere (like your soul) get dissolved by the garbage collector, and when does it get preserved, and when does it actually get energized and used? 

In a normal brain, what drives the garbage collector is what Freud called "psychic energy" (which I model as modulated backpropagation, something which really works and which fits the brain data reviewed in erbos and Davis). Basically, that which is useless for sure is simply recycled to other uses. So what brings psychic energy (at the noosphere level) to YOUR soul? What connections and relevance keep you from just dissolving away into nothing, as many older people do even before they die? 

FAMILY and PERSONAL connections are maybe the most common way for people and souls to be energized and stay alive. In my view, the Disney cartoon movie "Coco" demonstrates real spiritual sensitivity, grounded in Lagtin American cultures we would be idiots to underestimate. (Many Chinese traditions are similar.) BUT: those connections don;t last forever. The movie also depicts an old musician just dissolving away, like a Zen Buddhist monk I once saw in Korea, with a horrible rictus on her face which combined a smile of triumph and a horror of unnatural true death. If your soul survives because of feedback from X, what happens when X dies? 

In truth, there is an intermediate case, where instead of a b=garbage collector, one may be archived, like an old file. Many folks who do astral travel across levels and levels report the existence of a "causal plane," where there are "living statues," forms which are normally inert but may be temporarily activate dby others who can send energy. There is a movie about "Woland's basement" (in Master and Margarita) which seems to refect awraeness of that same kind of intermediate state.

So what is most permanent and useful and natural here?

In my view, our discussoins of "Triple Aspect MatherrmaticalMonism" (TAMM) point to a different way.

If we learn to "channel" the noosphere itself, to see through the eyes of that greater whole, we naturally connect more to the real, enduring source of energy. 

What survives is not the mundane first person eyes, or even the disconnected first person soul, but the soul which is fully connected,to be like an avatar of that soul. In my view, that is the truest "cosmic consciousness". -- but it extends even to awareness of what comes from beyond this large but limited local sphere.

Pope Francis was once cited as saying "Those who would preserve the life of this planet must first learn to truly, deeply feel the love of that life." 

Those who only have words and verbal beliefs dissolve quite quickly, like a dry parchment crumbling to powder, a sight I will never forget.  The inner connection to the noosphere is where that love can flow, if we fully commit to it and never forget.

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Clarification:

To maximize the quality of afterlife is basically the same as maximizing quality of spiritual connection here and now, but without dependence on what will be lost.

What yields the most positive feedback "psychic energy" from noosphere..is different for different people, and can be developed over time.

TAMM: the viewpoint of the noosphere as a whole is the most reliable basis. In a way, it reminds me of when I first worked for a large organization with a positive mission. It reminds me of hos it helped to understand the real missoin of the organizatoin as a whole, and how the department I was part of could contribute harmoniously to that. To survive, I also needed to understand the goals at intermediate levels, but in the noosphere or within a human brain,one is in a system where the learning rules have evolved to encourage harmony of the pieces. that has to be learned, and is not automatic, but one can draw on the learning process to connect things better. But in the end, the development of well-grounded noeic connections of some permanence, reflecting the noosphere as a whole, are the key issue. The novel Vita Nostra describes a Platonic school of development which is not exactlhy the same as this kind of connecton to basic things, but it feels similar to us.

Of course, the spirit of love and the spirit of truth (reflective of baisc lambda-U and lamda_e in a brain) are among the most permanent... variables... reflected in archetypes.. one can connect to.

hen I said "avatar" yesterday, I could have said "channel" or "gateway," which I have discussed before in discussing ordinary PSI in life today.