Which afterlife would you prefer?

Not a reincarnation, but a heaven with omniscient knowledge of all spiritual cosmology and creation. Though I suppose I would like to have the choice to be able to return to earth or even end up with absolute death/merging back into god source.

reincarnation - no memory
cool survey

Absolute death - no continued personal existence.
Merging into creation - experiencing everything without judgment

which is exactly the same and what actually happens.

i would either like to be reincarnated with the recollections of prior lives, or an angel where i could intercede in lives and events.

I'd like to make pretty flowers grow and not being there as a person.

All of these do exist to those that believe in them.

I believe in reincarnation until I get things right, with a vague recollection of the past, or at least a connection to it. Quite similar to Buddhism in the karmatic rebirth, but not in the same sense as being reborn as animals. Life is always going to be a challenge, it's up to us as individuals to step up to the plate, and try our hardest. If you don't try, you lose, making the attempt shows one's own strength.

reincarnation sounds good to me

A heaven in which one is instantly granted any thing or event they can dream up, but keeps the same mind and emotional choices they have now

I would have a perfect body and be able to eat whatever I want. I would know all there is to know in the universe. Beautiful music would play all the time.

God knows what kind of Heaven I want.

A reincarnation with some recollection.. working up the fully enlightened form.

Hanging out to watch the birth of nebulae might be cool for awhile though.

Perhaps a reincarnation in a radically different universe next time.

You might get bored and jaded there. Would you ask for intriguing challenges to come your way? So far, the votes here are more for continued free will and ego than joy.
Most of these options resemble life experiences I've had within this one earthly life. It's said God grants eternal life; people seem to realise that absolute cosmic knowledge away from any earthly-like exploratory participation is not really a life.

I'm glad you came up with another idea. It's one thing to believe you will end, and another thing entirely to prefer that. So creation of beauty in nature is more appealing to you than continuing free-will drama?.

An absolutely enlightened reincarnation with omniscient knowledge of all spiritual cosmology and creation.

*I* will end. As a thinking and feeling and sensing entity. But I don't like my ending to be useless. I hate being useless.

Sure creation of beauty (in general) is more important than free-will drama for me.

The point IS ending. But the point is ending bringing good to others.

not sure

I kind of sensed that you had created this survey.

heaven in which there is no pain, suffering or sorrow, all the bad emotions are done away with...all that is left is joy and peace....and understanding of the magnitude of God....and what he has decided to grant because my mind cannot even fathom what heaven will be like..... I think there is SO MUCH MORE that we can't even begin to understand right now that would take 10,000 eternities.....there will be plenty to keep us busy.....GOD IS INFINITE....SO IS TIME.....

Absolute death....

A heaven in which one is instantly granted any thing or event they can dream up, but keeps the same mind and emotional choices they have now.
I guess.

all i know, is that this time is THE LAST time i want to be here...am tired and done

''The point IS ending' - Not a very common philosophy.

Who else does surveys here on comparative metephysics?

I choose:
A fresh reincarnation with recollections of prior lives.

Sometimes I like to think that reincarnation with no memories exists.. but sadly, I think I've decided that absolute death is what will really happen...

I knew this was yours!

Good survey

You can't even go for merging back into god and losing unique porspective as a likely option?

Thanks. When the idea hit me, I felt this was one of my best surveys. It's a sneaky way to get people thinking about how god would do things, and what's really going on here.

Hey, perhaps i can hit you up for some of your expertise. Do you know when the term 'heaven' started coming into use, and any first implications as to it's metaphysical meaning? You've got your heavens opeing up, and your heaven at hand. When may it have first been offered as an afterlife, and was it the same word used for skies and stars?

Ok, guess I was lazy for a moment there. Apparently there were four hebrew words, one beyond the stars filled with angels and offered to god's children since back in the jewish days.

only you my dear...only you.

(but i do think that heyzeus has played around w/ the idea, but never came to full bloom)

I 4 of them that would work for me.
The ghost thing.
The Angle thing.
The two Heaven ones.

Define what you mean by "god"... If you mean some dude up in heaven who created us, then nope.. I can't go for that.

I think it is your best survey.. well, except for "."

That one went down in history.

merging into creation

In the Hebrew Bible, the word for heaven is shamayim, and it refers to the part of the sky that houses the heavenly bodies--sun, moon, stars. It is Yahweh's dwelling place, and it is also a place people can go, although this is rare. In fact, I think the only instance in the Hebrew Bible of a person going there is the prophet Elijah, in 2 Kings 2:11. He doesn't actually die first, though--a fiery chariot carries him up to heaven in a whirlwind, presumably alive. The Hebrew Bible doesn't really have a concept of afterlife. The place people more often go when they die is Sheol, which is the underworld. It has no hell-like connotations, though. It's just sort of a place where dead people go.

