Currently reading this. Thoughts? I find the arguments for NDE compelling
You're the one reading it. You tell us. What's the argument?
>>23821191looks gay & stupid
People find all kinds of stupid shit "compelling."
>>23821202Yes, such as evolution
>>23821191There is no ego afterlife, you simply fade back into the Qualia field and are recycled. I guess you could call this field god.
>>23821195People tripping on organic DMT while dying.
>>23821203You're just the exception that proves the rule.
>>23821191Anyone can easily experience the chemical release identical with that of an NDE themselves with ayahuasca or another similar psychedelic, but reports of hippies spacing out with some shaman in the Andes tend to have nothing to say about the afterlife. Probably because they're not in a mental state dreading imminent death.
the idea of an after life is so tiringi just want nothingjust thinking about it makes me want to kms
>>23821227Our mortal bodies are like biomechanical spacesuits from some higher presence, state-of-awareness, consciousness or so-called soul to inhabit and manifest in this world of matter. If you tinker with the biomechanical spacesuit enough (for instance, through the introduction of a foreign substance into it such as naturally occurring hallucinogens), such that it profoundly alters the consciousness or even allows it to leave the confines of the body/biomechanical-spacesuit for some time, I would not be surprised if this actually could give one a window in alternate realities, always invisibly present around us but typically imperceptible through the normal five-senses window of perception.As such, shamans, and shamanic experiences, could actually have something to say on the afterlife, but I don’t expect the average materialist to credit this, or for them to come to my side. Other parallels could include the darkness retreat of some Tibetan Buddhists, the alleged incubation-practices of some of the early Greek philosophers like Parmenides according to some ancient marble inscriptions found in Italy (where similarly to some of these Tibetans, they sealed themselves up in a dark cave for a while so that “their spirit could explore beyond the confines of their body”), and perhaps other forms of extreme asceticism or spiritual practice taken on by other saints, alleged prophets and messengers, monks of various religions on retreats, etc.The part about Parmenides’ practice and likely other early Greek Presocratic philosophers is found in pic related, Peter Kingsley’s excellent book “In the Dark Places of Wisdom.” It seems irrelevant if you take all this very dogmatically, materialistically, with a literal-mind, but practices like these could’ve been ancient ways of inducing OBE-states (out-of-body experiences), and hence be relevant to the OP. There’s a whole dimension of phenomena and experiencing most of us have not developed much in, do not know much about. Ironically, people we deride as “backwards primitive shamans in the Andes” or “kooky old ancient Greeks who (for one instance) thought everything was made of water or whatever”, might in fact be more developed than us in regions such as these. Our technological and civilizational advancement, while marvelous and awe-inspiring in many respects, in other respects may have brought us further from the spirit and the basic awareness of alternate realities that even some primitive indigenous tribesman with his feet firmly planted in the earth could’ve been more easily aware of.
>>23821274Forgot the pic lol
>>23821274>>23821278Thanks buddy. I didn't know there were any sources supporting Parmenidean mysticism but I'm not at all surprised to hear of it. I read what I could about Pythagoras' mysticism in Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius and it's more likely than not that at least some other philosophers took part in similar rituals and rites as Pyth. did. Anyway, my point was not to deny this higher state of awareness at all, rather to deny a literal afterlife. On the contrary, my interpretation is that 'afterlife', much like 'reincarnation', is a metaphorical term to explain a 'soul' proceeding beyond ordinary consciousness to the higher level of consciousness. In this process the 'soul' metaphorically 'dies' to access 'afterlife' after which it may experience 'rebirth'.
>>23821191>
>>23821274>Our mortal bodies are like biomechanical spacesuits from some higher presence, state-of-awareness, consciousness or so-called soul to inhabit and manifest in this world of matter. If you tinker with the biomechanical spacesuit enough (for instance, through the introduction of a foreign substance into it such as naturally occurring hallucinogens), such that it profoundly alters the consciousness or even allows it to leave the confines of the body/biomechanical-spacesuit for some time, I would not be surprised if this actually could give one a window in alternate realities, always invisibly present around us but typically imperceptible through the normal five-senses window of perception.what predictions about observables does this model make that are different from the hallucination model?
