A scholar I know has spent years probing deeply both into the empirical work in neurscience and psychology, and to the long experience and scholarship of yoga and Vedas -- to ask what might happen to HIM. He wrote:
Dear all,
Conclusion of reading many articles related to death and life-after-death (afterlife)
1. Since everybody dies sooner or later and we are not alone, there is nothing to worry about because of the group effect.
2. There is neither scientific proof for the survival of the self after death (afterlife or life-after-death) nor for the death of self. Therefore, we should remain agnostic on this issue until we have scientific evidence either way.
3. Therefore, the best way to live and die is first trying for symbolic immortality. If there is indeed literal immortality (self survives death) then we are in an excellent position because we tried out best in our lives in doing the good karmas towards symbolic immortality. In this way, we have both symbolic and literal immortality.
4. If we follow the above view then the anxiety of death will disappear (as happened to me) or at least be minimized because we will be benefiting either way.
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MY RESPONSE:
Congratulations, Ram, on achieving a certain degree of inner peace on the dilemma you have been working SO hard to come to terms with. As I read your post, I immediately visualize Yeshua talking about inner peace. For the sake of my own inner peace, I have mainly been relaxing this past week, and even reading calming reading like: https://www.amazon.com/Monkey-
But this week, I have been reminded of how certain very simple ideas we learn in childhood can be of enduring importance, important to REMEMBER and APPLY over and over again, at higher and hiher levels, in a kind of spiral development.
One of those ideas is: the challenge of NOT MISSING THE FOREST FOR THE TREES. This is such a basic principle!Eve n the early founders of artificial intelligence, like Herb Simon of Carnegie-Mellon, appreciated the importance of "chunking" (learning higher patterns of organization).
WHEN YOU GET VERY DEEP into so many neuro and psych papers related somehow to afterlife, it is very much like bewildering collection of leaves. Karl Pribram and Walter Freeman -- the real, greatest leaders of systems neuroscience a few decades ago (when I worked with them a lot, as did Yeshua and a few others on these lists) -- often felt sorry for those folks who were so deep into THEIR specific piece of an immense hierarchy of science that they never appreciated the OTHER parts, or the system as a whole.
I beleive that Bernie Baars once talked about certain conferences on consciousness where people would sound like
"TRUE consciousness is MY piece... are 17.31, not YOUR 21.56.... Of course, Bernie himself tried to raise people's sight to
the system as a whole, or at least the global workspace of conscious awareness in mammalian neocortex.
The leaves can be bewildering, Ram, but there IS a forest out there as well. Some of us can feel MORE at peace if we start to see
MORE of that forest, and start especially to make more use of our "eyes."
You, Ram, have worked ever so hard to advance a cause which I too revere: bridging the deepest gap between science and the great inheritance of first person spiritual experience which often comes wrapped in religious boxes. How to heal the greatest schism splitting our collective intelligence. (That was where I started at http://www.werbos.com/
My view: what humanity needs now, to have hope of healing its inner schisms before it kills itself (as it might well due to lack of true integration!), is to strengthen BOTH its eyes, the most powerful inner eye of science, and the most powercul eye of spirit -- AND to fuse the two together, to be able to REALLY see what is going on.
What is REALLY going on is not a vast warm blanket of fuzzy, information-free "bliss," which in my view is just PK operating on reward centers of the brain. That stuff is popular like drugs which stimulate pleasure centers, and warp the brain.
When we dispel the fogs of illusion, and learn to see... well, it is a complex world, even just on this planet. You need to see for yourself..as d id I.
Afterlife: I had a great discussion a few days ago with a former lead teacher of one of the Western esoteric schools, and we got very deep, and did discuss some sources important to making sense of the kind of first person experience which bears most on afterlife, and on what
THOSE OF US ABOVE 70 ("PSI70", folks!!) are called to prepare for. For example, we discussed the Tibetan Book of the Dead
(and our photos https://photos.app.goo.
Many say you go directly to the "Bardo," which many many fans of Tibet talk about in many ways -- a great entry hall for the newly dead.
I only got there once when I was a regular practicer of "astral travel," but it was an incredible once in a lifetime experience. (I have LOTS of those, but only one in Bardo." ). When we visit Bardo, the image we see is heavily shaped by CONFABULATION, the way our neocortex FILLS IN the kind of details our mundane brain needs to see to feel oriented. What I saw looked a lot like the bridge of the Enterprise! And there was even a group like a crew wearing space ship clothing!
There were many striking details. One was that I recognized the crew of the shuttle Challenger. This was just two weeks before they crashed. Another was that ... I learned interesting things as I was included in a group, expelled, and returned by myself by force, and shown and taught.
My friend agreed with Steiger: we are NOT ALL BOUND FOR BARDO. "Where we go VARIES a lot, and depends on US.."
I agreed with Steiger (whose experience fits mine, and Annie Besant's.) (If any of you have any respect for Ghandhi's first person experience, you might check out what books of hers he treasured when he was her student. If anyone is interested, I can even send you a link to photos.) BUT: none of us see IT ALL...
I cited the Oversoul book, and explained how the science-grounded model at http://www.werbos.com/mind_
"afterlife" imprint we may have on our noosphere, which we are all part of. Not just different PLACES to go to, but different TYPES of place and different parts of ourselves, which may remain connected or not, hard to be sure.
- SOME PEOPLE probably do indeed get dissolved by that great garbage collector in the sky, as in the Book of Esdras.
- The deeply inspired children's cartoon, "Coco," depicts another possible path, deeply followed in Latin America. It includes a musician who does just dissolve away (1), but a lot of people who live on as memories of a sort. (Think interneurons in cortex.) I also think of places like catacombs of Rome, pyramids, New Grange, and the giant server farms which many saw as the future of the internet https://www.amazon.
com/dp/B07Q1D6ZT7/. WOULD YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER AS A FILE IN A GIANT FILING CABINET? You may have that option. - Kissinger and Schmidt offer a better future for the internet, but they too are overwhelmed by the leaves (apps). Would you prefer to live forever as one small leaf on a giant tree? Well, it it is the tree of life, that is a whole lot better than atrophying as a file cabinet. As a leaf, and a useful app connected to other apps and users, you have something still there. Nature impels us to live that way, rather than ossify. The "sap" or "qi" we may associate with life, light and love naturally motivates us; it is who we are.
- SOME OF us may learn to integrate and connect a bit further, as do the giant pyramid cells of neocortex -- especially those which learn to instantiate universals, like mathematics and Platonic forms, conne cted to primary sources of energy and archetypes in the noosphere. That may seem overwhelming, but it IS natural... nature impels ojur entire noosphere to understand, learn, adapt and survive as best it can, and even become prepared for its future in the larger cosmos we are all also part of, similar to Carl Jung's Spirit of the Deep.
Have a happy future, if you have one. I hope we all can find ever better ways to help...
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Minor afterthought: the unified viewpoint has some similarity to what you see in the movie Avatar. (We even have photos of the Tuva area of China, where it was filmed, which has palpable qi itself.) Of COURSE, it is not just humans! But humans and computers are both important parts of the ecology of our solar system.
