Life after Death - Why Bother?

Discussion of the nature of Ultimate Reality and the path to Enlightenment.
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ardy
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by ardy »

fontana wrote:Ardy.

So, my question is: What happens to us when we die? Where does the energy that makes us up go? Where do we go?

I'm content with a non-romantic answer that we dissipate into en ether and that is it. And I'm with you, it's disheartening when people construct their own truths based merely on fear, imagination and ego.
As a very young man I was on a beach in the West coast of England and wrote my name in a lump of hard mud that seemed to be changing into a pebble (assuming it would sink to a great enough depth). I wondered if anyone would see it in a couple of million years... That thought evolved into, when I die I am made of the same stuff as this planets elements, I am expecting to return into those elements. But! where will the energy within us go? Who knows where?

Where does the energy go when you turn off an electric motor?

We go nowhere I assume, and this is a big assumption, that there is nothing. I prefer the null analysis, it seems sort of right to me.

Everything comes and goes. There is limited room in the heaven most imagine, for every ant, slug and lizard, and I refuse to go if they don't go!
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Leyla Shen »

from a dead perspective one can and should contemplate death and all the dead things since those studies are sobering and reflective. From a living perspective, the present view, death simply does not exist since nothing "comes and goes" in and out of that perspective.

Generally people move between dead and living perspectives somewhat nervously. Enlightenment involves mastering both perspectives entirely.
The "dead' perspective. Dead as "in heaven". This is why I linked the heavens to the disembodied, the symbolic world. It can be vulgarized but for most it contains also the mystery, the elevation and the rapture. This is an "underwater" world. It's where we're born into, a confusing world of senses, opinion and at best some rationality, some reason which has it own terrors.
Okay, so by "mastering both perspectives" you mean, ultimately, transcending ("enlightenment") man-as-bridge by transcending reflection ("knowledge") and the present/no coming and going ("truth") with the result that one arrives on the other side as man of vision, as OVERman -- as creator of futures.

Right?
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Pam Seeback
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Pam Seeback »

ardy wrote:
fontana wrote:Ardy.

So, my question is: What happens to us when we die? Where does the energy that makes us up go? Where do we go?

I'm content with a non-romantic answer that we dissipate into en ether and that is it. And I'm with you, it's disheartening when people construct their own truths based merely on fear, imagination and ego.
As a very young man I was on a beach in the West coast of England and wrote my name in a lump of hard mud that seemed to be changing into a pebble (assuming it would sink to a great enough depth). I wondered if anyone would see it in a couple of million years... That thought evolved into, when I die I am made of the same stuff as this planets elements, I am expecting to return into those elements. But! where will the energy within us go? Who knows where?

Where does the energy go when you turn off an electric motor?

We go nowhere I assume, and this is a big assumption, that there is nothing. I prefer the null analysis, it seems sort of right to me.

Everything comes and goes. There is limited room in the heaven most imagine, for every ant, slug and lizard, and I refuse to go if they don't go!
ardy, when you wrote your name in the mud you analyzed its meaning to you, and by you I am referring to the individual subjective (impersonal) nature of consciousness. Even now, after all these years, you continue to analyze that moment. Is it possible that Analysis is the nature of the energy that is eternal, that doesn't die when the body returns to its elemental state? That Analysis is Life and Life is Analysis and that its sustenance, concepts, are also of its eternal nature?
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Leyla Shen wrote:Okay, so by "mastering both perspectives" you mean, ultimately, transcending ("enlightenment") man-as-bridge by transcending reflection ("knowledge") and the present/no coming and going ("truth") with the result that one arrives on the other side as man of vision, as OVERman -- as creator of futures. Right?
The vision defines the man. Little men have - or are result of - little vision. [And normally women, like lady justice herself, are about blind folded but fair!]

It helps to visualize this a bit with the horizon. That's the limit of ones vision but also defines scale: eye level as provider of depth. The horizon is what I've called Earth (as opposed to both surfaces of the Heavens). It's also man, who inherits the earth in form of a "child", because he stands between the waters, symbolically and his eyes and sense of proportions are deeply linked to the horizon as vanishing point. The whole sense of distance, of space is linked up to this on various levels.