>>23821191https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/KarmaQ&A/Section0004.html>28. What is the process by which rebirth happens?The Buddha’s short explanation is that,>at the moment of death, an act of craving heads toward a new birth in a new world of experience. If you cling to that craving, you’re reborn.The analogy he gives is of a fire jumping from one house to another. Just as a fire depends on the wind to sustain and carry it from one house to the next,>when you cling to craving here and now, at the moment of death, it sustains and carries you to the next lifeIn a longer explanation, the Buddha lists four stages to the process:• First, based on ignorance, there’s craving, which can be for any of three things:—sensual fantasies;—becoming—a particular identity in a particular world of experience; or—non-becoming, the desire to destroy a particular identity in a particular world of experience.One of the Buddha’s discoveries is that this last craving(non-becoming/suicide), instead of putting an end to becoming, actually creates new becoming.This is why the path to the end of kamma and rebirth has to develop dispassion for all three forms of craving so as to put them aside.• Next, based on craving, there’s clinging—you feed mentally off the craving, in hopes that it will take you to even more food.• Then there’s becoming, in which a potential world of experience, together with a potential identity within that world, appears to the mind.These worlds can exist on any of three levels:—the sensory level—ranging from the pains of hell and the animal realm, through the mixed pleasures and pains of the human world, and on up to the pleasures of the sensual heavens;—the realm of form—heavens in which the inhabitants enjoy the pleasures of pure form;—the realm of formlessness—heavens in which the inhabitants enjoy formless pleasures, such as the pleasure of infinite space or of infinite consciousness.The range of worlds and identities that will appear in this way at your death will come from your past actions—in body, speech, and mind. Unskillful actions will produce painful becomings; skillful actions, pleasant ones. This is why it’s important to develop skillful actions throughout life. In this way, such practices as generosity, virtue, and meditation not only lead to happiness in this lifetime, but also provide the possibility of happy future lives.• Then there’s birth, when you move into taking on a role in one of the potential worlds of experience.These four steps are the same process you experience when the mind goes for a distracting thought while you meditate—which is why learning how to keep the mind concentrated on a single object without getting waylaid by distracting thoughts is an excellent preparation in learning to die skillfully.
>>23821191https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/TruthOfRebirth/Section0003.html>skillful actions always lead in the direction of happiness and well-being; unskillful actions always lead in the direction of suffering and harm.>it’s a safer wager to assume that actions bear results that can affect not only this lifetime but also lifetimes after this than it is to assume the opposite.>it is a safer, more reasonable, and more honorable policy to assume the truth of these teachings than it would be to assume otherwise.>action is an investment that, like all investments, incurs risks.In MN 60, the Buddha pointed out that anyone who adheres to the annihilationist view would not be expected to avoid unskillful behavior,whereas those who hold to the opposite—mundane right view—would be expected to avoid unskillful behavior.Then he said of the first (annihilationist) group:“With regard to this, an observant person considers thus: ‘If there is no next world, then—with the breakup of the body, after death—this venerable person has made himself safe. But if there is the next world, then this venerable person—with the breakup of the body, after death—will reappear in a plane of deprivation, a bad destination, a lower realm, hell. Even if we didn’t speak of the next world, and there weren’t the true statement of those venerable contemplatives & brahmans [who assert the existence of the next world], this venerable person is still criticized in the here-&-now by the observant as a person of bad habits & wrong view: one who holds to a doctrine of non-existence.’ If there really is a next world, then this venerable person has made a bad throw twice: in that he is criticized by the observant here-&-now, and in that—with the breakup of the body, after death—he will reappear in a plane of deprivation, a bad destination, a lower realm, hell. Thus this safe-bet teaching, when poorly grasped & poorly adopted by him, covers (only) one side, and leaves behind the possibility of the skillful.”As for the second group—those who hold to mundane right view and act on it—he said this:“With regard to this, an observant person considers thus: ‘If there is the next world, then this venerable person—with the breakup of the body, after death—will reappear in a good destination, a heavenly world. Even if we didn’t speak of the next world, and there weren’t the true statement of those venerable contemplatives & brahmans, this venerable person is still praised in the here-&-now by the observant as a person of good habits & right view: one who holds to a doctrine of existence.’ If there really is a next world, then this venerable person has made a good throw twice, in that he is praised by the observant here-&-now; and in that—with the breakup of the body, after death—he will reappear in a good destination, a heavenly world. Thus this safe-bet teaching, when well grasped & adopted by him, covers both sides, and leaves behind the possibility of the unskillful.” — MN 60
>>23821191Schopenhauer had some things to say about the enduring Self or your being.
