Afterlife exists says top brain surgeon

[Marblehead]

Anyway, tangent complete. Here's a smiley for anyone who made it this far, lol.

Yeah, you got off with that one, didn't you? Hehehe.

 

Did you know that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide (merge) in about five billion years? Science has already named it Mildromeda.

 

Of course, we don't have to worry about that because in about 2.5 billion years life will no longer exist on this planet. If we (humans) are not somewhere else by then it will be all over for us.

 

I have no idea where we will be in our afterlife but it darn sure won't be on Earth.

[Mokona]

What about OBE in place of NDE? I see so many NDE posts. I've never conciously made it out(OBE), an incredible fear overtakes me on the cusp. I read that it is a normal reaction and often is banished once seperated.

 

My preffered method is breathing chi into my body near an open window or cross windows as I get more energy that way. It's really as simple as that, I feel a deepening and then a stretching. Then I feel a lifting.

[Marblehead]

Many Native American cultures believe in OBE.

[Fū Yue]

Yeah, you got off with that one, didn't you? Hehehe.

 

Did you know that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide (merge) in about five billion years? Science has already named it Mildromeda.

 

Of course, we don't have to worry about that because in about 2.5 billion years life will no longer exist on this planet. If we (humans) are not somewhere else by then it will be all over for us.

 

I have no idea where we will be in our afterlife but it darn sure won't be on Earth.

 

Very cool. Mildromeda is such a terrible name though, should have named it the Milk Maiden. Golden opportunity, squandered.

[Marblehead]

 

Very cool. Mildromeda is such a terrible name though, should have named it the Milk Maiden. Golden opportunity, squandered.

Hehehe.

 

What is supposed to be being discussed here?

 

Oh! Afterlife.

 

Back to the topic Y'all.

[GrandmasterP]

Spending,as one does; substantial portions of time when at our centre; chatting to people who in the world's terms are 'dead'

I'm always going to side with the 'conscious life goes on eternally' faction.

That said there's no way anyone who chooses not to agree will ever be preached,taught or argued into seeing things our way.

Personal experience is everything in these matters.

[Taomeow]

Very cool. Mildromeda is such a terrible name though, should have named it the Milk Maiden. Golden opportunity, squandered.

 

The word galaxy derives from the Greek term for our own galaxy, galaxias (γαλαξίας, "milky one"), or galaktikos ("milky"). If they want to mix it with Andromeda, they could call it Androlactica (or Androlacticos), which would mean Milk Man or even Milkable (lactating) Man. Maybe that's what the mixing of the two is about -- a new and improved universe ?

[Marblehead]

... call it Androlactica (or Androlacticos), which would mean Milk Man or even Milkable (lactating) Man. Maybe that's what the mixing of the two is about -- a new and improved universe ?

Funny. Yeah, it would be different; not sure about improved.

[gendao]

"Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself."

This quote made no sense. It sounds like he's claiming that he was a faithful Christian...who did not believe in "God?" Uhhh...oxymoron, much? Perhaps he meant that he was a "cultural" Christian?

 

It is interesting how he actually experienced some more "Eastern/metaphysical" spiritual concepts in the afterlife like the bardo, synesthesia, pure unity (Oneness) consciousness, unconditional love underlying apparent "amorality," existentialist questions and a luminous "Divine" void...as OPPOSED to Pearly Gates paved in gold or other Heaven/Hell dichotomy.

death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.

Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way.

 

Again, from my present perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly’s wing.

 

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

 

message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

 

I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Where is this place?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

 

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

 

I continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.

 

That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.

 

The plain fact is that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued above all: truth.

And should this thread be merged with this one? Edited October 13, 2012 by vortex

[Birch]

'Afterlife' if accessible while still living, wouldn't that be better described as something else? Is it the 'same' as the 'Dreamtime (Dreaming?)' referred to by some people.

 

Why would this guy be ridiculed for having done what seems (to me anyway) some quite serious 'science' and documented it afterwards?

 

I came across a neat article the other day that really brought it home that 'science' and 'philosophy' can't be done just by thinking about them - although apparently 'thought experiments' are widely used as precursors to actual scientific action and what's weird IMO is when the action results in something that goes against the thought experiment, then it gets thrown out, why?

 

On the upcoming merger of galaxies. That would be IMO a 'natural' evolution of the universe. What role (if any) would humans on Earth play in it?

