Speculation on the Nature of Reality

[Haruhi]

1) You wrote "so the evidence is more consistent than you think". I would have to disagree! I am entirely aware of the consistencies. In modern society, since Moody's first book, we constantly get hammered with the "consistencies". I'm sure many of us on this forum have read at least half a dozen books which breakdown the similarities & consistencies to the umpteenth degree, with various charts, graphs, statistics, numbers and percentages demonstrated just how "consistent" NDEs can be.

Your data filter seems to be set on "consistencies" :) How about switching that filter to "inconsistencies"? Perhaps the inconsistencies will tell us more about the real or true nature of the experience?

Okay, but you wrote "There is no consistency or integrity to this view, especially when taken together with the narrative from other types of "mystical" or "anomalous" experiences or mystical traditions", but there is consistency here between NDEs and deathbed visions. Some inconsistencies exist, but seems to be due to the cultural baggage of the subject.

2) The use of the word "pyschopomp" is interesting, because in many ways it kind of supports what I'm saying, which is why I didn't fully understand your comment.

Pyschpomp is a Greek word that was most associated with Hermes, who is also known as the "trickster" (who you will notice is in my user icon pic :) ). As in my recent post, I was suggesting it may well be something tricksterish which is manifesting in these kind of experiences......I have no difficulty in believing it is something trickster-like (whatever that may be) manifesting as our loved ones during the NDE experience, it is actually what I'm suggesting may be the case!

Also, to again support my recent post, for Carl Jung the psychopomp was a symbolic interface between the individual and the collective unconsciousness. Which is what I wrote too!

I was just using the notion of psychopomp as a spiritual being accompanying freshly deceased beings, a role that the deceased loved ones can do.

3) Out of genuine curiosity, as I really cannot be sure off the top of my head, but how many NDE reports are there more than say 400-500 years old (perhaps even less than that, maybe 250?) which describe deceased loved ones coming to get them? I know there are hundreds of NDEs going back thousands of years, but I don't seem to recall deceased loved ones being quite as "consistent" then as they have been since the Victorian spirtualist period (or whatever it's called, 1800s onwards)? I dare say they were virtually non-existant?

There are not many reports of NDEs over 200 years old because in antiquity most people who were close to death died.

4) If it is loved ones that come to get us at death, are we to believe they are emobidied in some kind of identical "astral" counter-part to the last physical existene, only at it's "peak", for decades? Just walking around summerland waiting for their grandchildren to pass? What of reincarnation? Why must they inhabit a body with all the same "physical" characteristics as their last life?

The deceased beings may be making their lives in Summerland waiting to reunite with their loved ones still alive. About reincarnation, it may generally take many years between reincarnation and the next, except in puntual cases such as cases of Stevenson.

The key is that I see no reason to invoke a trickster. Only one thing: the evidences suggest that the spiritual realm is more dependent on the observer that the material realm, so what appears depends in part on the baggage of the subject.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Food for thought:

We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.
-Borges

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Some things Bill made me think about:

But if consciousness is primary to reality wouldn't it be possible that they exist and we are floating around them? I don't mean rules like "thou shalt nots" but something like archetypical patterns that DO exist as structures in consciousness that we, while experiencing certain aspects of consciousness in 3D spacetime, are perceiving glimpses of? I think this kind of thing is hinted at in a couple other threads, such as the one Bucky posted on astrology. The patterns are there, underlying everything, and seemingly unrelated aspects of material reality (like financial markets and planets) are reflecting them. We can't give a coherent description of where the non-human parts come from if they are aspects/laws of reality that we do not yet understand, anymore than we can say where the physical laws that we observe come from.

Cheers,
Bill

Interesting food for thought..Not sure if any of the following will be relevant to you Bill but hopefully my stream of consciousness has some value for you:

Penrose and Massimo both accept that Mathematics exists in a Platonic Realm. Penrose suggests the Platonic might also contain morals and aesthetics, with the former suggested by Nagel's Mind & Cosmos and the latter being taken up by Josephson regarding the topic of musical appreciation.

Prescott goes into the idea of consciousness "breathing fire" into Platonic laws.

So taking all this with the usual caveats recommended by RAW's Creative Agnosticism...

Would it make sense to see consciousness as part of the fundamental, existing alongside the underlying principles of reality? So "God moves upon the waters", to quote Genesis 1:2, but "God" is more akin to Josephson's observer-participancy and the "waters" are Kauffman's "Res Potentia", the quantum level equivalent to mythology's "primordial chaos" where possibility becomes actuality? As Josephson suggests, perhaps consciousness doesn't just "breath fire" into the laws of physics but actually gestates them?

This chaos might be constrained by the Platonic Laws, but other than that could make all sorts of universes...or the Platonic is the canvas from which we Observer-Participants paint? So creation is the play of consciousness, what the Hindus call Lila...

I find the notion of aesthetics at the Platonic level the most questionable at first glance, but Josephson seems to be making a more subtle argument than a simple demand we appreciate the classics. It makes me think of Lucas arguing that the mind's creativity transcends computation.

If nothing else, it does make me think of one of my favorite stories - Lloyd Alexander's The Smith, the Weaver, and the Harper.

"...you destroyed the instrument but not the music. Even with all your power, you gained only a broken shell..."

It makes me better appreciate the idea that the artist echoes the original creative action...and that encouraging the artistic talent of all humanity is important.