Death is too boring for /lit/
>>23821362> Anyway, my point was not to deny this higher state of awareness at all, rather to deny a literal afterlife. On the contrary, my interpretation is that 'afterlife', much like 'reincarnation', is a metaphorical term to explain a 'soul' proceeding beyond ordinary consciousness to the higher level of consciousness. In this process the 'soul' metaphorically 'dies' to access 'afterlife' after which it may experience 'rebirth'.Very interesting and I now see your point. After all, you do have a point, in that the ‘afterlife’, as commonly conceived, is supposed to be the state of an immaterial soul, presence, consciousness, psyche, mind or spirit of ours existing in some higher, subtler plane, normally invisible to us, yet still continuing to experience some modality of reality there. But wouldn’t that still ‘life’, or living, but simply in some other form?>>23821527That people could commonly witness or experience similar reported phenomena in this out-of-body dimension, including commonly reported entity contact (communion with subtle or extradimensional entities).That they could potentially commune with ghosts of the dead, ancestors, various spirits and spiritual entities in general (follow-up to the last one).That phenomena like remote viewing, clairvoyance, clairaudience, precognition, telepathy, etc., could become more easily facilitated in this state. (Ayahuasca used to be called “telepathine” by anthropologists and biochemists precisely because of the exact reputation it had for promoting exactly that, the phenomenon of telepathy! n.b.: they specifically called the molecule “harmine” that, viz. they called it telepathine, which is a component of ayahuasca which they took as the major psychoactive one, but this is now seen to be mistaken, although it does contribute to and activate these psychoactive effects through its MAOI activity).People could report being healed/helped/cured, or conversely harmed/cursed from a distance by shamans engaging in these and other ritual forms of activity meant to expand their consciousness into what they regard as the spirit plane of reality.And so forth. Direct experience speaks much louder than words here, however. The great and ironic paradox here, too, is that if any of this were possible, it would be prone to being very easily dismissed by members of a technocratic materialistic increasingly secularized society. Simply explainable as “the drugs fucking up your normal brain chemistry and functioning and hence making you hallucinate and even become temporarily insane, if not permanently so, if you do these drugs long enough or in very high doses.”
>>23821621>>23821621>But wouldn’t that still ‘life’, or living, but simply in some other form?>The great and ironic paradox here, too, is that if any of this were possible, it would be prone to being very easily dismissedSince this is a metaphysical subject, it's beyond the fundamental limit of knowledge, so we're completely resigned to either leaving the issue of its truth unresolved or at some point resorting to the acceptance of some dogma. My own beliefs rest on a personal experience that I found corroborated by all esoteric traditions, but increasingly also by scientific knowledge itself. So what we can say in regard to the materialists is that their ideology doesn't even hold up against itself in regards to mathematics (incompleteness theorem), quantum mechanics (uncertainty principle), cosmology (black holes, tentatively), computing (halting problem), consciousness (hard problem) and so on. Materialism wasn't even a tenable position in Antiquity, it was thoroughly refuted by the Sophists and Pyrrhonists.
>>23821833Excellent, very well put, and I’m happy for you. But you’re missing something beyond the dichotomy of either agnosticism or dogmatism: direct experience, perhaps such as that promoted by Robert Monroe. It’s in an entirely different dimension of experience than just philosophizing about it, although philosophy can also be great and wonderful.
Human beings are generally so retarded that for thousands of years they've been traumatized and hung up on the fact that sometimes people's bodies stop working.There has been an impressive amount of cope written about this infantile trauma.
>>23822473>ColdSteel Hedgehog has entered the chat
I'm a hardcore Christian, and frankly all these means to prove Christ's existence or justify our worldview make me sick. It's a matter of faith. Either you choose to believe, or not, and there will always be more reasons to not believe than there are to believe. Wrestling with your doubt it part of the lifestyle and is to be embraced.
>>23822859>all these means to prove Christ's existence or justify our worldview make me sick. It's a matter of faith. Either you choose to believe, or notwe know you are a retard, you can leave now anon
>>23821191There is no reason to believe in an afterlife. And certainly r/tripreport redditors are the worst argument in favor of it. If NDEs provide evidence for an immortal soul and afterlife, then why not also dreams? But nobody would claim that because dreams are not le special near death halluzination but merely muh ordinary, halluzination.Stop coping and learn to accept that there is just atoms and void and when you die, you simply cease to exist.
>>23821833I get it for the hard problem, halting problem, and incompleteness. Black holes and and uncertainty, thoughever? Black holes just say that our understanding of gravity is wrong in some way that can very well be solvable by science. Uncertainty just states something about how measurement on a quantum scale can never be accurate due to energy interaction. How do do these refute materialism?
>>23822473Thats what happens when you are a materialist and think that it all ends when your body dies>>23823115You will get what you ask for
>>23821191>ThoughtsNow it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
>>23823167And you will not get what you hope for.
>>23821833>Materialism wasn't even a tenable position in Antiquity, it was thoroughly refuted by the Sophists and Pyrrhonists.The skeptics also "refuted" (platonic) idealism and every other metaphysical position they knew about and let us not start talking about the earliest pseuds (aka sophists)...Materialism as presented by Democritus and Epicurus were the strongest positions in antiquity by argumentation and the success of modern science is due to it being a sprawling degenaracy of Epicurean philosophy.