 

I read an interview with Cohen over at 'Enlightenext' in which he mentions that 'ego-death' is an 'evolutionary' imperative, for which we are also in some way responsible (couldn't quite get my head around that one, however). Then I thought about all those guys like Kurzweil who would rather 'evolution' look more like some kind of transhumanist thing. What is that desire being driven by? Seems kind of 'archonic' to me.

[Marblehead]

On the upcoming merger of galaxies. That would be IMO a 'natural' evolution of the universe. What role (if any) would humans on Earth play in it?

Hi -K-,

Earth will be a dead planet before that happens. Earth has a life expectancy of about an additional 2.5 billion years and the merging of the galaxies won't be happening for another 5 billion years.

 

Evolution? That is not a human concept. It is one of the processes of the universe. No preacher can change that.

[Taomeow]

Hi -K-,

Earth will be a dead planet before that happens. Earth has a life expectancy of about an additional 2.5 billion years and the merging of the galaxies won't be happening for another 5 billion years.

 

Problem is, age of astronomical objects and events is something modern science had to re-think and change on 15 different occasions, and each new pronouncement was offered as "scientific fact." When a new one arrived to refute it completely, the new one was established in this status. And then the next one. And the next.

 

It really amazes me that people buy it every time without ever remembering that they were told something else and believed that too. The ability to hold two mutually excluding beliefs at once -- e.g. that what science told them before the refutation and after are both scientific truths -- is a symptom of fragmented cognitive process. The medical term for a fragmented cognitive process is schizophrenia. Our science is suffering from that, and everybody who has been fragmented into copycatting the process of compartmentalizing parts of their own cognitive process so that they are isolated from each other and don't communicate, ditto.

 

Bottom line is, they don't have a clue, they have a compartment containing what they feel equipped to work with at the moment. It will be sealed off and forgotten shortly. Don't worry. Earth may be many things, but a patient whom a doctor gives a suggestion as to how long she has left to live she isn't. The doctor only thinks he knows because he's mentally impaired and spiritually straightjacketed.

 

Evolution? That is not a human concept. It is one of the processes of the universe. No preacher can change that.

 

It is not. The process in the universe is "unfolding," not evolution. Looks similar if you observe the middle but don't see the beginning or the outcome, but is not the same at all if you do.

 

Unfolding is a cyclical process, evolution is a hierarchical one. The universe does not have hierarchical processes. These are a construct of the human mind. The universe does not see things as "lower" and "higher," "superior" and "inferior," "advanced" and "primitive" (all the operational ideas of the artificial evolutionary-hierarchical view of reality). The universe sees them as "moving," "interacting," "co-creating," "unfolding," "folding back in," or to put it in taoist terms, Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation, followed by the return of the cycle ("the way of tao is return"). The idea of evolution is the outcome of a desire that can only be satisfied locally and temporarily, not universally and eternally -- to wit, "I am going to rule because I am higher, superior, advanced" and all that jazz. Or, to put it in even simpler terms, it's an ulteriorly motivated tool of brainwashing, a version of the good old "heaven's mandate to rule" in a modernized scientifized plastic wrapper.

 

The universe knows our real place in the grand scheme of things -- something that will succeed or fail unfolding into what it really is. Either way is fine by tao, the cycle goes on, something new that is the human of the next cycle will get a next chance, maybe a billion years from now, or maybe yesterday, time is loopy. Evolution, a linear idea, can't make the curve and crashes into the divider as the Way flows on... To crash with the former or to flow with the latter is our real choice.

[Birch]

It really amazes me that people buy it every time without ever remembering that they were told something else and believed that too. The ability to hold two mutually excluding beliefs at once -- e.g. that what science told them before the refutation and after are both scientific truths -- is a symptom of fragmented cognitive process.

 

Does anyone know what makes this possible?

[GrandmasterP]

No idea but I can believe six impossible things before breakfast. Most people can. Scientists though..... NAH. They just believe breakfast consisted of.....

1. .

Handy folk scientists when you need a non stick pan inventing but for metaphysics you need a dreamer or a poet if you want a proper job doing.

[Marblehead]

Problem is, ...

 

...

 

It is not. ...

 

Apparently we do not agree regarding these two topics. Hehehe.

 

I have no intentions of trying to confuse anyone's belief system.

 

My understandings are as stated above because there is logic as a base for my understandings.

 

And as I try hard to respect the beliefs of others I won't make any further comments. (At this time. Hehehe.)

[Marblehead]

... but for metaphysics you need a dreamer or a poet if you want a proper job doing.

Exactly. And we all know that I do not go there.

