The Last seconds of life and the "afterlife"
 

I took this from another thread

I have always had this theory.

HUmans perception of the flow of time can be altered by many many things, frfrom personal body chemistry to drugs to meditation etc.

when one is happy and enjoying something time flies, and when one is suffering or bored time trickles.

well, I think that all of mystical teaching and religious teaching and wisdom is always guided to having the individual lead a good life so that they feel certain that they will go to a "heaven" f some sort, or achieve nirvana or enlightenment etc.
opposite of that is the instruction and indoctrination that if life is led badly, and without shame or forgiveness or redemption, then you will either go to a "hell" or just be forbiden from the grace of god or enlightenment or nirvana, whatever the individual teaching is does not matter.

Having said this, the statements "on earth as it is in heaven" makes sense. The afterlife is what you believe it will be, but not because it is real and actual, but because as you die, as your life is extinguished, time dilates in an exponentially increasing manner, so the last thought of a human as they pass is extended infninitely.

a person who believes in heaven and honestly feels they have led a good life can die without fear, without doubts weighing on their conscience. This "bliss" is experienced exponentially as everlasting grace, or oneness with god/universe, or entering heaven, or achieving nirvana.

If one believs, as the Hebrew fatih does, that after death comes an eternal dreamles slumber, then as one dies,one expects to do this and the death becomes an infnite falling into sleep, which for most people is quite pleasant, if not ecstatic.

If one believes that they have not achieved redemption, or if they know that they ave led a wicked life, with miore bad than good, and are weighed by guilt and such feelings, negative feelings, or anger, etc., then the last seconds of life are an exponetial infinity of that emotion, thereby feeling like eternal "hell" or eternal damnation or eternal separation from the grace of a god or gods.

this would probably apply to death by disease, or in old age, or by accident as in "life flashing before your eyes" as well, and if that life is joyous, with minimal harm aimed at anyone with maximum good directed at the world and at people then....


i don;t know how else to put it. I have thought about it a lot. i think i will write it all down.

Guy, you seem to be thinking a lot about death.

As for myself... I don't know. I just can't imagine what's going on after death. Your theory seem interesting. Personnally, I can't imagine that after you die there's that complete void, it makes the same effect on me as thinking to what there was before the Big Bang or what there is at the end of the universe (the universe is infinite, sure, but there must be an end still! I can't imagine it's infinite, but if it's not infinite I can't imagine what there's after it, etc), I can't imagine something totally void. Too hard for me, I think

Kind of like a program freezing? Hitting an infinite and staling. I can see that.

Though I don't see the difference between that and just nothingness as thinking makes us human (thanks Decartes) so infinity of just one thought is really just error. Nothing progresses nothing regresses. What's the difference infinity and nothingness?

But again thought independent of body? I don't understand that as it would have to be time independent of time. Death is unknowable so I don't see why it should be answered.

very interesting thoughts, but what about those that have fear when they die? not because they've lead a wicked life, but just because they're afraid as they feel life slipping away. does that mean their final thoughts commit them to everlasting fear? that would nearly constitute as hell.

That it would. as the mystics and priests say, one has to be ready at all times to face their "creator" and that includes facing the fear as you die. that is why such pre-death rituals as the Catholic Last Rites are so important, to help those about to die with calming their thoughts and accepting their "fate"

someone who believes in their faith would not be so afraid as someone who half-assedly believes in their faith, you know?

it is all strange. I have thought about this over the last 20 years or so.

i do believe there is probably some sort of endorphin rush (or such) that would make dying feel more or less pleasant/good. but anything you've never experienced before does cause some anxiety. i think even someone with the greatest faith wouldn't necessarily always find peace.

but, my friend, we are continually trapped in the past. our perception of life is trapped in memory, we live a split second behind reality for ever. we only know what we remember, we have no actual perception of the present, as we must process and feel it, interpret it which takes an amount of time and traps us to live perpetually in the past, in our memories. so if this is true, your conclusion, then it is not that human beings are experiencing life at death until the last moment, we dont experience anything to the last second, we are always a microsecond behind... so such an experience would in fact either have to not be possible, or would be in fact glimpsing at an afterlife, feeling the split second of death, a microsecond after the fact...