"Cosmic Creativity - Art is an echo of the creative force that births the galaxies. Creativity is the way that the Cosmos evolves and communicates with Itself. The great uplifting of humanity beyond its self-destruction is the redemptive mission of art."
-Alex Grey's TED talk

 

[ghost]

The mind's creativity does transcend computation. There is something magical about consciousness. Skepticism and pessimism try to tell us that there is not, but those forces of darkness only serve to enslave the human mind. There is something magical about the human mind, something that transcends the slavery of thermodynamics, the bondage of mathematical averages, the prison of logic.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

The mind's creativity does transcend computation. There is something magical about consciousness. Skepticism and pessimism try to tell us that there is not, but those forces of darkness only serve to enslave the human mind. There is something magical about the human mind, something that transcends the slavery of thermodynamics, the bondage of mathematical averages, the prison of logic.

Interesting - definitely check out Lucas's Godelian argument mentioned above. John McGuire has also talked about the importance of creativity here and how it relates to our place in reality.

The skeptic Massimo posted about how naive determinism and reductionism are both false because reality's foundations are relations/patterns between mathematical entities. It seems like this math-dimension, so to speak, still would need a place for consciousness.

To claim consciousness emerges from all these unthinking patterns is to posit an illogical something-from-nothing event, because you'd still be claiming that something without Mind can somehow produce Mind.

Seems like Spirit, Mind, whatever you want to call it, would have to be there as well in this timeless, causality transcendent Platonic firmament?

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Random food for thought:

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."
-Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

And on the observer-participancy of Wheeler and Josephson:

"The outcome of these little perceptions is therefore more efficacious than one would think. They form that je ne sais quoi, those inclinations, those images of the qualities of the senses, clear as a whole, but confused in their parts; those impressions that surrounding bodies make on us, and that embody infinity; the bond that every living being has with the rest of the universe.

One may even say that as a consequence of these little perceptions the present is pregnant with the future and laden with the past, which plots all (sympnoia panta, as Hippocrates put it), and that in the smallest of substances penetrating eyes like those of God might read all the concatenation of the things of the universe."
-Liebniz

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Nature by Numbers

"When the Spanish filmmaker and graphic designer Cristóbal Vila looks at nature, he sees numbers, and the remarkable elegance of mathematics. The theorems and geometric equations that explain natural phenomena – such as the shape of an insect’s eye, or the structure of a seashell – come to life in this short documentary, and simultaneously bring beauty to mathematics and logic to nature. Uniting music and animation with mathematics, Nature by Numbers is a sensory science film, an immersion in the world of the minute and microscopic, and an exciting introduction to some of the great geometric and scientific concepts."

 

[loka]

As far as i'm concerned and given the experiences i had (synchronicities, weird phenomenom, mediumship proven), i think that both "giant shared dream" and "virtuality" are the explanations. Life and death are shared dreams... We are never really lucid. That explains also some contradictions in the paranormal facts like seeing a person who is alive in an NDE etc...

The dead can talk to people but it's just a dreamer who talk to another dreamer... The dreams are different but life and death are dream states.

Which author or searcher says this kind of thing in a best way please ?

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

As far as i'm concerned and given the experiences i had (synchronicities, weird phenomenom, mediumship proven), i think that both "giant shared dream" and "virtuality" are the explanations. Life and death are shared dreams... We are never really lucid. That explains also some contradictions in the paranormal facts like seeing a person who is alive in an NDE etc...

The dead can talk to people but it's just a dreamer who talk to another dreamer... The dreams are different but life and death are dream states.

Which author or searcher says this kind of thing in a best way please ?

Obviously Jung for synchronicities, but Tom Campbell and Bernando Kastrup both get into this. Kastrup was interviewed recently.

I'm actually surprised Campbell has never been interviewed on Skeptiko. Unless I missed it?

 

[loka]

yes, but who talk about the life as a dream ? ANd the death as a dream too ?

 

[manjit]

Hi loka,

I resonate with the terminology you use in your "explanations", though I am personally not anywhere near confident enough to categorically state they are, indeed, "explanations"! I guess I prefer the term "speculations" :)

I think Sciborg_S_Patel has indeed provided you a couple of very relevant references for your question - though you may need to dig deeper into what those guys are saying & read between the lines, synchretize their different ways of expressing what you also are referring to with your own terminology & conceptuality etc (Jung, Tom Campbell & probably Kastrup....I'm only mildly familar with Kastrup, so cannot comment so much on him, though I generally seem to agree/like/resonate with his perspectives....I haven't read enough to comment really).

Along the Jungian lines, you could look into the western perspectives of the "imaginal" realms which again intersect conceptually with your "life & death as a dream" idea. I enjoyed several of Patrick Harpur's book as an introduction to this kind of interpretation of reality.

The ideas I'm most familiar with, and those which I guess directly relate to your question, is the mahayana/Tibetan/tantric Buddhism schools of thought and practice.

For example, in the 6 Yogas of Naropa (one of the main practices in several of the Tibetan Yoga sects & sub-sets), there is a yoga called "dream yoga". One of the major practices in this yoga is contstantly repeating/understanding/feeling throughout the waking day "this is all a dream, this is all a dream" (these are not precise instructions, please do not follow from just this summary sentence alone as madness can ensue :). One of the (many, wonderful) effects of this is a continuity of consciousness throughout the the 3 states of waking, dreaming & deep sleep (perhaps rather surprisingly, deep sleep is the most meaningful and blissful of these 3 states of awareness, ime).

This of course connects to the awareness of the bardos of death & dying as recounted in the Tibetan book of the Dead, for eg.

It's all just one Big Bardo :)