[doc benway]

t really amazes me that people buy it every time without ever remembering that they were told something else and believed that too. The ability to hold two mutually excluding beliefs at once -- e.g. that what science told them before the refutation and after are both scientific truths -- is a symptom of fragmented cognitive process.

 

Does anyone know what makes this possible?

I'll take a stab at that.

 

First - it's ok to accept multiple "truths" since the universe revels in contradiction and paradox, it's simply the rational mind that abhors it. But that's really beside the point.

 

Second - scientific "fact" is nothing more than a "best current approximation" based on the strongest present theory (ie best predictive value). Belief does not need to enter in at all. Belief is to simply accept an explanation for the unknown. It is stagnant. The questions are always alive. Science gives the opportunity to test that explanation and either accept or reject, wash, rinse, repeat.... Always refining the image further and further until a new one takes it's place due to some new perspective or observation presents itself. It's very alive.

 

Science is simply a tool that makes predictions, tests those predictions against observation, and adjusts the predictive theory accordingly. As our ability to make more accurate observations improves, our theories must adapt. Any rigid, inflexible rules and laws are not really science. Science is flexible and adaptable or it is rapidly obsolete. It is not a sign of weakness that science changes it's theories and predictions, but a sign of strength.

[doc benway]

 

It is not. The process in the universe is "unfolding," not evolution. Looks similar if you observe the middle but don't see the beginning or the outcome, but is not the same at all if you do.

 

 

I will agree with Marbles here. Evolution is nothing more than the change in inherited characteristics of biological populations in response to environmental change. It does not imply better or worse, higher or lower. It simply applies more or less adaptable, more or less well suited to current circumstances. It is an elegant characteristic of our ever changing existence. A consequence of the fundamental connection between life forms and the environment with which they are inseparable. It is evidence of the oneness of being and the intelligence of biologic-ecologic systems. There is no reason to bring judgements into the equation like better or worse, good and bad, preferable and not, and so on.

 

We exist at a conscious level where we accept an organizational level of "human" consisting of sub-strata of organ systems, organs, organelles, cells, etc... There certainly is organization and hierarchy in that experience. My feeling that there is a similar level of organization at other levels of existence - such as that of trees, forests; humidity, streams, rivers, and oceans; populations of living things, eco-systems, planets, galaxies, and so on. It's just so foreign from what we experience as consciousness and awareness that it eludes us (well, most of us).

 

I wonder if beginning and outcome even make sense. Awareness, being-ness is always in the middle. Existing "now" yet looking forward to something the mind projects as outcome and looking back as the mind interacts with knowledge stored as memory, projecting an idea of beginning. Similarly in space. I'm always "here" surrounded in a more or less spherical fashion by everything that's out there... Time and space are both consequences of my uniquely tuned sensory apparatus and the bag of skin that deludes me into feeling separate. They do not necessarily have any independent existence.

[Taomeow]

I will agree with Marbles here. Evolution is nothing more than the change in inherited characteristics of biological populations in response to environmental change. It does not imply better or worse, higher or lower.

 

Really? Last I heard, we "evolved" from a "lower" species, according to the theory. Last I heard, all species that aren't us are "lower" but some are lower than others -- it's not the natural environment that decides which ones will die because they are too "low on the evolutionary scale" to reckon with. No. WE decide, and whatever we decide to kill is "lower," that's the only thing we need to know, per evolutionary theory's logic. If we want to kill it, it's proof enough that it's "lower," "primitive," and if, on the other hand, we see it as "lower" and "primitive," it's proof enough that it's OK to kill it. Last I heard, people who believe what I believe -- shamanic tribes -- are "primitive" in scientific terms. Until you have enough money to buy a TV and start consuming what it tells you to consume, you're "primitive." Otherwise you are failing to adapt to your environmental change. Meaning, you are going to be bombed out of your cave, burned out of your forest, kicked out of your land by the "higher," "advanced" version of your species. If you believe that "evolution" the way it is offered to the public is about the change of eye color in fruit flies, you haven't been paying attention.

 

The legitimate process that is really happening in nature, morphogenetic adaptation, is not evolution by any stretch of imagination, incidentally. It's merely unblocking of some genes and silencing of others, activation and deactivation of particular digestive enzymes, stimulation or suppression of certain receptors in the brain, and so on. It unfolds in response to environmental changes but there's no natural environmental change that can cause a car to evolve into a plane, an ape into man, or a strawberry to splice itself with viral hepatitis and luminescent jellyfish so it can better tolerate Roundup. If we were apes and became humans, that's genetic engineering. If there was no genetic engineering, apes were apes and humans were humans, apples and oranges. Evolution theory makes no scientific sense, but it makes perfect sense as a tool of domination, one of many, used by pseudoscience (that's the ruling science, by the way, always a pseudoscience, because it stopped looking for truth and started looking for new and improved methods of entrenching itself, of ever-greater totalitarian dominance.)

