a post I made to the abstractthought community today

[novapsyche]

Jesus is dead.

I hate to break this to some people, but the truth must be told. The man died. He is no more. His body is so much dust in the desert.

I am a Christian. However, I am not the type to believe in a third-party God. (I consider myself to be a Christian mystic.) The Judeo-Christian God is just a flawed as any human being. I do not believe in a transcendent God; I believe that the universe is transcendent in itself.

I do not believe in reincarnation, because that seems like a bright idea proposed by leading thinkers several thousand years ago who had no idea of what the human body was composed of. Those people had no idea what entropy means, or metabolism, or simple brain processes. It was a best guess at the time.

The "soul" (I don't believe in such things) is not imprisoned in one's flesh. The spirit is a marriage of flesh and consciousness. At the same time, I believe that consciousness itself is predicated--necessarily--upon pre-existing form. The cell had to exist before it could fashion an awareness of itself.

Death is an end in awareness. I firmly believe that when we die, that's it. The fight against entropy is over, and our component parts degrade into earth. Religions that fight this natural order of things are misguided, in my opinion. Christianity, coupled with general Western philosophy, encourages the thought that we have divine dominion over the natural earth, and this dominion extends into the belief that we can escape death. (This leads to a devaluation of the aged in our communities and a perverse predilection on youthfulness and suppleness.)

It never ceases to startle me that there are people who honestly believe that deceased people are simply "sleeping in the earth," until Judgment Day. Those people, like Jesus, are dead. There is no second awakening for them.

However, being a believer in mysticism, I do believe that people can reach such an awakening while alive, through contemplation, wisdom, and self-knowledge. It's similar to "being saved" or "being reborn" in Christian terminology, but in my own experience it was much more immediate and long-lasting than being saved was.

*shrug* To answer the question, "What is death?" one must first find an answer to the question, "What is life?" Years ago, I came to the conclusion that life is. It just simply is. Similarly, death simply is. They are part of the same process, and we would be wise to reconcile ourselves to that process and live accordingly. (For me, that means not engaging in wishful thinking, like Judgment Day or reincarnation, things of which we have no evidence and which go against all forms of sense, common or otherwise.)

Comments

[simplewhore.livejournal.com]

Intersting. Life is and Death is. I like the logic.

No soul?

[hozed.livejournal.com]

I used to think pretty much the same thing as this (minus the mysticism part).. I've since decided that although I can find no concrete evidence *for* a soul, reincarnation, higher conciousness, etc, I can't find any that disproves it either.

I do want to say that I DO try to live my life as if death were simply an end to awareness, and there is nothing more. I try search out 'truth' and discover if there is some part of our conciousness that is beyond mere physical and observable processes. In a strange way, I almost look forward to death, because I'm exceedingly curious as to what actually does happen. Of course, being as one possibility is just an end to awareness, I tend to do whatever I can to avoid it.

And back to the entropy argument.. in these days of computer technology and exponentially increasing information storage capacity, the end of my bodies existance is by no means the end of the information that has been generated during my lifetime.

[sulphuroxide.livejournal.com]

to say that something 'is' is not to answer what it is. what things are obviously cannot be expressed in the medium of language; however things like death and life have specific relationships to other facets of life; this allows us to better define what they are, socially or phenomenologically as it were.

[vaxjedi]

While I can find no evidence for a soul, I still believe in a soul. The main reason is that I find a lack of a soul, in some form, falls to Occam's razor. I see too many things, from magick to love to meaning to art to the very nature of spirit itself, that do not make sense without a soul of some sort, the soul being, in this case, the spiritual dimension of a being.

Do I think a soul exists separate of the flesh or the intellect? No. The soul is a function of sufficiently advanced biology, in my opinion. It's a sort of spiritual software that runs on and is written by our bodies. An imergent divine and magickal property. I don't think that negates its reality, however, nor its importance.

As for the whole afterlife issue, I am vehemently non-committal. There is literally no way to know. As soon as I get there, I'll see if I can figure out a way back and let you know.

As for what is life, I was always fond of Douglas Adams' definition from the Hitchhikers' radio plays: Life is that quality you lose when you fall 14 miles from a large marble cave floating in the middle of the sky. Of course, he points out that this could just as easily describe, say, one's glasses. Thus it's not terribly useful.

[rubel.livejournal.com]

I think you're misreading mysticism a bit. First of all, when any of the mystic traditions (from Christianity to Islam to Judaism, to Buddhism to Hinduism, etc) speak of death, they don't always mean the same thing. Physical death of the individual organism? Permanent, they all say. Duh. I'm as appalled as you are that people still argue about that one. Another kind of death is the death of a concept. "Ego death" generally means letting go of your exclusive identity with the ego.

Death is not an end to the awareness that the mystics speak of. The awareness that they speak of is not bound to the ego and thus does not die with the ego. It's also the same awareness that is there in deep dreamless sleep. As for the soul, that is not supposed to be "trapped in the body" either. I could expound on all of this, but if you want a full and exhaustive explanation, go for Ken Wilber's _Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution_. It addresses all the scientific (including entropy), philosophical, psychological issues and spiritual traditions (the mystic, esoteric side) and has been hailed as the most comprehensive world philosophy ever written. It doesn't just explain away all these things, it incorporates them and integrates them. And me being a skeptic and all... Trust me on this one, I think you would love this book since you obviously have a brain in your head about these issues. :)

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the book suggestion. I've been hankering for something to read lately, but had no idea what. It does sound like something I can sink my teeth into.

I may well be misreading mysticism. I don't claim to be an expert, by any means! :) I just started researching mysticism a few months ago.

Death is not an end to the awareness that the mystics speak of.
When I say that death is the end of awareness, I mean that my physical death will be the end of my individual awareness. I guess, in a way, I--my personality, my self-ness--will pass from reality into non-reality, whatever that is.

I don't know. My opinions about death are still evolving. Death as a concept has been problematic for me for a decade, now, and I know I still have miles more work I need to do on it.

Re:

[rubel.livejournal.com]

I know where you're coming from, I just started on it back in May. But Ken Wilber is a great place to start, I'm already making rapid progress on my spiritual practice now that I have a clear-cut path. It helps that it's in line with what I was already starting to write. I was woefully ignorant about what was out there, so the fact that I was onto the very core of it on my own just by following my intuition (and I was never a fundamentalist) was a very good selling point for me. :)