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Sometimes I have to wonder how sad it really is that we simply die and end of story...
I can think of many examples or reasons to consider a simple end something of a good thing. A blessing. Other reasons to consider that are not so bad at all. Live life to the fullest and not worry about the end either way. We're all going to end up there one way or another. Sooner or later. No point in wasting time fretting about the end before we're there, because that will surely mean once we're there we'll regret we didn't make better use of our time while we still could!
I envy Christians because they have this fantasy of living on a brand new refurbished earth and in a cube shaped "New Heaven" with streets of gold and pure water and worshiping God all day and night and it helps them to get through miserable days and nights. Their lives go easier because for them there is a payoff at the end of the day. For skeptics there isn't any. Life is rotten and when we die the best that can be said is we stop suffering and go back to eternal nothingness. Cold comfort.
I envy Christians because they have this fantasy of living on a brand new refurbished earth and in a cube shaped "New Heaven" with streets of gold and pure water and worshiping God all day and night and it helps them to get through miserable days and nights. Their lives go easier because for them there is a payoff at the end of the day. For skeptics there isn't any. Life is rotten and when we die the best that can be said is we stop suffering and go back to eternal nothingness. Cold comfort.
I wouldn't put it quite the same way...
Can't speak for anyone else, but I always like to say that "heaven and hell are right here on earth." How we choose to spend our time here is what matters most. That we do the best we can to know happiness. Contentment. If believing in the here after helps anyone with that, well okay for them I suppose. Life is in no way miserable for me without believing in any of that sort of thing, and for this too I am very thankful.
I envy Christians because they have this fantasy of living on a brand new refurbished earth and in a cube shaped "New Heaven" with streets of gold and pure water and worshiping God all day and night and it helps them to get through miserable days and nights. Their lives go easier because for them there is a payoff at the end of the day. For skeptics there isn't any. Life is rotten and when we die the best that can be said is we stop suffering and go back to eternal nothingness. Cold comfort.
Jesus said MANY would come in his name and prove false at Matthew 7:21-23.
No streets of Gold, but there will be ' healing ' for earth's nations - Rev. 22:2
Healing to the point that No one will say, " I am sick......" - Isaiah 33:24
Earth and its people will be healthy as described in the 35th chapter of Isaiah.
I envy Christians because they have this fantasy of living on a brand new refurbished earth and in a cube shaped "New Heaven" with streets of gold and pure water and worshiping God all day and night and it helps them to get through miserable days and nights. Their lives go easier because for them there is a payoff at the end of the day. For skeptics there isn't any. Life is rotten and when we die the best that can be said is we stop suffering and go back to eternal nothingness. Cold comfort.
I am not sure how impressive the physical description of the "city of god" is to most Christians. The parts I and most others I knew seemed to care more about was the ultimate justice, closure, and having all questions answered that heaven represented. It was a place to deflect the indignities and incoherence of this life into some future resolution.
We were also conditioned to think that you couldn't possibly function or be happy without this expectation. It was a sort of learned helplessness though. When I left the faith, my sense of loss around this and other more practical aspects (belonging, refuge, tradition, connection with others) lasted about a week I think because of the tremendous relief from all the cognitive dissonance of reconciling the "promises of god" even relating to this life, with actual experience.
So I didn't, and don't, have any envy of those still in my former faith, mostly because I feel like I'm living a much more coherent life. As far as heaven goes, that's not as hideous to me as reincarnation, but I have come to find the acceptance that my existence is finite and has a clear end point, to be a great comfort. Not because my life has been horrible or unhappy, but because even in some future world without disease or aging where we had biological mortality, I just am skeptical that, story-tellers that we are, we can live lives that are unending. Stories need beginnings, middles, and ends. To the extent I'm suffering, I can bear that better knowing it has an endpoint. To the extent I'm happy, my joys are all the more precious for being finite.
