Let's Get DEEP: What Happens After DEATH?

In reply to Olive00, I've reposted my earlier post (seen above), but there are many documented cases of reincarnation that seem to defy any alternative explanation. I'd have to look some up in my books, but one case I remember is a young child who was fascinated by aviation and actually knew what all the controls were for on a WWII aircraft when seeing it for the first time. Eventually, the parents discovered the name of the specific aircraft and determined the pilot who was killed in WWII and traveled to his home. The child described the home and told survivors details of the pilot's life that no one else could have known.

One question skeptics have is that if I've lived before, why can't I remember it? It seems that very young children can sometimes remember snippets of past lives, but as they get older, the memories fade.

You can also remember through past life regression, but this is problematic since the chances of being the reincarnation of anyone famous enough to even have a history exist about them are millions to one. I've been guided on several past life regression journeys. I was never anyone of any significance. However, interestingly, each past "life" had something in common with my current life.

To me, my belief in how the afterlife works, combined with the works of Don Beck on spiral dynamics and Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology books, explain pretty much all the great mysteries of life... why bad things happen to good people, why children sometimes die young, why incredibly evil people exist and are "allowed" by a higher power to do all the atrocities that they do.

Colby wrote:

Jesus is the only one who rose from the dead, so I will take him at his word.

You are a liar. J. Christ is not the only person who rose from the dead.

Simple answer that makes the most sense to me is that you cease to exist— just like before you were born. Emotionally it’s nice to believe other things and no disrespect to those who wish to organize their life in a way that includes religion but I personally doubt there’s much chance you can go on living when your brain has objectively died.

The concept and implications of reincarnation is an interesting one. Many may be pragmatic and think that if you dont remember your prior lives and if you won't carry your memories to your future selves, than the concept of reincarnation doesn't matter. However, experiencing something like a car accident and you are injured in such a way that you lose all memory and self identity, but your body otherwise goes on living fine is essentially the same thing. In that case does the fact you are still the same person "matter"? The decisions you made before your accident will significantly affect your life after the accident. Do you care about your future self in that scenario and want to do what is best to set up that post accident person well? Those questions are the same as those raised in reincarnation beliefs.

Regardless, reincarnation itself assumes linear time. Even if you do not believe in traditional reincarnation beliefs, a case could be made that the present exists for eternity and experienced by yourself for eternity - we may be just perceiving the passage of time.

One could also make the case that our universe is one single being, we are all the same entity. Not so different than considering 2 separate blood cells of your body are individuals but also part of one entity that will be recycled over time. Humans are just one step up in that concept, simply a part of one greater functional being. For all we know the universe has a greater level of self awareness than we do as humans, say the difference between a red blood cell and a human.

If you DO believe in reincarnation, the concepts matters to you, and may affect your decisions, you also have to believe in free will. You also have to believe that your perception of self is more than a manifestation of physical/chemical reactions in your brain. A strong case could be made that free will is only a perception and the universe is physically deterministic.

What I think happens: It's basically lights out. You are unconscious, like a deep sleep. It's like what you were before you were born. Nothing.

What would be cool: . I think about this a lot. Your actual death is painless. Big bright lights and a long white tunnel to another place or dimension. You arrive and you are greeted by a person who welcomes you to another phase of your life. No judgement, just a warm greeting.

You pass through another tunnel and there you meet all of your loved ones. You are able to visit places and experiences you once loved that still exist even though they might be gone in present day - houses you once lived in, restaurants you loved, parks, movie theaters, races you won, whatever. You get to experience these things again because they matter to you. It's the most beautiful experience you will ever have.

You also get to option of viewing and re-living unfortunate circumstances and you have the luxury of educating others in this space on how they shaped you and how we can be better moving forward. Evolution moves quicker in this space and we are able to send new souls back into our living world.

Eventually, we all move back to the living world, as higher-evolved people but still not perfect. It takes some souls longer to make the transition back to the living world but it's part of the process of improving each soul.

Our world is an imperfect and sometimes terrible place. It will never be perfect. We are working to make the living world better but it takes small steps from highly evolved and gifted inviduals from the other side to make that happen.