I wonder if beginning and outcome even make sense.

 

Unfolding relies on this distinction, evolution can ignore it and work with the artificial "now" that has no developmental history and no clear idea of where it's actually going. Natural processes don't work like that. Think back to when your mom was pregnant with you. If you were to rely on the "now" mentality, you would have to ignore the fact that it was a moment in the process of unfolding, and that it was close to a certain "beginning" in the process of "unfolding of a human being." If at that point someone asked you, a fetus in the womb, how tall you are, you would honestly respond, gollump, gollump, gollump. Evolution theorists, "now" theorists, however, don't seem to be this honest. They say, "forty-five centimeters." If they want to think of something or someone as the "outcome" of "evolutionary changes," what's to stop them from choosing this random "now" moment in the process of unfolding and announce that Steve is a man forty-five centimeters tall?.. And that's exactly what they're doing with every phenomenon they please because the beginning, middle, outcome, return are not part of their "scientific" model. Due to, as I mentioned earlier, catastrophic fragmentation of consciousness.

[Apech]

From etymological dictionary:

 

evolution (n.) 1620s, "an opening of what was rolled up," from L. evolutionem (nom. evolutio) "unrolling (of a book)," noun of action from evolvere (see evolve). Used in various senses in medicine, mathematics, and general use, including "growth to maturity and development of an individual living thing" (1660s). Modern use in biology, of species, first attested 1832 by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell.

 

Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

[JustARandomPanda]

Also check out Journey of Souls.

 

I read both it and the sequel and of the 2 the first explains things much better. Also I found it interesting that much that was documented in Journey of Souls is nearly identical to the afterlife processes discussed by the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.

[Taomeow]

From etymological dictionary:

 

evolution (n.) 1620s, "an opening of what was rolled up," from L. evolutionem (nom. evolutio) "unrolling (of a book)," noun of action from evolvere (see evolve). Used in various senses in medicine, mathematics, and general use, including "growth to maturity and development of an individual living thing" (1660s). Modern use in biology, of species, first attested 1832 by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell.

 

Charles Darwin used the word only once, in the closing paragraph of "The Origin of Species" (1859), and preferred descent with modification, in part because evolution already had been used in the 18c. homunculus theory of embryological development (first proposed under this name by Bonnet, 1762), in part because it carried a sense of "progress" not found in Darwin's idea. But Victorian belief in progress prevailed (along with brevity), and Herbert Spencer and other biologists popularized evolution.

 

Yup, the original meaning of "evolution" was exactly this, unfolding -- it would still be used as just a synonym if the word itself was not hijacked by the peddlers of the idea of "progress" which does not correspond to any natural phenomena whatsoever. It came to mean what it never meant to those who originally used it, and what never occurs. Yet that nonexistent meaning referring to nonexistent phenomena is exactly the kind of the dusty wool 99.9% of the "scientifized" modern minds have been stuffed with.

 

Anyone who doesn't believe me, go out and ask a random pedestrian what "evolution" means. They will say "survival of the fittest." Fittest for what? Um... er... ...oh, for survival, of course!! The vicious circle of circular logic complete, the compartment sealed and separated from the rest of the cognitive process. Another bleeting sh... ...er... scientifically educated modern highly evolved product of spectacular progress of the highest species in existence repeats the repeaters repeating other repeaters who were told what to repeat so as to sound as though they have higher cognitive functions and a scientific mind to boot. Very convincing.

[GrandmasterP]

Well if you breed chickens you get chickens.

Bigger maybe better chickens but still chickens.

We breed chickens hence I think that evolution is a crock.

Waste of time trying to convince a scientist though.

Those guys are true believers.

Jolly useful too when it comes to inventing stuff but as far as metaphysics goes our chickens know more than your average scientist. Plus they lay eggs.

:-)

[Enishi]

I have a pdf version of Destiny of Souls.

 

Reading parts of it here and there puts me in a very good mood. The only thing I don't like about it is the author rationalizing away experiences some have had with negative spirits, they're not all just 'lost souls', some are deliberately malicious and negative. Other than that though, it's sheer gold.

[GrandmasterP]

Hungry Ghosts can be nasty but are easily dealt with. They only ever have as much power as people choose to give them.

;-)