Is life rotten? I think it is for some. I have pondered this question often: what will I say on my deathbed if someone were to ask me (in a way that it was clear they wanted an actual honest answer) whether my life had been worth living? I think my honest response would be that you can answer that in different ways from different perspectives. My synthesis right now is that I was born a white, anglo-salon protestant heterosexual male into a loving and ultimately intact middle class family in the wealthiest and most technologically advanced civilization in the history of mankind -- that alone was winning the lottery if your objective is an easy and privileged life. Some super unpleasant stuff happened, some of it very diminishing and ruinous to me as a person and to my personal objectives. Some really fortunate stuff happened, too. I had things I didn't even clearly understand that I wanted or needed. I was loved, however imperfectly, and my love, however imperfect, was accepted in return. I will die with some unresolved sorrow and loss, some pretty big disappointments, and probably not without worry for whoever I love that survives me.
I doubt I'm unusual in this regard at least among people who are able to be honest about their experience and don't have appearances to keep up. Life is a mixed bag. It's messier and more painful at times than I would like. In certain ways I'd rather not have bothered; in other ways I would have missed out on some really wonderful experiences. So it goes. At some point though I think it's best to let go of all the happiness and sorrow and sturm und drang and pass the baton to others. That concept is a great comfort to me. Your mileage may vary.
A simple basic logic should tell you that with this process, the world population should've not been increasing.
Otherwise, please update the work flow and tell us about your fantasies as to how new souls are added into this process?
From supposedly 1 human pair, we are now over a 7 Billion. How does reincarnation address this?
You are basing this on the assumption that Earth is the only place beings can incarnate. It isn't.
Earth is a school for the spirit and as such there are many other schools - just like we have many universities offering many courses. There are some international universities and also some business and other training establishments. So there are many worlds where the spirit can go to learn different things if it wants to.
Basic logic would say that people of different faiths and beliefs should be experiencing different things when they nearly die but this is not so. When the NDE data is analysed across the world there are many similarities which should not be there if NDEs were a process of the brain - since we are all very different products of our culture, upbringing and education.
My opinion is my own, I do not pretend it will change anyone else’s mind on reincarnation or the after life.
I am aware of three of my past lives, I even know the name of a couple of them. All three died relatively young. I’m not going to include my past names.
The first one I died very close to the end of the civil war and was in my late 20s. It was a dishonorable death since I was shot in the back it looked like I was fleeing and since I was a brigadier general it was hinted at that fact, but not recorded that way. The fact is I was trying to get back to my horse since I was stabbed in my right hip and inner left knee. I have the birthmarks and had the large flat black mole from my back removed. I didn’t die right away, they took me to a house used as a hospital. The upstairs room had two beds, but I was the only one in it. The room was either painted yellow or had yellow patterned wallpaper. When I died I went out the window and saw the fields and trees in the distance, then I floated up very fast.
The next one is probably the one no one will believe. I almost drowned when I was 3. I fell backwards into a hole kids had dug at a lake beach. When I went under I saw a mans face in the reflected water, just before my grandmother pulled me out of the water. After that I had dreams of drowning. In the dreams I would be in the water surrounded by things that shouldn’t be in there like park benches, boxes and luggage. I would eventually get sucked down under and then would come back up and float above the water. Eventually these dreams would happen when I was awake and I couldn’t move until the scenario played completely out. Eventually I stopped having what my mom referred to as panic attacks.
It wasn’t until they found the Titanic and I saw the book showing it sunken that the dreams started again, in much more detail. I know that there were a lot of people lying about what really happened with collapsible B and why only one of the ships smokestacks fell over. I often wonder if Jack Thayer really committed suicide. I wonder if he was finally going to spill the beans. Just look at his face in the photo taken on the Carpathia. He’s sitting away from everyone else, except one guy and I’d guess he was trying to get him to agree with the story they planned to tell. I’ve thought about writing a book, but I don’t want my life turned upside down.
Long story short, I had to jump and I got caught under the smokestack that fell and couldn’t find my way back to the surface. I know what it’s like to have your lungs burning for air and the overwhelming need to take a breath and the panic that follows when you know you have no choice but to open you mouth and let the water in. After I floated to the top and started to separate from my body I was face to face with the man I saw before, only this time I was the face looking down into a dead mans face. He was white with dark brown hair in his late 20s, early 30s. I floated up and away and saw many other orbs or balls of light with me. I looked back and the ship was still visible but growing smaller by the second. I felt no desire to go back, no regret about what happened and who I left behind, I was free.
