Do we ever stop living?

[swilow]

We talked about this in the other thread, I don't feel like writing it out again. Being in the material envelope is why most of us don't remember. Those who do remember have been permitted to.

Permitted by whom and why?

What you are suggesting about memories being accessed after the physical structure that encodes them has dispersed goes against every thing we know about the universe. Not once has such a thing been demonstrated reliably. Lack of evidence doesn't make something untrue but there is ample evidence that, in our reality,; but evidence for something does confirm that something is true.

I actually have a small bit of anecdotal evidence for my beliefs. There were ghosts on a street in a town where I used to grow up, and once I actually saw them and picked up on their presences by simply feeling their energy. Most of them appeared to have no idea they actually were deceased!

Why did you need to pick up on their energy if you could actually see them? Do you really mean that you saw them with your own two eyes? What makes you think they were actually deceased people?

 

[LandsUnknown]

Why did you need to pick up on their energy if you could actually see them? Do you really mean that you saw them with your own two eyes? What makes you think they were actually deceased people?

I couldn't really see all of them. Some of them were visible (e.g. shadows of them). Others I could simply sense that they were there. This was a street where there were numerous very old houses dating back to colonial times. When this happened, I knew nothing of the "ghost stories" of the area, other than that the street was of course widely known as "haunted". However, after this experience, I did research on the ghosts that were seen in the area. To my surprise, it matched up precisely to what I had experienced!

 

[cyberius]

If you haven't, I HIGHLY recommend you listen to some of Alan Watt's lectures... they're all over Youtube. Out of Mind is an amazing set of lectures, changed my thinking in very positive ways. He describes eastern philosophy in a way that westerners can understand... and he's damn good at it. Some people think he tells a little too much, things you need to find out on your own and are not told to you by gurus/masters.

Thanks for the share! Eastern philosophy just provides the most well guided and developed approach to these spiritual issues; super interesting stuff!

 

[belligerent drunk]

Is it so crazy to think that in an infinite amount of time the stars won't align just like this one more time and your consciousness won't exist just once more?

Exactly like this? Not in our universe, I don't think. Our universe will suffer a heat death, which basically means that entropy will have reached maximum. There will be matter, but there will be no required exchange of energy (which is required for life - we are pretty much using energy to lower entropy locally). If our universe will exist infinitely, then it'll just be a lot of matter floating around in galaxies so far apart that they cannot see each other (we can see other galaxies right now), with not much happening.

You can imagine it as a bunch of snow in a glass in a warm room. At first it's all complicated and intricate, it starts heating up, melting - all sorts of things happens. But then at the end it's just a little pool of water where visibly nothing happens, just a bunch of matter sitting around.

I'm not an astrophysicist, so there may be errors in what exactly post-heatdeath universe will look like, but the main point remains, and that's what I think will happen unless we find out information contrary to that.

E: mind you, there will most likely be more life in our universe after ours is gone. The current estimations give our universe trillions of years before heat death, and that's a goddamn long time, considering it's only 13 billion years old atm, and there's already life formed at least once. So I think it's way more likely that life will start again sometime somewhere in the future, at least once, than not, given this huge time period.

 

[Jonneh]

Does consciousness ever really come to an end? Do we really ever escape the reality we are granted by the universe?

'Our' consciousness (which is a set of experiences tied to self) surely will, yes. The only way we perceive and construct reality is by existing as bodies and more abstract selves that transcend these bodies but are fully dependent on them. I can't imagine what to 'escape reality' would mean.

You are a set of events coming together in an amazingly abstract way. While your "end" might seem like the end it's probably not. Your death is the beginning of a period you just won't experience, but you will be born again in due time.

You are the self that is the collection of everything that is tied together into one unified entity. I'm happy to talk of souls, but they are the physical processes in our body and in the world seen on a different level. When your physical body ceases to function in a way that enables these processes, much of what makes you also ceases to be. If you are referring to a Hofstadterian immortality in the minds of others that knew you well, that's fine by me, but that is a diluted self indeed.

You will not be born again unless a similar body and worldly circumstances recur. Unless you are referring to abstract principles common to all life, or to aspects of your humanity, I find it hard to find sense in talk of existing in another's body. Life will go on though, that much is for sure.

Is it so crazy to think that in an infinite amount of time the stars won't align just like this one more time and your consciousness won't exist just once more?

What makes you think that you are not now living that one rebirth? Would you expect to have memories of the last time?