Never Ending Life
- - Posted on 2010-02-09 02:41:46.0
 
Written By: Discussion, Bob, Wendell, Bill
1 comment (at the bottom of the page)
 
Joseph Campbell expressed the view that everything is imbued with consciousness, but not the same level of consciousness. For example, the sunflower is "conscious" of the sun and turns toward it.  Things behave the way they do, whether a plant, an atom or an animal, through the expression of a level of consciousness. Human consciousness is the hightest level of it.
  
Then there is a Jewish writer who believes that Jesus rose from the dead, although he does not think he was the Messiah or God or anything along Christians lines.  He expresses the idea that no an atom of us is lost even physically when we die.  His thought is that if every atom that makes us up is not lost, it is not unreasonable to think that neither are our thoughts/consciousness/unique identity lost.  Jesus said that even the giving of a cup of cold water will never be lost. 
 
It is like this email.  It will never be lost.  You and me may press the delete button, and then send the deleted items to the rubbish bin, but it is still there somehow imbedded into my computer and yours.  But if you then destroy the computer, are you so sure that you really destroy this email - or the thought that goes out in this email.  We may not have the technology to recover it, but it will still exist.  All thought is creative, it is not the product of the physical, but the universe is in process of being created and we are also participating in its creation. Of course.  We create families, social networks, ideas, business enterprises - and these are the product of our thoughts - so we are God’s co-creators and we to this extend determine the shape of the future and the on-going creation of the universe.
 
Pascal opinion is that if a person who has never existed can actually exist (birth), why is it so hard to think that a person who exists could not go on existing beyond death. He is thereby reasoning that birth appears to be a greater miracle than "resurrection" -  whatever that word means - certainly not a restoration of the fleshly or animal body!
 
But I like Luther’s rugged simplicity:  "He whom God wants to speak to either in anger or in love cannot cease to exist."
Bob
Wendell Reply
God holds all in existence each moment, and all is in some sense “in” God (God in all, all in God, yet not pantheism). Other terms used to describe this mystery have been interpenetration- closer than our own spirits, our own breath and atoms.
 
And God sustaining all reality in existence in some mysterious way, yet granting such freedom to all reality (that indeterminate aspect). The immanence/transcendence categories is another way of conceiving all this.
 
And perceiving of divinity as, among other ways of conceiving, as Consciousness in some transcendent fashion, that we cannot begin to conceive of. Consciousness as the most fundamental reality behind all else. And we share this consciousness in some manner.
 
Here is another astounding mystery- this infinite consciousness comes to expression in each of us, in a unique personality, a unique story and life experience.
 
And just as astounding in all this- that the foundational nature of this Consciousness is love or compassion. The discovery of this has been interesting to note over human history- from our own experience of love as human beings, we have come to see that this supreme value/emotion/characteristic also defines the ultimate reality behind all in the most essential way.
 
And this gets to the issue of life and death and suffering and loss and the rest. Love, again, from our own experience, can be trusted to do the right thing. We know this from our own experience and how much more infinitely greater and more true will this be of divine love. We can see the truth of all this from our own experience as conscious persons experiencing such feelings and impulses. And we know ours is but a weak taste of something infinitely better.
 
Yes, nothing of value will ever be lost.
 
Bill Ferguson
I think its simpler than that.  I think what we think of as "God" is in all - everything.  One of the most rudimentary religious concepts of God is His "omnipresence".  But we never ask how that can be. Sometimes its helpful to think in visual terms, topology or shape works for me better than math formulas - my mind simple works visually.

Its simple, all that we see as creation has "emerged" from God.  Creation is not the totality of God, but it did emerge (or unfold?) from God.  Its not separate from God, for it owes its entire existence upon the source.

Matter/Energy/Information (information encoding/decoding - not interpretation) are all interchangeable. E=MC2 is all about that.  Its in the algebra - as is gravity and time.  Entropy is process by which energy and matter change forms by degrading their past forms. Extropy - increasing complexity - is caused by increasing information content.  The way around entropy is through extropy.