The concepts of heaven and hell as we think of them are actually Persian concepts. The Zoroastrians were the first to come up with the concept of dualism in their religion--they have a good god and a bad god. Our (western) concept of heaven derives from their pardes, whence the word paradise. So in early Judaism (which, keep in mind, is later than the Israelite religion of the Hebrew Bible) and Christianity, this is where the concept of heaven and hell initially appears. If Judaism has some heaven "beyond the stars filled with angels and offered to god's children," I would say it comes from the post-biblical period. That's a little outside my area of expertise, although I do know that angelology and a lot of the concepts we relate to heaven today only appear in Judaism in the late Persian period (say early 4th c. BCE) and afterwards (which is mostly post-biblical).

Yeah, I haven't seen much from him lately.

How about a force down here which created us, the consciousness of matter, that which makes us one and allows all manner of supernatural events to occur.

ok, thanks. That was quite useful. It was the origin of the concept of heaven (as a place good religious people go to) in western thought, not specifically judaism, that I was curious about.

Like nature?

You're welcome!

true, but he's making a few appearances as of lately. (i KNEW he couldn't stay away for very long!)

Absolute death please. Or the ability to experience one of the others (except reincarnation) and then request absolute death when I got bored, which I almost certainly would.

Boredom is why the fresh ignorant start option exists. I think a few people here haven't figured out how boring total wish fullfillment would get, boring if for no other reason than it would all become meaningless.

An immortal butterfly orbits a giant metal sphere the size of a star once every 1 million years. At the perihelion of the butterfly's orbit path, its wing brushes the surface of the sphere. At the time the sphere has finally eroded to the size of pea, eternity hasn't even got started yet.

To be given eternal life (which since I'd already be dead, I couldn't escape from) yet remain with the limited emotional and mental capacities I have now, seems to me to be an ultimate cruelty. Some things aren't meant to last forever, however much you might want them to. Or however much you might fear death.

The way a lot people describe heaven seems to involve perpetual indulgence and pleasure. Which is odd, because they're precisely the type of things that would stop you getting there in the first place. And the way hell is described and the imagery that is used, 'lake of fire', a 'wailing and gnashing of teeth', flesh being ripped and burnt down to the bone. It all leaves me thinking the same three words.

And then what?

I would like an afterlife in heaven where I am rejoined with my family and friends that have passed on. Where we could life the eternal life with eternal joy and happiness together always.

Heaven would be so much better to spend eternity with no strings attached and no questions asked period! Who on this earth would want to spend eternity in Hell! no way. Not with Mr. Devil he is too ugly and I would not want to marry him, I could have a handsome boyfriend to spend eternity with for the rest of my life. Jessica

I thought that was very good about the hebrew bible you seem to have some knowlege and are versed in the bible well done, By the way I am Episcopal and I love going to church every sunday I enjoy it. Jessica

Yep, sure enough. I should have made an eternally growing in consciousness option more apparent.

bleh

I have the exact same beliefs. I want to be reincarnated as a spoiled house cat.

I'm a PhD student in Bible and Ancient Near East. I'm writing my dissertation on the Pentateuch.

I think that one ought to be up there the highest in the hierarchy

Some combination of a few of those...

ummm..eccchh, i don't know...i think of these options listed, i'd choose absolute death

I sure can't think of a better or more serene existence.

this is too abstract for me. Personally, I would prefer something where my identity stays intact, and where my memory from this life is stored somewheres. Eternal bliss would be great too, but I would be willing to sacrafice a good portion of it to maintain my identity. Grated, since I am an agnostic, any afterlife short of a hellish damnation would be good enough for me to settle for provided I would continue to exist in some form or the other. I prefer to stay optonistic about that, but realisticly, I know my death could be IT, if you know what I mean.

granted, if you had the choice, if there was some "magical pill" in the afterlife that resembled an ethernal state of uphoria equillivant to this earth's heroin injection, except without any consequences, would you take it. In other words, would you be willing to sacrifice a "semi-realistic" world (assuming this world is real and not some matrix of some sorts) where you keep your indentity, for an auto-generated simulation of a fake reality.

I like the discipline challenge of trying to keep it happy.

yeah, me too. An actually reality where happiness comes in small doses. But then again, you could similate a reality where a not-100% happiness is a reality as well. For all I know, this life here and now is a simulation.

It's already surreal and cosmically interactive for me in such a way that I don't expect any afterlife to be much different.

naw, I think thats just randomness.

