Choosing Your Religion
"Because of most of us can't imagine a world without ourselves in it. But reflect on this: Did the world exist before you were born? Of course. Did you miss being alive before you were born? Of course not. By the same token you the world will go on after you are dead and you will not miss being alive."
Yes, what I wrote about, I believe is usually called "existential panic" and is a part of our human egoistic nature. We cannot imagine a world without us but that is exactly what we must face. Otherwise, we must posit a perfectly nonsensical afterlife or a belief in personal reincarnation.
Thinking in my own field, I imagine all those bad paintings of "THE GREAT COMPOSERS" in their imaginary parnassus calmly contemplating their accomplishments in each others' company.
Against this, I think of the somewhat familiar joke where they open Beethoven's tomb and find a little man tearing up music. When they ask "Maestro, what are you doing?" he replies "I'm decomposing!"
About Spirituality
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
posted by Ed @ 7:28 PM
2 Comments
2 Comments:
It isn't inconceivable to me that consciousness in some form persists after the death of the body, in much the same way that radio waves continue to be propagated even when the receiver breaks and is tossed aside. Perhaps consciousness is itself a form of energy analogous to electromagnetism. Science has yet to give us a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, and new subatomic particles keep cropping up that weren't previously known. So there is room for entire new areas of knowledge, some of which which may pertain to life and consciousness.
At this point, we can only speculate and weigh the anecdotal evidence of an afterlife, such as it may be (including the so-called ouit-of body phenomena, which I can personally attest seem to be "real.") We do know, however, that energy and thus matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and that our constituent particles have already been incorporated into other creatures (including humans) that lived before us and that our atoms will end up in the bodies of others that come after us. So, in a scientifically defensible sense, immortality on a purely physical level seems inescapable.
--Joseph Dillon Ford
Hi Joe,
I guess I'd think of you as a sort of "science-mystic" and, why not?
I've never experienced out-of-body phenomena but scientists have tried various approaches:
http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2007/08/23/scientists_propose_explanation_for_outofbody_experiences.html
Though I hardly developed the thought, when I wrote of "personal reincarnation", I was trying to distinguish it from the physical, at least partial, reuse of matter that had been used to make up another previously living body.
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