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Goodbye Jesus

Getting Used To There Not Going To Be An Afterlife


Chikirin

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I keep dreaming that my junior high contacts my employer and tells them I failed gym in 7th grade, thus nullifying my high school and college degree, and I am forced to return to 7th grade to pass the course

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Getting used to thinking of myself as mortal, and not having a soul or afterlife is the main difficulty I'm having.

A big part of life is accepting and dealing with the simple fact of your own mortality. Stripped down to its basic root causes, most of the neurosis and immaturity that's abroad in the world is because of all the energy that goes into denying / ignoring the reality of death. One of the ways we do this is to cling to the existence of an afterlife -- generally an afterlife that is suspiciously idyllic. What basis would there be to think that an afterlife would not just be "same shit, different dimension"?

 

I think there is actually a much greater possibility of an afterlife or at least some form of consciousness persisted outside the meat machines we're trapped in -- maybe a 3% probability for that, vs the 0.0000000000001% probability of anything even vaguely resembling an omnibenevolent god. In both cases, though, I don't order my life based on the assumption that either exist.

 

Personally I like the idea of all this being over for me one day soon. Even the Apostle Paul opined that "to die is expedient for me, but for me to live is expedient for you". I am weary of the ways of men and the ways of gods. I want no further part of it. My life is made tolerable by the idea that there is an endpoint in sight. I suppose that sounds like a downer, but really, it's not. I have certain responsibilities to myself and to others and I get a certain amount of self actualization and satisfaction out of fulfilling those responsibilities, even though my life as a net proposition is not something I'd wish on my worst enemy.

 

But all in all, I think that life is finite is a Good Thing. If you open your ears and listen -- read people's biographies, read philosophy, and so forth, and you'll find a theme ... life is, to varying degrees, a fine thing for specific individuals, but no matter how good it is, eventually people grow tired. And I think it's more than an artifact of aging. I think living too long is like a great movie that needs a good editor -- no movie is so good that people will sit through 12 hours of it.

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I keep dreaming that my junior high contacts my employer and tells them I failed gym in 7th grade, thus nullifying my high school and college degree, and I am forced to return to 7th grade to pass the course

 

I used to have recurring dreams about having to go through bootcamp again.

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I only just recently managed to accidently have a lucid dream. It went something along the lines of being in a combination of every educational instituition I've ever attended, in one room, and realizing I was dreaming and trying to wake up. Asolutley profound. It's those kind of experiences - that alter your sense of time as well - that really get you thinking about just what the hell the "feeling" of time really is.

 

It's interesting reading how much existential damage being promised a silly childish afterlife from the get-go can do. It never happened to me, and by the looks of it I'm happy I never wasted any of my 'real' time worrying about it. Death has never bothered me; horrid injuries and such before death yes perhaps.... But death? What's to worry about. You're dead. And it's going to happened to everyone.

 

If you really want to get physical about it, something that has always kind of baked my noodle is: What of the physical nature of a consciousness? Can it ever exist more than once? Which leads to cloning for me. You could get an exact genetic clone let's say, would there ever be a way to replicate a past consciousness? A part of a conscioussness is past experiences, which eventually do structure the brain to a degree. So I wonder if everyones genetic structure and experience is a physical one-off anyway... And since it looks that way, what are the implications for the all the possibility that is never forged into a consciousness.... etc.

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