Yes, I'm pretty well aware I'm going crazy with the symbolic here. Bit of postmodern, bit of Christianity, ancient Egypt and a drop of misogyny. And why not? Everything else been said already too many times to have any power left. At worst I drive someone insane.
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Dennis Mahar »

Take a bex and lie down.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Dennis Mahar wrote:Take a bex and lie down.
The housewife's drug of choice!
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Dennis Mahar »

hush
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

That's your drug of choice. Together with flush. It won't last forever.
Dennis Mahar
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Dennis Mahar »

bee in a bottle.

(:

wishing well.

wonderfulness

shall we listen to 'dire straits' today?
what's on the menu?
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Leyla Shen »

Yes, I'm pretty well aware I'm going crazy with the symbolic here. Bit of postmodern, bit of Christianity, ancient Egypt and a drop of misogyny. And why not?
But you already answered that:
The vision defines the man...
At worst I drive someone insane.
Drive what is already insane, insane? Perhaps all it does is attract itself.
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Dennis Mahar
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Dennis Mahar »

The vision defines the man
poppycock.
crazymaking.
sounds like self-hypnosis.
self-cherishing.

the man's causes are the man.
derivative of.

Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
All roads lead to Rome.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Leyla Shen wrote:
Yes, I'm pretty well aware I'm going crazy with the symbolic here. Bit of postmodern, bit of Christianity, ancient Egypt and a drop of misogyny. And why not?
But you already answered that: "The vision defines the man..."
Yes, all we are in modern times can be captured by cultural mis-mash. So when describing "man" or anything at all, with some effort one can hear the post-modernity, nihilism, Christianity, Greek and Egyptian elements singing along. The big mistake is to think one can "get around" it. To speak in "timeless universals"! But nobody, not even the most important sages ever named by anyone on this forum has ever even attempted to escape his time. All they really did was trying to overcome it. To combine and to speak with the Prophet of Nihilism: " There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts". Amen.

Now back to explaining my self and your self: the definition of human nature, of man, is to be found in the frameworks supporting the terms and phrases being employed. Words do have meaning because man has meaning. He is the meaning and not the moving lips or the feverish brain. There's no "meaning maker" somewhere hiding as Dennis still believes perhaps. Even before a word is spoken, there's first Man, the context of a word. He makes meanings only as far as he creates in his own mirror image like he himself was created.
Drive what is already insane, insane? Perhaps all it does is attract itself.
Perhaps indeed. But we could boil down everything down to that and end up saying not much at all. Another way of seeing it is fighting fire with fire. Dislodge a stuck structure of abstracts taken in as "real" and "authentic" by introducing something "realer than real": words which make actual sense if you think them through. They are more real than anything else under the sun, no matter how weak, how soft the whispering can be. At least, if the difference between truth and false can be distinguished. Otherwise it's just more blah. Head ache. Bex. Hush.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Dennis Mahar wrote:"The vision defines the man" sounds like self-hypnosis.
Or like bliss... obviously any vision is larger than the composite man contemplating it.
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Pam Seeback »

Diebert van Rhijn wrote:
Dennis Mahar wrote:"The vision defines the man" sounds like self-hypnosis.
Or like bliss... obviously any vision is larger than the composite man contemplating it.
This is why bliss or any one thing cannot be given permanent status of way-of-being. Every meaning of being is but a rest stop, until the next meaning of being 'shows up.' If this were not the case, the 'Totality' would not be infinite in nature.
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The Unholy Grail

Post by Leyla Shen »

" There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts". Amen.
"Amen", for you indeed!