The only people that should fear death are those left behind. They're the one's that are losing anything.

the meso-american cosmology states that a person's death (ie, type, time, place of etc) is determined by their own and the people around them's attachment to their life. young people die in violent, bloody accidents and things because both they and the people who know them, or even just those strangers who come across the body and know that young folks are supposed to live and not die are therefore attached to the person's life even though they do not know them, are too attached to the concept of life, whereas old folks die peacefully in their sleep because both the old folks and ourselves have become comfortable and accepting of their inevitable deaths...

that would fit EXACTLY with my theory, that those last moments of life are exponentially dragged out, "smeared" in a sense, and that instead of experienceing death, what we experience is the inexorable descent into death, never experienceing the present moment of death but instead the eternal and infnite moments leading up to it.

and we are not all trapped in the past. the whole point of mystic teaching is to rid oneself opf those obsessions with the past and to experience the present moment.

when you or anyone is having a wonderful time, at a sonic youth concert for instance,mwhne they just kicked into Inhuman, you are living in the moment, not analyzing what just hapened, but instead epxriencing everything at the speed of our neurons, which is just short of light speed, almost infi nitessimally instantaneous.

the present is all that matters and is all that is real. the past is all gossamer and memory, clouded almost instantly, and sadly most people do live wandering the hallways of their past experience, instead opf appreciating and enjoying the rpesent, the ever ocurring, ever renewing present.

oh yes this is true. i have also had such religious feelings at sonic youth shows. I believe the point of mystic teaching and the purpose of experiencing the actual present moment, is because the actual present moment is this eternity, this after-life, which we all seek in one way or another. I think we differ here however, in our defining of death. I see death as fully an illusion, where as, you seem to be explaining death as a drawn out process of eternity. interesting, where we intersect though.

a good friend who studied law and psychology told me once that long term memories are formed during rem sleep, and that many memory disorders, including amnesia are closely linked to sleep disorders of some sort.

his theory was that if you die, say in the afternoon, the memory of your morning activities on the day of your death could not linger into any sort of eternal afterlife. he claimed it was physiologically impossible, you just wouldn't remember the events of your final day. if, on the other hand, you died in your sleep early in the morning, after a night of dreaming and storing long term memories of your final day, then they would accompany you in eternity.

but i like your theory better, because you are saying that there is only a perceptual eternity; relative to any clock observed by those still living, what you perceive as eternal peace or eternal suffering occurs within the space of a few minutes as life is fading from your body and it returns to dust. if this is true, then both long and short term memories would be a part of what you experiences "after death," or during death.

that's just one of a thousand theories regarding REM. and probably not the right one.

i never claimed he was right, in fact i said i like rob I.'s theory better.

Can someone explain REM, because I don't feel like googling it and coming up with the band R.E.M.

I thought this was a prevailing theory re: REM?

"The Magicians Penn and Teller used the phrase on a TV trick [1] with a Nobel Prize winner.
R.E.M. vocalist Michael Stipe said of the incident: "It remains the premier unsolved American surrealist act of the 20th century. It's a misunderstanding that was scarily random, media hyped and just plain bizarre."

well i was just addressing that one fact.

synth.. there are different stages of sleep. stage 1 and 2, and then 3 and 4 are slow wave sleep or deep sleep. REM is also a stage which becomes more frequent the longer you sleep. you know that rem is rapid eye movement. and when someone has rapid eye movement, it's easy to tell they're dreaming. no one really knows the purpose of dreaming and there are a million theories from totally new age sort of bullshit to it being nothing... neurons firing randomly (which is actually what i believe). but nonetheless, REM is necessary. if you are REM suppressed, you are excessively tired and fatigued.

I've never had a really convincing "long time in a dream but short in reality" kind of experience.

Oh ok, thank you love.

R.E.M.
Random Eye Movement.
There is a period in sleep, and it happens with everyone, except a very very few severly brain damaged people, that alsts from 30 minutes to around 45 minutes, where your eyes move "randomly" which is actually your eye reacting to the images conjred up by your brain as you dream. all dreams take place during REM sleep, and most sleep is not REM sleep.
there are many theories as to why this is, and one I have found to be satistfactory is that during REM sleep, the brain is effectively ending all superconscious thought left over from befor you fell asleep, thereby allowing the 4-6 hours of quiet, non-dream sleep your braina nd body both need to regenerate themlseves after a day of excersion.

and the stuff about death and the last seconds of life, is of course, just an idea I have ruminated upon for twenty or so years, correcting it as I learn new neurobiological info and new shamanistic mystic info.