To clarify:

1. Some souls start at conception in the living world. Other souls come from the evolved "heavenly" space. These evolved souls change our world for the better with varying degreess of success.

2. Some are terrible souls who began at conception on Earth. They will take the longest to "fix" in the heavenly space.

Roof Inspector Gadget wrote:

So believing in Jesus is how you get into heaven? What a ridiculous system! We're supposed to take some sketchy accounts of what supposedly happened 2000 years ago and somehow make ourselves believe them to be true - and our eternal fate depends on our doing so? That seems downright perverse. Especially for those who are raised Muslim, or Hindu or any other religion. Talk about the odds being stacked against you!

Jesus once rode a dinosaur. The Bible tells us that God himself created all land animals on the sixth day of creation. Jesus died 2000 years ago, but last dinosaur was around 65 million years ago.....

....wait....what?!!!!

You ever pass out? Okay, then.

Bythebay12 wrote:

Ana Theist wrote:

Again: People don't get to *choose* their beliefs or nonbeliefs. So as long as they don't use force, or the threat of force, to impose their beliefs on others--and, in particular, don't try to enlist the physical or economic force of government to do so--I think it's all good.

I choose my beliefs freely.

No, you don't. "Ana" is right on this one.

You may possibly choose to acknowledge or embrace or act upon your beliefs, but you didn't CHOOSE those beliefs. Something(s) struck you as believable...and that was it.

If you find something unbelievable you can't believe it. If you find something to be believable you can't not believe it.

kibitzer wrote:

Bythebay12 wrote:

I choose my beliefs freely.

No, you don't. "Ana" is right on this one.

You may possibly choose to acknowledge or embrace or act upon your beliefs, but you didn't CHOOSE those beliefs. Something(s) struck you as believable...and that was it.

If you find something unbelievable you can't believe it. If you find something to be believable you can't not believe it.

I somewhat agree, but people change their beliefs all the time. Atheists adopt other religions and religious people become atheist. Our beliefs are changed by the experiences we have and the knowledge we obtain. The reality is we DO make choices about the experiences we subject ourselves too and the information we consume. So we don't necessarily 'choose' what we believe, but we at least play a role in 'choosing' *some of* the factors that decide what we believe.

Let's say you choose to hang out almost solely with the religious people whom you respect the most and you genuinely study their religion and partake in their practices for the next few years. You're more likely to believe in that religion- and the same goes for if you did the same with atheists. People literally change their whole belief systems based on going to church one time or taking one college class that challenged their existing beliefs. And some people (not everyone) often flip flop beliefs back and forth depending on the crowd and content they surround themselves with. Other people choose to never seriously subject themselves to other views so that their views won't be changed. This is easily seen in debates when one person is clearly ignoring information or refusing to research with an open-mind because it may be opposed to what they believe in.

So in the case, do the people ignoring information really lack the ability to choose what they believe in?? Or are they just 'choosing' to be stubborn. Given how much our society debates, most people would say the latter if they're honest... but then why don't we have the ability to 'choose' when it comes to our religious beliefs?

Sham 69 wrote:

?

Me neither, but what about the Elephants? Should we try to save them from extinction?

to the people saying there seem to be past lives recollection that can't be explained any other way

Seriously?

You don't think that's like finding it's so unbelievably remarkable that a cloud formation can look like a flower or a face or something.... In other words it's apophenia, the tendency to see patterns in random noise.

Just like a rock formation or a cloud can look like a face, coincidental occurrences can seem like strong evidence of past lives

People have active imaginations. They embellish. They find connections. Just because someone remembers something or has a strange birthmark, it's just imagination

It's like the cliche that how come people who have near-death experiences always just come back with platitudes like love is really important

How come people those that have near-death experiences never come back with a cure for Alzheimer's or with a theory of everything in physics that actually works. In other words how come no one ever learns anything interesting and inexplicable from their near-death experiences it's always the same old cliches

After all anything can be inexplicable if we want it to be. The simple mundane fact that I'm wearing a blue shirt and so are you can be a remarkable event. What are the odds we are both wearing blue shirts. What are the odds I had a dream of a fighter pilot and I find out I was born on the day that a fighter pilot died