The reason the man of intuition grows dumb or speaks in unheard of combinations of concepts is precisely because man, right down to the image he has of himself, is not made by words and concepts, but because words and concepts are made by the needs and actions -- or indeed as the case may be, indolence -- of men.
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Diebert van Rhijn
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Re: The Unholy Grail

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Leyla Shen wrote:
" There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts".
The reason the man of intuition grows dumb or speaks in unheard of combinations of concepts is precisely because man, right down to the image he has of himself, is not made by words and concepts, but because words and concepts are made by the needs and actions -- or indeed as the case may be, indolence -- of men.
All needs and actions are just words and concepts in the sense that they derive meaning or meaninglessness from the Man as active principle. Or like Nietzsche writes in the same postmodern tract: " One designates only the relations of things to man" who "out of need and boredom, wants to exist socially, herd-fashion". Man defines himself as existing and names everything in relation to it. From this the world is ordered and a dialectic development arises, conflict and strife to resolve the recurring contradictions -that a thing, especially human nature, is not what it appears as and becomes essentially quite different to each and any of us.
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Dennis Mahar »

I've said each time 'bliss is generated'.

The only thing any of you are saying is 'causes/conditions'.
cannot be refuted.

You never, ever are saying anything else.

savvy?

You are saying because this and because that.
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Leyla Shen »

Well, yes -- that's exactly what's happening, Diebert; and exactly why the bourgeois order sweeping the world met with the socio-economic critique from the likes of Marx and the philosophical insights of Nietzsche.

There is a big difference between the socially created individual, and the living one.
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Bobo
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Bobo »

Needs and actions are Words and concepts? Maybe it is better to talk about causes and effects, and psychological causes and effects, or any other counter part you have to it, but then, yes, cause and effect is a concept for meaning.
The sage would appear like that, insane, if you take that he doesn't strive and achieves. While insanity appears to be much striving and no achievement.
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Pam Seeback »

Dennis Mahar wrote:I've said each time 'bliss is generated'.

The only thing any of you are saying is 'causes/conditions'.
cannot be refuted.

You never, ever are saying anything else.

savvy?

You are saying because this and because that.
Because of meditation on emptiness, bliss is generated. Because I am hungry, I eat. Because I want to go camping, I pack up the trailer and go camping. Because I write about causes and conditions, you step into my posts and chastise me for writing about causes and conditions. You savvied me "because of." You gave that woman you met at the bus stop an orgasm "because of." You are reading these words "because of." All there is to the conscious mind is "because of." Look how the world because is structure...BEcause...
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Dennis Mahar »

What are you saying when you are saying which is the only thing you ever say?
We're not looking for a massive predicate calculus provided by meaning junkies.

what are you indicating?
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Diebert van Rhijn »

Leyla Shen wrote:Well, yes -- that's exactly what's happening, Diebert; and exactly why the bourgeois order sweeping the world met with the socio-economic critique from the likes of Marx and the philosophical insights of Nietzsche.

There is a big difference between the socially created individual, and the living one.
Isn't there a risk here for just dividing between two types of "socially created" self-hoods? And created by whom exactly? Social forces? History? Chickens? Eggs? And is this "living individual" then the "artistically creating subject"? Important is the following consideration and I have to quote again from the same piece: if but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. In my view there's quite a lot at stake at this point perhaps even more than Nietzsche and Marx could envision in their time.
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ardy
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by ardy »

My God! (if there is one) you guys can go round and round in a washing machine of words!
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Leyla Shen »

Isn't there a risk here for just dividing between two types of "socially created" self-hoods?
No. The former is a (as Nietzsche indicates with thing-in-itself) superimposition on the latter.
And created by whom exactly?
Whom? Thing-in-itself, Platonic Form, whom?

There is no "whom".
if but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed—Nietzsche
Indeed.
In my view there's quite a lot at stake at this point perhaps even more than Nietzsche and Marx could envision in their time.
Yeah? And what would that be? The prison walls of his faith?
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Re: Life after Death - Why Bother?

Post by Leyla Shen »

ardy wrote:My God! (if there is one) you guys can go round and round in a washing machine of words!
(:

Hold on tight, ardy. You're in the spin cycle...
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