Lent 2020 - Day Four
As well as having a deity or deities, nearly all religions have some concept of an Afterlife. These may differ greatly. Essentially they all offer the promise of everlasting life to the faithful, conditional on adhering to the precepts of the religion.
It may be an eternity of basking in God's Glory if you are a Christian, or it may be returning to life in a different form if you are a Buddhist or Hindu.
The non-religious would rather believe in eternal oblivion - a nothingness that cannot be experienced because, they would argue, the conscious mind is extinguished as its host body expires.
Who is right? We have a trichotomy - three possibilities:
- No afterlife whatsoever
- An eternal spiritual afterlife immediately after this one
- A succession of afterlives in the physical world
On the basis of my own personal observations, over my 62 years, I'd go for the third - if only because I have experienced many times anomalous familiar moments not from my own lifetime. These feel just as familiar to me as memory flashbacks from my current life. They are not as frequent, but they are just as real to my subjective conscious experience. *PAFF!* suddenly I am back in 1950s U.S.A. and it feels like it did. I will expand on this in future posts (I have written about this phenomenon on this blog several times), but there is another reason why I favour this succession of afterlives concept.
How much do you remember about yesterday? About ten years ago? About your childhood? Was that really you? Or are those memories now an illusion? An afterlife in an other person's memory? Is that it?
I believe in the notion of spiritual evolution as a process, as a growing toward, as constant development. Life is so short that we cannot gain anything but the slightest insight into the full glory of God the Universe; the becoming, the growth and evolution of consciousness takes forever. The notion that I am good in this life so that I can be rewarded with a high-quality, eternal afterlife after one short lifetime of avoiding sin strikes me as banal - a simplistic form of social control. The gradient from Zero to One, the amount of learning required - takes up endless numbers of lives. A single life, even if lived a hundred years in optimum physical and mental form, is insignificant in the eternal scheme of things.
The hydrogen atoms that came together to briefly form you and I have been in existence for almost all the time between now and the Big Bang. Those same atoms will survive us all and will continue to exist forever - until shortly before the next Big Bang (Big Bounce, if you believe in a cyclical model of cosmology.)
Can atoms carry consciousness, memory or will? We don't know (sceptics here would invoke the God of the Gaps). How our consciousness may survive our bodies, what vectors (quantum decomposition?) are involved - don't know. But I do feel that this is the closest of the three possibilities to my own experiences - a consciousness that grows in awareness from life to life; that is moving towards perfection away from imperfection, from ignorance and beastliness towards the angelic, life after life. Inexorably.
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| In search of another time, another place |
This time four years ago:
Probability: Chance or God?
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7 comments:
If we are evolving over many sequential lives to becoming more perfect individuals, as you posit, then why is the world filled with tragically imperfect people? Shouldn’t there be a sub-population of extremely wise people, who have passed through several lifetimes, reaching higher planes of perfection? Following that line of thought, why wouldn’t those wise people occupy leadership positions in our world, taking us to a better place? I see a downfall of civilization at this moment in time. Incompetent world leaders, ongoing civil wars, vast populations living in profound poverty, a burgeoning viral pandemic, are some of the most distressing hallmarks of today’s world.
I don’t believe in a ‘perfect’ person. We are all flawed in our humanity. Perhaps ‘God’ created us imperfect beings, so that we would learn to be tolerant of one another, to have humility, to have empathy and to ultimately show us that we will all fail at some point in our lives but that failure is not the opposite of perfection, but rather an expression of our shared human frailty.
@Teresa
Many thanks for your comment. My short answer is that we are still far nearer to 'zero' than 'one', a mere 13.8 billion years from Big Bang (or 'the latest Big Bang' if you favour a cyclical-universe model). But there is progress... things may resemble the 1930s, but the interval between the 'nasty' times of history and the 'bearable' times seem to be stretching out. 'Profound poverty'...Between 1990 and 2013, the World Bank says that people living in 'extreme poverty' has fallen from 37.1% of humanity to 10.7%, so there is progress. Our one, short lifetime is insufficient to take it all in.
We are flawed, even the saints among us. Anger, pride, selfishness - nearer the Beast than the Angel. Not to mention psychological imperfections. It will take many more billions of years for spiritual evolution to play itself out.
With each successive 'go' at living, the consciousness acquires ever-deeper insight into Creation. And of course, greater empathy and tolerance.
Unfortunately, I don’t think our Earth will see billions of years in the future. We are well on our way to self-destruction now . My adult children recently said they have serious qualms about bringing new life into this troubled world. I can hardly blame them.
@Teresa
I'm sure our parents' generation had every reason to feel the same way about their world when they were our children's age - from the Nazi/Soviet invasion of Poland to the Cold War, somehow they carried on. Every age has its fear.
Ultimately, I believe that I only have one life. Once I die, that’s it. I don’t believe In a merry bunch of souls partying in heaven, nor do I believe in sad souls succumbing to the fire and brimstone of hell. I don’t believe I come back as someone else.
I don’t believe successive generations are any wiser than the ones that preceded them. I hope my children will have a better life than mine, but I don’t see it happening. I don’t believe that the next generation will be ‘resilient’ enough to overcome the many obstacles that will come their way. A great number will sink under the weight of it all.
Most of us just live day-to-day - many in quiet desperation. That precarious state of mind does not advance society. We are more barren emotionally and spiritually than ever before. We bow to superficial social media gods, who provide no true sustenance for our souls.
I believe we are born imperfect and we die imperfect. Not particularly glorious, I know. Simple, yet true.
@Teresa
I wouldn't be so negative...
One's belief is ultimately my own. I have reject both the heaven/hell of Christians and the eternal oblivion of atheists on the basis of my lifetime's subjective experiences which suggest to me a flicker of previous lives lived... Since childhood I've had them, no more than a few a week tops, each for a fraction of a second, but there, familiar and ultimately comforting.
"superficial social media gods, who provide no true sustenance for our souls"
Very true. Our task, then, is to seek for ourselves.
Not negative. A pragmatist at heart. I see clearly the world as it is, not as I wish it to be.
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