true, i think it's probably pseudo-random neurons firing while yr brain is trying to accomplish some other task unrelated to what you happen to be experiencing in the "dream" ....maybe related to processing memories, maybe just keeping yr heart and lungs going.... i don't think it's pure noise, but on the other hand i don't think our brains create "dreams" just to entertain us while we sleep...

if you enter into a sensory deprivation chamber long enough, the brain is fooled into thinking it is asleep and will begin to "dream" while one is awake. It does this also when someone is deprived of sleep for whatever reason, for a long time. the brain needs to "re-format" itself in a ssense and will do so whether you are asleep or not.
stay awake long enough and the brain shorts out and you can literally go insane. supposedly ther is no coming back from that kind iof insane.

scary

really?? i regularly experience hours and sometimes days in the time between hitting the snooze button twice, with varying degrees of realness - from the occasional "holy shit, what day is it?" to the more usual "that was strange, i want some pancakes..."

the scariest is when the brain makes up, in a near instant, an entire back story dream to explain something you hear or sense while lightly asleep. has that happened to you?

scientists find it amazing, the speed at which the brain/mind can send thoughts to itself.

it is like a dream that self-predicts what you needed to dream before the event happened, like an alarm going off, or water dripping on you.

they are hard to explain.

this assumes that the physical aspects of the brain dictate thought and feeling, rather then believing that thought and feeling dictate the physical reactions and activities we observe in the brain. it is a chicken and the egg kind of question..

i know what yr talking about, but it hardly ever happens to me because i'm such a heavy sleeper. i think that's why i can re-enter the dream state (hardly ever the actual same dream though it does happen) so easily. my ex said she used to have conversations with my dream-self i the morning as i was waking up. she said sometimes i'd respond coherently but talking about something in the dream i was having, other times it would be a combination of english, french and gibberish... in both cases my eyes could be open and looking around. i have no recollection of any of this. i wonder if she ever asked me who i dreamt about having sex with....

Many people having near-death experiences report a slowing-down of time perception as reality becomes dream-like.
As I offered before in another thread, I personally believe that sleeping and dreaming are functions of a larger whole of our true beings and that we are preparing for both life and death as we dream. In dreaming, just as in death (and to an extent in orgasm), our waking consciousness is extinguished.

Dostoevsky writes of his dizzying, consciousness-altering experience before the firing squad prior to getting a last-minute reprieve. The experience changed his life in many ways. One thing it did though is that the stress of the event (and his sufferings in the Siberian labor camp too) probably caused his epilepsy.

C.G. Jung wrote an essay of the Catholic mass ritual as a rehearsal for death and the ideation of self-sacrifice of the ego. Now, Jung was not a Catholic, in fact he was a sun-worshipper of a relatively esoteric Egyptian sect if you can believe it, but much of his study is concerned with comparative religion and mythology as much as psychology and philosophy and these very same questions raised in the thread.
He also wrote much on the subject and history of Christianity in general as saw Christ as a symbol for the actualized self that is part of a larger whole.

Before the big bang happened there was no sense of time, but only of what we can describe as eternity. As one's consciouness is extinguished, one may very well dwell there in that thought (as was written previously in the thread) for eternity. Then again, perhaps one's state of matter is transformed in some other way; at any rate, it cannot be denied that we are eventually, as it is said, food for worms.

All religions seek to provide a basis of understanding of life's mysteries and are concerned with death, but some religions are more obsessed with death and the afterlife than others. In Buddhism, for instance, they crafted the science of death we know as The Tibetan Book Of the Dead that espoused one to clear one's mind of fears and desires as they die. The concept, as you may know, being to embrace the clear white light and escape the cycle of birth and death to reach nirvana. (Lynch's Agent Dale Cooper character provided a memorable westernized version of a Buddhist death ceremony on the Twin Peaks television series).

I think the Buddhists have a very interesting idea with the bardo and reincarnation, but I happen to believe personally that existence on this planet is a one-shot deal and that they are merely attributing a physical form (via the doctrine of reincarnation) for a metaphysical reality. They do, however, have a great notion about the importance of one's state of consciousness in the moment of death. And the Buddhist karmic reminder that the life one leads provides a certain threshold upon the moment of death is a grand one. In other more direct words, life is art and one cannot cheat in death.

see? this is what I like in internet forums, and this is the only one I go to.

they usually mash me down when I speak of things like this and accuse me of all kinds of nonsense. in a thread that asked what is a forum good for, this is the answer.

