Thought Experiment: Life and Afterlife

25 Sep 2024 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

Let’s take most standard discussions of a Christian afterlife for granted as a thought experiment: some sort of celestial sphere where people go when they die and stay there for eternity as a reward.

Now let’s explore some conceptual corollaries of this that have haunted me as a thought experiment.

Let’s say we have all the people from 1650s England who died in a particular section of this realm. When they died, their souls (we’ll get back to this element in a bit) are transported to their new afterlife home. They’re there with others they’ve known in life. They can share their time with them forever.

First question: what do they do? Do they sing hymns with the angels? If so, isn’t that a fundamentally different idea? Same with the idea that they continue to do, explore, etc. This isn’t life – there isn’t further growth and development to do. Do they bask in the glory of the creator but are otherwise fully passive? Just an overwhelming spiritual high forever? If so, what was the point of the time in a body, in life, etc.? Do they continue to spend time with their community and extended family from past and future speaking over memories of what they did when they were alive (and maybe continuing to view the events of the living)? – Let’s take that last idea as given for our next question.

Second question: given the idea that they’re sharing the memories of their lives forever, what are the structural consequences of this afterlife? – 1) the afterlife is a static data suppository for lives and memories: a true cloud for data that (unlike real technological clouds where data will corrupt eventually) never changes; 2) if they communicate using their learned languages from life – they can only communicate with family a few generations before and after them, giving another degree of being static within humanity’s flow of change on Earth. Furthermore, they have no hope of communicating with the larger array of all the other souls from history. There’s a lingering question here whether new skills (such as new languages) can be learned here as there’s an unaddressed metaphysical problem of what a soul can learn, and furthermore there’s no indication in our framework of some sort of organized learning system for people to study languages or share them with others.

Third question (a bonus question): which version of the person goes to the afterlife? A soul isn’t a body – so it’s fundamentally strange to have it line up with a particular iteration of a person across their lifespan (like an image of the person in their prime, as a baby, or at their oldest moment when they died). However, most any description of the afterlife is one describing a human perspective of being in a place with others, which is inherently one of embodiment – having a particular human form, not some nebulous cloud or something even more abstract which a truly metaphysical dimension would almost necessarily require – it would be a metaphysical place, not a physical one (i.e. not anything akin to the bodily places and experiences we have).

Something about this conceptual idea (which again, is right inline with perspectives I’ve heard described throughout my life) is incredibly cold and inhuman. I find it terrifying to be essentially an element of data for an eternal databank, a storehouse of human memories and experiences forever. This is fundamentally an anti-life, not just an afterlife. Life is about the flow of development. It’s about being a burgeoning and decaying human body-mind in a dynamic little planet with billions of years of history. The idea of being a static data upload set to an eternity of being functionally a human memory/experience data file is perhaps the most inhuman version of a telos to life that I can imagine, and part of that is that that entire data file is not only static but will be static forever. It is there to never be forgotten. There’s something incredibly freeing about our memories in life that we don’t have perfect recall. We forget the vast majority of moments from our lives, and on a larger scale, history is mostly dust – forgotten and turned to fresh soil for future generations to live and create anew. The organic nature of life, society, and our world is precisely what makes life vibrant. Of course, certain experiences both personally and culturally are maintained or “remembered” in the way that all memories are a construction of parts that may be reinterpreted over time, but this is only done insofar as it is adaptive to further function. Some is held onto that is dysfunctional, but it is in burying it and letting it become fully the dust of the past that it becomes room for something new. In summary: I very much affirm the idea of dissolving into this world and disappearing after death, transforming into a different unfolding of the ten thousand things that is not this current, unfolding life of a human body-mind. That seems so much more beautiful and soothing to disappear into the physical earth than for the deeds of my life to be transcribed into a metaphysical sky to statically exist forever.

Cross-post: The Post-rock Way – Energy | Hope | Overflowing

02 Dec 2021 Leave a comment

by zeuslyone in Music Tags: , , , , ,

This is a post that I just posted on my other blog about philosophy/spirituality and post-rock. I wanted to share it here as well.

One of the most intoxicating aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy is the ambience of hyperabundant overflowing of energy. This is the dynamism of the Dionysian, and it’s the strength of a healthy life. This sentiment comes forth perhaps nowhere as strongly as in the first section of the prologue to “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, in which Zarathustra greets the sun (a symbol of the Apollonian here transformed to the hyperabundance of the Dionysian) and speaks to the task that he must undertake of “going under” from the heights of the mountains (we could possibly see this as the heavenly realm of the Forms) to the human realm. This choice resonates later – one must go under to go over, to become the overhuman, the Übermensch. The feeling of overflowing is here in the sunshine and the happiness and abundance associated with it and the final lines:

“Bless the cup that wants to overflow, that the water may flow from it golden and carry everywhere the reflection of your delight!”
“Behold! This cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become human again.”
– Thus began Zarathustra’s going-under.

Nietzsche, trans. Parkes, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 9.

The overflowing energy is the strength of one who can climb the heights with the fullness of health, joy, and the ability to help others climb up the same paths. It’s the intensity that allows one to live dangerously with light feet dancing over the obstacles that one faces. It is the power of affirmation, of yay-saying — perhaps the greatest possibility in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Recently, I’ve felt this sentiment greatly from a song from the new album released by Maybeshewill. The band has been broken up for years but has come back with a compelling album about facing climate change with hope and resolve to overcome and shape our futures. They describe this at length in the album’s description on Bandcamp.