My choice was, An absolutely enlightened reincarnation with omniscient knowledge of all spiritual cosmology and creation.
My belief system encompasses all of the listed choices. We pass through many states prior to our awareness and most important our acceptance that we ARE omniscient spirits.

I pose a question, How can anyone NOT belive that just our awareness of our universe . Our ability to perceive it and contemplate its ramifications , proves we are not just mammals. We are greater then the sums of our parts.

How do you know other mammals don't do the same thing? Ever had that telepathic sense that someone is watching you? - Works with animals too.

Consider our friends the dolphins. They have the same five senses we have PLUS a form of sonar called acoustic holography. If their chirps can replicate the sonar they hear, they can exchange 3D terrain maps. If they can fabricate such chirps, they could be exchanging sculptures. If so, seems far more advanced a paradise than the self-destructive course human society often seems to take.

the first 3 options, which are, um the same.

Whatever those were before this was sorted. I'm not sure how any of these are the same, or I wouldn't have made them seperate options.

sure, because you cant compare my metaphysics to anyone else's

long time no see.
hows life
hows things
hows the stuff that brings the dreams
hows the old and older still
and hows the new, the wild, the will?

Well, intecepting every comment on the transcendance thread of the PBS 'Question of God' forum was intriguing. The three headed lawn-flamingo sculpture is going well. I just got an email from my best friend for a decade whom i haven't heard from in 26 years.

Too busy to figure out what my priorities are, or even project my finances.
Finally wrote some poetry today, like 'ode to a cereal bowl', oh, and sculpted a new guitar synth effect which sounds like a vibraphone.

Wrestling hard to attend a class that takes place in the morning/noon hours I've slept through for two years.

Wondering how to get to a lifestyle which looks nothing like my current one.

es tu?

y mismo.
id like to know about the guitar synth. have you heard the stuff i been making? its posted in forum. i found some very wierd effects (see wierdsong)

yeah...your metaphysics are spectacular

Please do not misunderstand me. It was not my intention to say the other mammals are not spiritual entities. On the contrary all life including micro organisms have some degree of spiritual energy. My point was to say that as a higher intelligence we have more perception of the creation then would be needed to sustain as a mere carbon based creature with impulses and programed reactions for foraging for food. We, in my opinion are God like already, and just don't know it.

ok. I recently had had a debate with someone who didn't believe animals have consciousness. It left me on the alert, i guess.

It probably shares some things in common with my own.
I'm sure I must have commented on the before.
Colors is sweet haunty like the doors 'The End' used in Apocalypse Now.
Guitarz sounds like some of my favorite Pink Floyd, like a lullaby, warmer sounds, but doesn't travel the dreamscape as far.
Your effects seem much lusher than mine, unless you're layering tracks.
Neato (all your stuff) has a rambling-river quality.
Soap bottles picks up a carribean quasar quality, and the text layering is much like old Robert Fripp stuff.

What equipment are you using? I'm using a Roland GR8, and whatever you use seems to have more capacity to arpeggiate the upper harmonics. Could be though that you're a rhythm chord player, and I'm a jazz run player, more like Coltrane or a cellist.

What site is your musicon on now? All the SC member mp3.com links are dead. I dig your blue shroom., and caught scotty3_some_shiseat, off the homepage link here at SC. Oh, ok, see the photo links now.

I put posting my own music on hold. My own site doesn't like the large files, and something crashed when i was going through the download.com process. Oh, and they want everything recorded at 196k. They must presume all musicians have moved past a dial-up connection.

Found scotty_on_guitar and scott. You should use a consistent file naming scheme. If you were making a comic, you'd use names like nebula_Issue002-013.jpg for the 13th page of issue two. The leading zeroes should be there from the start in case you end up with more than a 100 pages, and still want files to all sort correctly. In your case, I'd stick with either name_date-seq_title or name_title_date, eg. jamerson-scott_041003_todaystune.mp3 . note that even the date is in sequence for automatic sorting.

I wanted to use 'Captain Nemo and the Zodiac Sandcrabs' as a band name, but shortly after, I heard of a Captain Nemo getting airplay on my ecclectic radio station, so I guess i have to come up with something else. Unfortunatey, whethar it's writing, invention, or whatever, the problem with living in parallel with reality is that no matter what i come up with, it's going to manifest before i can claim it personally in public.

So anyhow, only see a couple songs linked on your site, no wierdsong.