Just as meditation teaches the mind to be able to acquire more endless possibilities of "space" in-between automated and somewhat programmed thought-patterns, time away from this board has helped me make a perhaps less confrontationally provocative post (see my post above) than I would have had I been routinely posting lately.


Reminded me a bit of Krishnamurti:
http://www.jkrishnamurti.org/About_J_Krishnamurti

Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge, which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution.
When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts, he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep, radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence.

holy shit, atari's back

I forgot why you left.

every once in a while, I am...

Then again, it (^) could have something to do with the fact that the topic is non-confrontational...as opposed, to say, the "there is no god" and "all religion is stupid"-type of topics.

yes, it is nice

Many would assume, and naturally so, that Christianity teaches a somewhat opposing view of death and the afterlife than Buddhism, but a closer comparative look reveals that there are some important and interesting similarites of belief.

While Buddhism has Escape from The Wheel of Birth and Death as a strived-for ideal option to being reborn based on one's mettle in the bardo stages, Christianity has a heaven and a hell. Buddhism teaches that one must let go of fears (in a loose sense, hell) and desires (in a loose sense, heaven) to reach nirvana and leave samsara.

But Buddhism teaches also that one's likelihood of escaping birth and death is proportional to how one has prepared themselves for death. In other words, the degree to which one has lived an artful life with good karma and a strong mind disciplined in meditation relates to how likely it is that one embrace the clear white light after death losing all fears and desires and rejecting being attracted into being born again into another life.

New Testament Christianity teaches that one needs to repent in the name of Jesus Christ who died for one's sins. It teaches that one can do this at any time before death and be saved from hell and be set aside a place in heaven provided the prayer is heard. Again, this seems to run contrary to the Buddhist idea of karma. I write "seems" because Christianity also (per the above italicized portion) teaches, (and one rarely hears much about it) that God simply doesn't hear the prayers of those that have been cut off from God from living an unjust life that rejected the soul, the human part of being a human animal; the lamentations for salvation of the dying one that chose fear over love all their life isn't heard. God doesn't accept a person for the prayer's sake, but the prayer for the person's sake.

So, we see that essentially in this regard that Buddhism and New Testament Christianity teach the same concept: that life is art and one cannot cheat in death.

I've always enjoyed the idea that life is art. But so many people forget who the artist is.

Life is art in every sense. As Pollock was fond of saying, "Art and life are one...inseparable." It can be good art or bad depending on what you make of your life. And success rarely leads to good art just as the Bible reminds about the rich man's chances of getting into heaven are about the same as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. Humans are fairly obstinate and usually require suffering to live an artful life. Thus, many religions (over?)emphasize the importance of an ascetic lifestyle.

If life is art, then what is art? For as much as has been written over the ages by philosophers and critics concering aesthetics, no one has a comprehensive definition really. My definition of art is meditation or prayer; it's about the the arduous process of perfecting the will no matter what your vocation and evolving consciousness in yourself and those you relate. The lifelong relationship between a cognitive spirit and Eternal Truth finds its expression in artistic endeavour. Even science, even sports can be artistic. The object d'art itself is a manifestation of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious contents in the artist's mind and a symbol for Socratic self-discovery. In Picasso's words: "Art is a lie, but a lie that leads us to the truth."

__________________
"Music is my religion. There'll be music in the hereafter too." - Jimi Hendrix

I think it's great that over mankind's history, isolated groups of people have developed belief systems that often mirror each other.

the medicine wheel of native american belief wisely predicts and explains this similarity.


the Great Spirit exists within the circle of life.

as a man (or woman) traverses this circle through time and experience, they will each have a different view inward, but ultimately, they are "seeing" the same thing.

I'm pretty sure that I've posted almost exactly this same thing before, but I think that it's beautiful. [this board will never witness me post anything else as personal].

although my beliefs do not attract me to any one organized religion, I feel sad for those that do not see or sense the underlying current that caused this infinitely complex universe to arise.

as far as art goes, I feel that it stems from the same place as religion.

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i have often thought about how this works
like for example..if someone knockson my bedroom door and then i have a dream about someone walking all the way up from the hallway and knocking on my door... so when in the real world someone knocked on my door my brain made a dream that seemed like it was real time..yet it must of been so fast to sync up with the real door knocking...did that make sense