The song is called “Invincible Summer”. When I listen to it, I find myself running, dancing, fist pumping, and screaming: “YES!!!”. I’m serious about all of those. I have done all of those in flowing with the feeling that arises in the later movements of the song when the strings swell and pull you along with the overflowing energy that would allow you to climb to the heights with light feet.

Path of the Dharma: Dhammapada – Chapter 12: “Self”

03 Jun 2015 3 Comments

by zeuslyone in Buddhism, Change, Self-development, Spiritual Path, The Dhammapada Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Disclaimer: This book has 26 chapters, and I highly recommend you get a copy and read them all. I’ve had to pick and choose, and in so doing, much is passed over. I only hope to emphasize what is key for getting to the other side, but even in my choices, it would be too long to write out each whole chapter, so I have to pick selections from them as well.

Learn what is right; then teach others as the wise do. Before trying to guide others, be your own guide first. It is hard to learn to guide oneself.

Your own self is your master; who else could be? With yourself well controlled, you gain a master hard to find. (Chapter 12, Verses 158-160)

Stephen Ruppenthal introduces this chapter in my translation with an analysis of how the Buddha does not specify his position on what the self is; he cites the Buddhist scholar/philosopher par excellence, Nagarjuna. The Buddha, indeed, does not posit: “The self is X”. However, both here and in the opening lines of the first verse, (“All that we are is the result of what we have thought” see my previous post on the first chapter here), the Buddha makes clear that the self is something that can be trained. As such, it is something that can change; thus, it follows the Buddha’s emphasis on impermanence as does all else. The Buddha does not posit here that there is no atman (a soul), but he does say that the self is something that can be trained, mastered, and he indicates that the spiritual path is one in which you master yourself. The Buddha doesn’t posit anything about the self’s nature, as that would go entirely against the point (i.e. positing something that “atman is”.). Rather, he indicates selflessness, or as is often described as the Buddha’s position: no-self. As he says later in chapter 20: “All states are without self; those who realize this are freed from suffering.” He displays to us that what we label self is not fixed or permanent, rather a dynamic process: one that can be trained and mastered. A permanent, unchanging thing is not open to such dynamism. A biography I have recently read about the Buddha expressed the subtleties of this stance very well:

This was the last thing Gautama wished to communicate. He believed that in this life we inherit the karmic consequences of our actions in past lifetimes, and that when we die, our future existence will depend on our moral state in this one. Having been brought up to believe implicitly in rebirth, this didn’t raise for Gautama or his listeners the metaphysical problems it brings to many who hear these ideas today. He was trying to get away from metaphysical abstractions and point people towards the kind of experience they could detect and observe. Of course, Gautama was saying, every person, including a Buddha, thinks, feels and experiences; the point is that how we think and feel shapes the kind of people we become in the future. The self, therefore, is a process and the task is to shape it. The wanderers should stop asking of life, ‘What is it?‘ or ‘Where is the true self?‘ They should look, instead, at their actual experience and ask, ‘How does it work?‘ Sue Hamilton succinctly encapsulates Gautama’s approach: ‘That you are is neither the question or in question: you need to forget even the issue of self-hood and understand instead how you work in a dependently originated world of experience.’ (Blomfield, Gautama Buddha: The Life and Teachings of the Awakened One, p. 151)

whirlpool-waves

The self is a process that changes with time like the flow of a river (read Hesse’s famous “Siddhartha”) or the waves ebbing and flowing on an ocean. Note: the flux of some processes can take a very, very long time–such as the erosion of a mountain. That does not make the mountain a permanent, solid entity…

In the quoted passage from Chapter 12, as elsewhere in the Dhammapada, the Buddha tells us to guide ourselves to develop our own wisdom (especially if no wise people are around to guide us–he clearly states it is better to go alone than follow the spiritually immature) and master our own minds. No one else can master them for us. This is the most fundamental aspect of the path–the aspect that wholly depends on our own efforts and no one else’s.

The evil done by the selfish crushes them as a diamond breaks a hard gem. As a vine overpowers a tree, evil overpowers those who do evil, trapping them in a situation that only their enemies would wish them to be in. Evil deeds, which harm the doer, are easy to do; good deeds are not so easy. (Chapter 12, Verses 161-163)

This injunction to not do evil comes right after the call to master the self. How are they connected and what exactly are we supposed to avoid? The answer could readily be seen in the twin verses of the opening chapter already discussed in my previous post. Self-mastery, the proper way to guide yourself, is to tame your thoughts in such a manner that will bring you away from sorrow and closer to joy beyond death–nirvana. It’s a taming that cultivates selfless thought–thought in accordance with the Eightfold Path, rather than the selfish thoughts that our mind is constantly lost in as untamed monkey mind. Selfless thought shapes the mind in a way that brings joy and nirvana. Selfish thought molds the mind in a way that brings sorrow and samsara.

May this help you see your “self” in a light that allows you to cultivate joy for yourself and others. May you be inspired to read through this great spiritual work and find the path to liberation from suffering. May you have the generosity, energy, discipline, patience, meditative insight, and wisdom to walk it.

Gassho.