The last one I don’t know exactly when it was, through my research I found a possible match in an unsolved murder case in the late 1930s. I was a guy and I was getting a ride with another guy. He had to make a stop at a restaurant. I remember going inside, but feel I was told not too. The next thing I know the guy I was with was shouting to get in the car. We took off with another car following us. I told the guy to drop me off, I wasn’t a part of it and didn’t want involved. He dropped me off at a steel mill or something. It had long metal tubes strapped together in rows beside a railroad track. The main building was shaped like an airplane hanger. I ran to the door and it was locked and dark inside, no one was around. I saw the car that was following us pull in and I ran to the end of one of the metal tube stacks. Next thing I know there was a guy on either side of me grabbing me by the arms. I looked down and saw I was wearing brown cuffed pin stripe pants, a brown coat and brown and off white wing tip shoes. They drug me over to a sleek green sedan with a black top, spoke wheel tires, and a spare tire on the side by the front tire well. This big guy wearing a suit and a fur collared coat came up to me. I don’t remember anything that was said, although he was questioning me. He pulled out this little shiny etched silver gun that had a bone or pearl handle. I wasn’t scared, it looked like a toy. He put it up to my head and shot me in the right side above my ear. My head rocked back and I saw the blue sky with fluffy clouds as I felt my knees hit the ground. I floated up out of my body and could see myself lying there. I had brown hair and was probably late 20s or early 30s. I then as before floated to the sky, going faster as I went. I awoke with a throbbing headache on that side of my head. I’ve had migraines since I was five.
I believe this murder happened in the early spring and I felt it had to do with the mob and a reporter. I think the guy I was with was a reporter and they thought I knew something. Wrong place wrong time perhaps.
I’m not afraid to die. I believe we are all here to learn something and as we evolve our life challenges become harder. It’s easy so look at the rich and not be jealous, or wonder why God would let a child suffer from cancer, or look at a person with a physical or mental disorder and wonder how is that fair. My thought is that those who have wealth and power have learned nothing and refuse to choose a harder life. Those with disabilities are on either there last or next to last life and have chosen the hardest lesson to be learned. God is real, eternal life is real. Having compassion and a strong moral compass is the key to living each life.
Last edited by HistoryRhymes; 01-05-2022 at 12:59 PM..
I'm totally, completely convinced that the secret to the Afterlife is out there somewhere, perhaps it rests with the CIA or some other organization, and they're not about to reveal that secret as it may entail mass suicide around the world.
My opinion is my own, I do not pretend it will change anyone else’s mind on reincarnation or the after life.
I am aware of three of my past lives, I even know the name of a couple of them. All three died relatively young. I’m not going to include my past names.
...
I’m not afraid to die. I believe we are all here to learn something and as we evolve our life challenges become harder. It’s easy so look at the rich and not be jealous, or wonder why God would let a child suffer from cancer, or look at a person with a physical or mental disorder and wonder how is that fair. My thought is that those who have wealth and power have learned nothing and refuse to choose a harder life. Those with disabilities are on either there last or next to last life and have chosen the hardest lesson to be learned. God is real, eternal life is real. Having compassion and a strong moral compass is the key to living each life.
If you read Robert Monroe's 3 books, some of his experiences are very similar - of course, different examples. I believe folks who can have OBEs will probably eventually explore their past/future lives to learn from them. I would like to be able to do this. Linear time is supposed to be someting we agree to when we reincarnate and lives can be chosen from any time period, not just the in accordance with how we experience time here.
My opinion is my own, I do not pretend it will change anyone else’s mind on reincarnation or the after life.
I am aware of three of my past lives, I even know the name of a couple of them. All three died relatively young. I’m not going to include my past names.
How is your memory?
Belief in reincarnation tied to memory errors
People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.
People who believe they have lived past lives as, say, Indian princesses or battlefield commanders are more likely to make certain types of memory errors, according to a new study.
What I find interesting is that some of people who believe in past lives seem to be sure they are reborn from remarkably famous people.
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