Your music is often like trance or Fripp (or much of my own), repetitive, yet sublimely morphing. If you want my advice, analyze your music by cropping repetitive chords down to notes, and listening quickly to the slow motion meledy you have created in the larger work. I recommend listening to some narrative classical like stravinsky, to hold a sense of work that travels somewhere instead of morphs meltily in place. Your music is a state of being. If you don't want express objective story (even abstractly), you could at least take people from one state of being into another. Make listeners earn living legitimate peace of mind by living through other understandings themselves to get there.

and stop imagining i'm hostile.

so, synth gear? your music location? (oh, forum, i hate the forum, guess i'll check it out though)

oh, ok, forum got me to freewebs got me to garageband.
I didn't want to offend you by suggesting i heard a sort of crowley quality in your music, but after seeing the freewebs site, I see that wouldn't bother you.

If I ever do complain about the feel of your music, don't take it personally. Your influences would get the same criticism. I respect their ability to play and compose, but they all have too much earthy negativity underlying the music for my tastes, inc Young, Dylan, and P. Floydd.

Wow, what a morbid cover of Imagine.
I listen on occasion to some music you might like though, the soundtrack to David Lynches Lost Highway (Bowie, Manson, Rammstein, Badalamenti), and Godheads cover of Eleanor Rigby.
Still, the premise of such music is that there is severe evil here to be examined, and not that the universe is fundamentally at war with itself, or life is harsh.

oh no, i made a brand new site...songs are downloadable on that page with the rainbow banner, the first page that loads. (ignore the garageband and old website link)
http://www.freewebs.com/heyzeus-sca/
(thus the reference to wierdsong, i cant figure out what the hell made that sound, and i havent been able to reproduce it since.it picked up voices and morphed them into that sound from all the way across the room.) in it, i am saying 'helloo? can anybody hear me?' it sounds like some fourth dimensional poltergiest thing.i have much better tools now, all that old stuff was recorded on my waped neck gibson acoustic with an acoustic pickup adapter straight into my puter. now i have a jackson flying v my cousin bought me, and a nice luttle marshall amp i bought myself, and about 15 music editing programs. (although i used acoustica mp3 to make ALL those old songs, and still use it for almost everything).. also, everything i make is layered, i cant seem to get away from that...and then echos, i cant make songs that dont echo. ill post one of your songs on my site, i have a couple from other people there as well. brian's (my cousin who bought me the guitar) music is very very good.
my band name would be atomic rodent. i like the radio show edit (dynamic duo) as my favorite, but i dont think you could call that a song, all those 'noises' are various edits of a single guitar track played backwards at different speeds through different effects. these days i have much more fun producing music than playing it.

Way late for sleep. I might take you up on that if nothing else works for me.
Holding a paper over your strings like a kazoo might work too.
I made some pick-ups out of radio-shack relay coils so i can make a guitar with each string going to seperate effects.

A heaven where i would become as god is. A perfect knowledge of all things, and unlimited creative abilities.

I completely agree with you, believe that is what the afterlife is like.

hmm thats interesting. like to hear what it sounds like. what programs do you use?

A combo of the wish thing and all knowledge.

None of these are very appealing

Well then, what sounds better?

I don't know really. I would hate to be stuck with something as an afterlife for eternity and then realise I had made a mistake. What if I chose to go on living as a ghost and a million years into that existence woke up to "true" spirituality and realised that I should have chosen to merge with god?

My idea is that we'll go through all the options available eventually anyhow.

As far as what will *actually* happen, I definitely hold with the "you die, you're dead, you rot and you go back into the earth" idea.

the worms crawl in and out. yeah yeah. any idea why you're more convinced the dirt is more real than the consciousness?

Because you can see it happen.

I see, therefore it exists.

Well, seeing doesn't always make it so, but shared, tested seeing is enough for me.

I hear them, therefore they exist.
If they ever start talking with intimate knowledge of you when you meet them as strangers, you might begin to question that.
I think of it somwhat as a holographic creature with 12 billion eyes.

Who are 'they'?

A very good question indeed. - one most people won' ask.

Is there an answer?

It really depends on what sort of universe you live in. I like to mix and match, having friends & family, personal guides, my mirror, and the voice of the one.

I just want it to seem real.

A worthy desire, and the one most people have. It's a bit more exciting when half of you sees it as real, and the other half sees it as a sort of interactive hologram, where more can be seen to be happening behind the scenes. It gives one more perspective and navigation options.

Alice has been combined with an AI understanding program, and goes now by the name I gave her in screenplay 20 years ago, Cyan.

