I was very happy when a hard core devotee of logical approaches expressed her PERSONAL wonderings about what might actually happen to HER after her mundane body dies, which many of us should expect in less than 20 years. Here is how I replied:
I again thank .. for trying to start a very serious discussion about connected questions which in my view ANY truly sane person after age 70 will be thinking very hard about: what happens to "me" (to my personal consciousness, or whatever consciousness it is part of) when my ordinary, mundane physical body drops dead?
To start with -- I recall that I proposed "PSI70" as a subject code for the BPM discussion list, to flag any post which STARTS FROM the assumption that "psychic" or "spiritual" experience beyond what would be possible under QED physics (the physics of electromagnetic fields and charged particles). ... She noted that HER personal experience simply rules out the possibility that we just die, period. Some of us, with scientific backgrounds, might allow for SOME possibility that she might be wrong on this, but I for one am with her. Since childhood, I have agreed that Von Neumann's view of mathematics is "my Bible" (or my old testament);
I assume that life is "a game of probabilities", and that sanity demands we consider COMPETING THEORIES, and allow for changes in the probabilities we assign to these theories as we learn from experience. At werbos.com/religions.htm, I post links to a more complete discussion of the mathematics of intelligence and what it says about levels and levels of sanity. And, in the end, why agree with her?
BUT THAT AGREEMENT is just a starting position. Her real question, which the sane among us really wonder about is: WHAT THEN?
She wonders whether we should simply believe the story some of us were taught in childhood -- that we will meet a gatekeeper in the "world of spirit" who will assign us to hell, purgatory or heaven. I TOTALLY gave up on that (choosing Von Neumann as my new Bible) at age 8, but there are more refined views available.
In fact, here in Virginia (which I just returned from after about a month of travel, mainly to Patagonia and Antarctica), I was impressed by what I learned about George Washington from probing deep here in this very neighborhood. George Washington clearly led at least THREE MAIN LIVES in parallel. One life, in collaboration with Jefferson, aimed at creating a view of life and a social covenant (the Constitution) aimed at being fully accessible to ALL humans. (He did his best to phase out slavery, but that was a long and complicated story.) Another life was that of a highly respected, high ranked Episcopalian, speaking in several churches I have been to from Virginia to Philadelphia. A third life was that of a Master Mason, leader or a prominent lodge of Scottish Rite Freemasons, whose esoteric teachings have often fallen into my hands "by accident," including the story of people at Trinity College of Cambridge, UK, who really led the creation of that tradition. Brian Josephson has often seen the portraits of two of those people in that dining room!
For many years, I mainly labelled myself as "Quaker universalist," a simple label which calls for us to be honest and open in a way which refuses to compromise on the issue of truth, in the way that Washington's three-fold life stretches. Yet many factors led me to give equal time to a local Episcopalian church (whose enlightened leader I bcc), and learn what I could through THAT channel.
I was VERY deeply struck by a few phrases in their Book of Common Prayer (BCP), repeated every Sunday, which **I** interpreted to say:
"May the righteous dead rest in peace. But let us strive instead to join the Communion of Saints, where we live on and continue the work at a higher and higher level. "
That's a simplification, but I tend to feel that this is what Washington really believed, AND what best fits my updated understanding
of how the "soul" really works. (At werbos.com, I have posted links to part of what I learned AFTER the papers posted at religions.htm).
What's more, the highest levels of all world mystical traditions all emphasize mutually consistent VERSIONS (under many names) of what Washington would call the Communion of Saints. Different outcomes apply to different people, at different stages of life.
Speaking of Heaven and hell... I was very grateful when a family member led me to the Dante museum in Ravenna, which showed how Dante's concepts were far deeper than the kindergarten versions of them. It even showed what pope Francis thought, and I am deeply grateful for all he has done to help restore the Catholic church to a higher level than it had when I was young
(though Ravenna also included records of a level much higher than that of people like Justinian and Theodora). But every major nation on earth is going through risky times now, and the Catholic Church is no exception. I attach one of the two images I was thinking of sending out in reply to Cathy, along with a great weaving by Melissa Cody ("World Traveler") which depicts the challenge of harmonizing the levels of our lives, in the spirit of KuKai.
We saw MANY of these cultures in our recent travel, but now I must postpone further discussions.
I should mention that I have previously listed many very unique people whose first person relevant experience gives great real insight, like a person seeing through many eyes at once to develop a unified understanding, just as visual saccades are crucial to full understanding. On this trip, Connie Willis was great to read...
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MY reply to a follow-on post:
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First, I apologize to ... a staunch defender of mainstream science as he sees it... for NOT having given my views on a question which falls within the scope of his post.
He wrote:Paul,
Yes. I would also like to know more about beliefs in afterlife from different religions since science cannot say anything about it. People like Vinod say that all religions agree on their concepts of afterlife. This is flatly wrong as casual reading or conversations with people believing in different religions will reveal. So I welcome this discussion.
We are not required to agree, of course, even in a civilized and sincere discussion of this issue.
I do not agree that science cannot say anything about it. I take the opposite extreme view, that
belief in SOME form of "afterlife" (carefully but reasonably defined) can be 100% consistent with views fully within the scope of science.
In particular -- I claim that Hard Core Einsteinian Realism (HCER) makes more sense as a scientific "theory of everything" than anything else ever has in human history so far, AND THAT the noosphere species theory summarized in many of my posts at werbos.com is fully consistent with science and yet useful in illuminating and sorting out first person experience.
CONCRETELY... I see our "personal soul" (such as it is) as ONE SIDE of an "alchymical marriage", a real biological symbiosis of "what we see" (the mundane body and brain governed by QED physics) WITH the parts of our local solar system noosphere which connect to it. When the noosphere SIDE of that symbiosis, the personal soul, is weak,
the outcome may be basically just a quick disintegration, as depicted in the Book of Esdras, one of the Apochrypha in the modern Catholic Bible. Or that disintegration may come a bit later, as in the great Disney cartoon Coco, depicting beliefs common across Latin America. OR it may be like storing the data in an inactive file cabinet, like those brain cells which carry memories (as in Steve Grossberg's ART model of memory, applicable to SOME cells in mammal brains) -- like the akashic records or causal plane, described in many records of human experience.
("May the righteous dead rest in peace.") BUT when the deep connections in the noosphere are active and persistent enough, sustained by a flow of "backpropagation" or "qi", the personal "soul" may be more like a collection of giant pyramid cells, the foundation of powerful archetypes in the collective "unconscious" of Jung and of the "Communion of Saints."
To achieve that last outcome, it depends on how strong the connections are which we make with each other and with the noosphere as a whole via active, live qi.
Many nations use words other than "qi," but I prefer to use the term "qi" because it highlights real active direct experience, and links to a more complete scientific model fitting varieties of information flow WITHIN a larger intelligent system and to physics substrates.
THus for many of us, the call to strengthen our connections is a matter of personal life and death.
It is also a natural response to what really calls to us... as described at https://