I mean come on it's like is anything really so inexplicable, or are we just looking for it and then saying it is inexplicable

...like the ghost hunters who go into houses and are amazed that there are electromagnetic Transmissions going on... and there are sounds of the house settling. Well yeah that's in every house. But it seems so interesting when it's late at night and dark and the house is abandoned

But only because we're priming ourself to find this interesting

Anyway I guess the upshot of what I'm trying to say is stop being gullible stool pigeons and come to your senses that we are the result of natural processes and there has never been a repeatable clear demonstration otherwise

i have died twice in my life ...once during my sleep and the other time when i lapsed into unconsciousness from a waking state ...both deaths occured due to brain anuerysms which i subsequently had major surgery for and i have been kickin' around since,,,nearly 20 years and counting ...according to my medical support team i was clinically dead in both instances ...i have no recollection of a trip to the light through a tunnel to a plce of peace etc ...i was gone,then i was back ...some day i will be gone for good ,hopefully not too soon...well not before i get back under 20 mins for 5k's anyhow,hopefully this side of my 70th birthday ...

i hope this does not come across as arrogant but for me the belief that there is no afterlife actually improved me as a human being..i realised tat one can attempt to live their best life in relation to my fellow humans without the wish or hope in some sort of eternal payoff ...try to be the best i can be just because it is the right thing to do ..."ever tried? ...ever failed...no matter ...try again...fail again ...fail better' ...waiting for godot,sam beckett ...

Ezrun wrote:

to the people saying there seem to be past lives recollection that can't be explained any other way

Seriously?

I would urge you to actually read about some of the case studies of reincarnation. There are thousands of cases. Here is one. The book Soul Survivor documents the case of a small boy who was discovered to be the reincarnation of a WWII fighter pilot. The boy correctly identified the type of plane he flew, the name of the aircraft carrier, his first name, and at a reunion of WWII vets, accurately identified missions, locations, and was able to name 25 of his fellow crewmembers. He met the sister of the dead pilot and, according to her, knew details that only her brother could have known.

To be fair, there are lots of alleged cases in India that stretch credibility. To me, they're like the guy who said, "uh, and I saw JEE Sus in my GA rage." I discount most of those cases as a child seeking attention or parents wanting to show how gifted their child is.

But that doesn't mean that the other reincarnation cases aren't true. In one of their early books, either Weiss, Newton, or Moody cited several cases of reincarnation where the child went to their former villages and identified details that could not have been known without visiting those locations. These children often met with village elders and told them things that only the reincarnated person could know. In looking for a link to post, I found one expert who claimed to have studied over 2,500 cases of reincarnation.

Unfortunately, a lot of the reincarnation videos on YouTube are awful! The presentation of the information is so bad it destroys any credibility.

Here's a decent video of the WWII fighter pilot kid.

Thoughts from Space wrote:

What I think happens: It's basically lights out. You are unconscious, like a deep sleep. It's like what you were before you were born. Nothing.

Well...in this case you'd never know you ever existed as a human being on Earth. Nothingness is empty...non-existent. It's like unplugging any appliance from it's power source - it goes dead and ceases to function.

It's also like when you go to sleep at night, and if you don't have any dreams, you can't account for the hours you were asleep - it's nothingness...like you didn't exist. So if that's a permanent state after death, then it sure botches the heaven & hell concept, afterlife, reincarnation, etc. And with nothingness, I guess a person can't be held responsible for any of terrible things they have done on Earth.

Plausible concept but surely to disappoint the religious factions.

I continue to see many materialists posting their belief that our consciousness ends when our physical earth body dies, so I’ll again point everybody to the AP subreddit which, upon doing your own research, will prove that you have an immortal ethereal soul, even if not blatantly revealing the eternal deity because the spirit realm, like earth, respects your free will return to God so will not shove him in your face, but even in other planes you are not left without hints about God and Jesus, just like on earth.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AstralProjection/top/?t=all

Judgment

Bythebay12 wrote:

I’ll again point everybody to the AP subreddit which, upon doing your own research, will prove that you have an immortal ethereal soul . . .

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Good one!