Energy is just a different form of matter.  Its an agent of change or communicates change - but it is not intelligence.

 Wendell again
 
“William James redirects our attention back to the immediate world of human experience”
 
He notes also the problem of science trying to construct a ‘God’s eye view of reality’. Some perspective that is free of the subjective and is purely objective. This cannot be done as all observation is through the human mind with all its beliefs, assumptions, feelings. Any attempt to construct something mind-independent is fatally compromised from the start. “There is no view from nowhere”.
 
And I tie all this to comments such as Bill’s on his NDE. Such experience is the most real thing in the universe and in reality. Our personal conscious self or person is the most real thing of all and the determiner of reality and truth. Firsthand experience is the most credible thing of all. And look at what such experience has concluded over the history of humanity. I mean, in relation to such things as death and an afterlife. That instinctive or intuitive sense that there is a fundamental duality (David Lund spoke to this in The Conscious Self- he said, “the view that persons are entirely material beings- is a recent and rather remarkable phenomenon. This view has been rejected, at least implicitly, by the great majority of people throughout the ages. In nearly every society of which we have any record, we find the idea of an afterlife and the belief that the soul or essence of a person survives the death of the body. Though such a belief was probably not critically acquired or reflectively held, it may have been grounded in or reflective of an intuitive understanding of the nature of consciousness and persons”). He then sets out to “establish a strong metaphysical dualism”. 
Ahh, the value of common human insight based on common human experience- the source of all truth and reality.
Let me add another thought here re a detected spot of materialist perception in this ‘unsubstantiated’ bit. We don’t perceive what is most real and fundamental of all through the crude abilities of our gross senses that are oriented to physical objects that are not fundamental reality. Rather, to grasp what is most fundamental and real we employ our more refined faculties of consciousness, mind, reason, faith, intuition, and so on.
 
Multiple millennia of refining human insight with these more refined capabilities has led us to these conclusions about the most fundamental and real of all things in reality. And hence, something like love should be at the very heart of a new story of the universe or a genuinely complete theory of everything. It is perhaps the most substantiated thing in all the universe.
 
 I would suggest it is overwhelmingly substantiated as opposed to evil. Evil is not the dominant reality of existence and life. Order is. And all growth, development and progress is based on the fundamental order of reality. This order expresses a fundamental goodness and love at the heart of existence. We don’t have chaos structuring all existence, but order. Predictability is possible based on such order. Our very existence and development is based on such order. So the fundamental order of the cosmos and life expresses the fact that love is at the core of it all. This is powerful substantiation. Overwhelming substantiation. So my faith is well substantiated to wear this word out. The evidence is massive and overwhelming. All reality expresses it.
 
And of course I reject materialist science which interacts with a silly straw deity and claims that any evidence of disorder, chaos, indeterminacy reveals that there is no deity is behind reality. No. Such elements only affirm the fact that Love values freedom most highly in order to attain genuine goodness in this existence. And such elements don’t work against fundamental order but simply enable such things as spontaneity and creativity. Tectonic plate movement has been important in the development of life over time. But such things have been very destructive to people living in such areas and hence the human responsibility to adapt to and even eventually control such things. So also with climate- changing climate is vital to the development of life but damaging in other ways.
1 comment

 
Bill Ferguson
2010-03-13 00:25:04.0
 

I think its helpful to view evil not as a force or entity into its own (vis a vis God) but rather as a pathology. 

You can think of evil as a deficiency disease.  You can say scurvy is undeniable,  but Vitamin C will cure it.

I once read a study on vicious male murders.  People that anyone would rightly call evil.  In nearly ever case, these men were rejected by their mothers at birth.  While it is true that some people in these life circumstances rise above it, some don't.  Whether or not such people can be fixed - is an open question.  Perhaps many of them will have to be warehoused for the rest of their lives to protect other humans - much of it depends on them.  But they did not become that way in a vacuum without influences.

Its when we get into the dualistic mindset that we come to some really erroneous conclusions about people and life.  But such is the natural fallout when we base those conclusions on the incomplete system of binary Aristotelian logic. Bill Ferguson