Thought-experiment time: imagine the most egotistic, narcissistic person you know, marooned on a desert island. Life's comfortable (food is plentiful, there's shelter, a warm climate, no predators), but there are no other human beings around, and escape is impossible.
Imagine, say, a Trump, on his own, minus entourage, with no one to impress, or boss about or shout at. What would be going through his mind? How quickly would he implode psychologically?
We see here the individual, the individualist – entirely focused on self – and yet emotionally dependent on the collective. Such a narcissistic ego requires the collective to provide non-stop positive feedback, the crowd acting as a mirror in which the ego can view its reflection. Without fawning flunkies, without the adulation of the masses, the ego's sense of being collapses. The individual ego, it turns out, is anything but independent. For such folk, isolation, loneliness, is the greatest fear.
Although I'm sure I'd be unable to cope with the level of isolation on that island, I do appreciate the joy of solitude; not having any one around to bother me making demands. Over time, with age, my biology-linked ego has faded; I no longer seek the attention of or approval from others. A calm consciousness rises instead to replace it.
And yet despite my individualism, my deepest concerns are not for my own future, but for the Collective. I don't want a return to war, sparked by a tiny handful of egos. I don't want future humans to suffer from the effects of a changed climate, changed by a couple of generations' unthinking dash for material possessions.
So – seeking an afterlife that's essentially the same as this one, but with your ego residing in another plane is, according to me at least – is unlikely to occur. Seeking an afterlife with your ego residing in another body is even less probable (different body = different biology = different ego). But seeking an afterlife in which your consciousness, unshackled from your ego, survives in some for or another, well, that's a notion I'm open to, if only because this squares with my life-long experiences of anomalous qualia memories from another time, another place.
But how about if your afterlife were to take the form of a dilution of your individual, small-c consciousness into one, vast, cosmic, Big-C Consciousness? I have long posited this as the end-point of the unfolding Universe, its Purpose met, its destiny fulfilled. You are no longer either ego nor individual, subjective conscious experience, but the consciousness of everyone, everything that ever existed. You know all, there are no secrets, everything is clear – but you are now everything.
This squares with Buddhist and Hindu teachings; the 'I' subsumed into the 'we'. A difficult concept for individualists to swallow – whether materialist individualists or ones with a more spiritual outlook.
Lent 2023, Day 24
We are all Sentinelese?
Lent 2022: Day 24
Memory, identity and reincarnation
Lent 2021: Day 24
Reconciling science and spirituality
Lent 2020: Day 24
Refutation (II)
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