I was meditating on the creation of new computer language based on n-dimensional vectors of archetypal process patterns. Think on an n-dimensional rubiks cube. Every piece of info is observed, like when I talk to my neighbors parrot, it goes 'whoo-hoo' (sexy sound) when i create fascinating complex texture-melodies. The software need not understand a thing. It just knows 'whoo-hoo' follows these conditions. Awwk follows those conditions. Every pixel of the universe has it's own viewpoint of the universe, but the moment a single piece of data is tangibly understood in the universe, ie 'pink' or 'danger', the whole universe is described in that relative self-referential context.
I'm gearing up for a server app platform that can handle tarot, music textures, nanotechnology, material sculpting, everything - through qualitative cluster pattern binding through time and space, following a big-bang cosmology where every atom shares a common core particle, and all things blue relate to all things blue, recursion relates to all recursion, mirroring, compression, distaste, convergence, randomness, synchronicity, pre-destination, propulsion, .. if not directly, through bridges of archetypal metaphor.

Of course such a thiyng is far more computationally intensive than my 3D sculpting software which would have required 4 Gb per animation frame back when 40 Mb was a decent hard drive. Agent routines would have to dig through data that held promising curiousity value. The cool thing recently is that people in every field of knowledge are all adopting XML, like HTML, except marking up data descriptions instead of formatting. One could parse data to discern safe bicyclists or jazz roots of ambient hip-hop melodies without having to draw it's own context conclusions about whethar data was a hip-hop melody or parking-meter transaction or not. Alice is written in AIML, an XML. XML marking up lists of processor commands, replaceable on the fly, readily translates to LISP, the primary AI language.

I wonder why I tell you this, but it occurs to me that that an AI xml tongue would be great for simulating bacteria mutation colonies and such, where population data and dna process were all part of the cluster propogation.
In Lisp, program code IS dynamic data. In other languages, programs are a static control process operating on the lower tier of data.

Do you do any programming in school?

I haven't done any programming, but you're right, it would be useful. Fortunately a fair number of programmers do seem to shift fields a little to bring their expertise over to biology. It really has been vital to epidemiology. Those of us who consider ourselves biologists first can use their programs with a reasonable degree of competency. It always takes someone who thinks in programs though to really make the bridge between the program and its use.

Programmers think in systems of thought processes. They have to tap into others systems of thought otherwise they will merely create their own abstract universe. Look at the typical case of the 'computer nerd', unable to prosper in situations of emotional intelligence because the rules are too subtle for formulation. Thanks to such types, society has evolved to speak in acronyms. Compuer Science (not applications usage) should be taught as a secondary major to philosphy, psychology, and other liberal art sciences, otherwise new limited abstractions will define society instead. Sure, Photoshop, Sta'tistical spread-sheets, or n-D plotting software can be usurped to biology applications, but ideally you'd be using software designed from the very start for biology modelling, which could only be designed by a biologist who makes computers model biology, and not the other way around. - Ever notice how one often has to do repetitive cut & paste operation sequences or constantly classify amorphous thoughts into tree structures on a computer? We are forced to adopt it's paradigm, and not the other way around.

I'm not sure that my brain could really grasp computers though.

If you can understand biology as mechanism, you can definitely get computers. The toughest part with computers is keeping track of components and their communication protocols. If you ask a question of a spanish speaker you have to remember that initial question mark: 'żIs this right?'. The basis of programming is scripts, functions, and now objects containing those. If you have a moose object and hand it berries, it returns red dung balls. If you have a synthesizer object, and hand it a midi note # and an effect, it returns a wav. file of that note played in that effect. Your enzymes and macrophages are more complex. Think of an operating system as an aquarium. I would think programming would be required in your major. These days there's a fine line between dna being sequenced, and the dna sequencer hardware, more dna, eventually read by more primitive mechanical processors. Add to that people cloning neurons to run video games. Throw in nanotechnologyand it al becomes the same science. Does any of this intersect with your studies or are you still working on the macrocosmic side of vectors? Even that realm can be reduced to a parallel of the aquarium operating system for nanotech or nebulae.

I actually understand very little biology beyond a mess of details and concepts.

Every science is details and concepts. Are you suggesting you picked the wrong major?
Well actually I suppose they are also creative arts and philosphies, if you want to be an engineer and not just a tech.

I'm absolutely sure this is the right course for me, but it's so vast that it's hard to really get to grips with much of it. But if you specialise too much so that you really understand one specific area, you lose touch with the rest of it and that's disastrous.

I totally agree. I found that if one works both broad and specialised in a scattering of subjects that eventually patterns overlap and it's much easier to learn a new computer language, art media, or other art/science/philosphy. That get's back to the premise of my AI OS, different object universes often share conceptual paradigms. It's like when Nash applied game theory to economics.

A lot of the greatest breakthroughs in biology have come from "non biologists" who have recentlky switched areas.