Physical reality might be a nightmare or hellish realm. Factory farming, prison rape and solitary confinement, brutal regimes and torture, homelessness and illness. Of course there are numerous spiritual and religious traditions that propose there can be release from this samsara but have come to believe it's all bullshit. We're here forever. I want to get off mr bones wild ride.
Its as probable as anything else that you've ever heard of a wild and speculative nature that physical death truly is the end.
We just get caught up in stories/theories/beliefs by our fellow mortals that make us think/hope or fear that their wild or even reasonable sounding ideas might be true.
NDE's as fascinating and real sounding as they can be for example may be nothing more than a dying brain hallucination and it is said the same effects as these experiences produce ie ultra realism of the experience far more than a sleeping type of dream can be induced by using the drug ketamine.
Nietzsche's eternal recurrence idea is also just that ie an idea as is the ideas of Buddhism or whatever about having many lives and tiring oneself out of all desire before being able to reach nirvana, etc.
Though that said even if death truly is the end for our consciences (which I hope) the scientists are probably right that we continue on in some form ie the old "energy can neither be created or destroyed" adage or however exactly it goes.
I suppose I'm fine with that so long as our conscious minds are gone when we die.
Though don't get me wrong if we could experience some sort of afterlife that would actually be a paradise or bliss or allow us to be happy and fulfilled, etc I wouldn't be against experiencing that.
Its just that this world paints such a bleak picture of existence its hard to believe such a thing/concept could exist.
I'm fairly confident that on death we're reminded that we committed some crime or sin and our punishment is to be reborn time and time again into equally shitty lives
Some religions teach this, however most apex forms of these same schools teach that Samsara and Nirvana are truly one. It all boils down to ones attitude, to discovering ones calm, unchanging center that lies in the middle of all changing phenomena.
As Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven is spread out over the face of the Earth, but few can see it.
Your mind itself creates both Heaven and Hell.
They reckon the planet (and subsequently the universe) are on the path to dying out one day, so hopefully it's not forever. I doubt there's a lot humans can do to stop being humans while we wait though. A horrible state of affairs indeed.
How can you folks even consider non-materialistic viewpoint to the fate of our consciousness? What's real is real; materialistic view of the universe is internally consistent and testable, while all these Buddhism ideas are just ideas.
A controlled existence after death, like christian heaven sounds ok, it'd be nice to experience it, but there's not a single piece of evidence pointing in that direction.
There's that word again, evidence, testifiable, etc, but I do believe it matters. Whatever view of telos you have, what matters is that it is solid. Whether we get reincarnated, or burn in hell for being bad normalfags or simply stop existing doesn't matter. What matters is consistency, and a solid foundation in this belief.
My belief, that we simply die is consistent, but goddamn does it feel empty
If this is Hell then it's small time for most people. Try talking to someone with a chronic painful health condition and see how hell like their world is. A true Hell would have all people experiencing that at all times.
I would be fine with a materialistic view if I didn't exist, as nonsensical as it may sound.
Everything seems to be perfectly explainable by materialism, only for consciousness to come and go against all logic.
Why does a specific arrangement of matter births an unnecessary point of view to accompany the process? Going by the notion that humans are not more than meat mechas, the software ran by the brain could recognize its properties, its place in the world and all that, but that doesn't sound like more than a program running like any other instead of a consciousness. Other humans don't have a consciousness, as far as direct experience go.
Note that all these mental faculties aren't even a prerequisite for consciousness, mentioned only for illustration. A fishlike being wouldn't think about itself and all that, yet it theoretically could experience things in a borderline vegetative way.
Everything seems to be perfectly explainable by materialism, only for consciousness to come and go against all logic.
Why does a specific arrangement of matter births an unnecessary point of view to accompany the process? Going by the notion that humans are not more than meat mechas, the software ran by the brain could recognize its properties, its place in the world and all that, but that doesn't sound like more than a program running like any other instead of a consciousness. Other humans don't have a consciousness, as far as direct experience go.
Note that all these mental faculties aren't even a prerequisite for consciousness, mentioned only for illustration. A fishlike being wouldn't think about itself and all that, yet it theoretically could experience things in a borderline vegetative way.
Consciousness is also a lie to a degree. When you get that deep you have to understand the basic functionality of the brain instead of acting like your consciousness is supreme.
Your consciousness cannot control your heart or your emotions. They exist on a level higher/deeper than "you" do. As such could you claim you are anything but a slave to your biological operating system? Panic attacks being a prime example of this. I was once sick and whenever I would throw up 10 seconds before it would bring on a huge wave of panic (no idea why). This panic was overwhelmingly strong and I had no control over it what so ever. My consciousness was overwritten by an internal program I had no control over.
consciousness could evolve as a trait because it allows for superior food selection. It would be incredibly useful to have the ability to predict when food is good and when food is bad on a conscious level rather than having to take moment by moment assessments. Evolution isn't planned as much as it's just random luck. The odds of us existing at all are probably equal to the odds of us being conscious. It just happens hat for us to ask question B, event A must also have happened so the infinite number of times A didn't happen B never became a question and same for A happening and not B.
Your consciousness cannot control your heart or your emotions. They exist on a level higher/deeper than "you" do. As such could you claim you are anything but a slave to your biological operating system? Panic attacks being a prime example of this. I was once sick and whenever I would throw up 10 seconds before it would bring on a huge wave of panic (no idea why). This panic was overwhelmingly strong and I had no control over it what so ever. My consciousness was overwritten by an internal program I had no control over.
consciousness could evolve as a trait because it allows for superior food selection. It would be incredibly useful to have the ability to predict when food is good and when food is bad on a conscious level rather than having to take moment by moment assessments. Evolution isn't planned as much as it's just random luck. The odds of us existing at all are probably equal to the odds of us being conscious. It just happens hat for us to ask question B, event A must also have happened so the infinite number of times A didn't happen B never became a question and same for A happening and not B.
What does that make us though? Demons? Damned souls?
It's a jailhouse realm and the human body is convict's garments. The being that are imprisoned can be very different though.
I've always suspected I'm in some private hell. Yeah.
I think heaven, or at least some glimpse of it, can be found again at the end of a culling of most of the population; that hell peeks into this Earthly realm to a degree directly proportional (and logarithmically so) to the number of souls in it. The soul itself carries with it the propensity for good or evil, but once so many humans exist, their evil feeds off of each other with extreme ease, in contrast to good which, like a flower, will wither and die in an overcrowded, deeply shadowed forest. Look at how the world destroyed itself in the last hundred years. The population has quadrupled. Technology (nay innovation and creative production in responses to problems) serves, or at least should serve, to ameliorate the human condition, but it got raped and hijacked by greed.
We're here forever.
Why does the sun take so long to die.