saw038September 22, 2016 at 03:1213850 views63 comments
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” - Alan Watts
It is interesting in a poetic way; I find that it does not invite me to elaborate on it at all, just as I would not attempt to explain the meaning of a poem.
I like much of Alan Watts' work. In this case I think there is a salient asymmetry though, that the saying, for all its poetry, overlooks.
That is that nobody ever wakes up - in the sense of being suddenly completely lucid - having never gone to sleep. We gradually attain lucidity over the first few months (or years?) of our life. For some people the process of death may be the reverse of that - particularly in the case of dementia. But for illnesses or injuries that attack other parts of the body than the mind, the symmetry is not there. One can be there and fully lucid one moment, and have permanently ceased consciousness the next.
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 22, 2016 at 13:03#227730 likes
After you're dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience - or the same sort of experience - as when you were born. Only, you can only experience it one at a time. You can't have an experience of nothing; nature abhors a vacuum.
I've tried to imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up, but it always ends with waking up again.
Reply to andrewk I see what you're saying, but some of what you're assumes that we understand the consciousness of newborn babies and that is something that really can't be proven.
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” - Alan Watts
Reply to Ciceronianus the White I presume the imagining waking up after never having gone to sleep must have been tough because the only thing that would describe that would be birth.
Terrapin StationSeptember 22, 2016 at 19:21#228130 likes
Reply to Terrapin Station But it logically follows because we can imagine going to sleep and never waking up (at least, crudely); therefore, we should be able to imagine the inverse; that is, waking up without ever having gone to sleep. Alan's point was that this represents birth.
Terrapin StationSeptember 22, 2016 at 20:00#228180 likes
Well, waking up logically requires that we were asleep first, though.
I don't buy that there's nothing like consciousness or sleep prior to birth, and I also don't buy that consciousness is more or less like it is as an adult for the first few years that we're alive. It would be too difficult to explain why we have (amost) no memories of being infants if we were to posit that consciousness when we're 1 or 2 is more or less similar to adult consciousness. But clearly we sleep prior to consciousness being like adult consciousness.
CiceronianusSeptember 22, 2016 at 21:14#228250 likes
I think this little statement is supposed to be like one of them thar Zen koans, which need not (or perhaps are not supposed to) make sense but which somehow bring about enlightenment, or something like that. Like asking about the sound of one hand clapping. So, perhaps Mr. Watts is saying something like: "Death is just not being alive, man; you can't sleep or wake up. Shanti."
. . it logically follows because we can imagine going to sleep and never waking up (at least, crudely); therefore, we should be able to imagine the inverse; that is, waking up without ever having gone to sleep.
No, there is no such thing to imagine, because the ability to identify what something is like is acquired when one is awake. If you have never been awake before, then there can be no such thing to imagine as waking up without ever having gone to sleep. Also "crudely" it would be a fictional story of what something was like but which couldn't have been like anything.
I see what you're saying, but some of what you're assumes that we understand the consciousness of newborn babies and that is something that really can't be proven.
I said that based on my own memories, in particular that I have no recollections of consciousness prior to the age of four. It's possible that I was lucid at the age of one month but do not recall it. That seems implausible to me but you're right that I can't prove it.
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” - Alan Watts
Thoughts?
Epicurus Symmetry argument:
"...anyone who fears death should consider the time before he was born. The past infinity of pre-natal non-existence is like the future infinity of post-mortem non-existence; it is as though nature has put up a mirror to let us see what our future non-existence will be like. But we do not consider not having existed for an eternity before our births to be a terrible thing; therefore, neither should we think not existing for an eternity after our deaths to be evil."
The problem I have with this argument is that there is an asymmetry. Any existence after death would be a continuance of present existence, however that might be conceived, whereas any existence before birth would not be. This is so because if we have no memory of any existence before birth we know it cannot be thought as related in any coherent way to present existence; whereas the possibility there might be memory of the present existence in a future existence allows that there might be a coherent way to relate the two. This doesn't rule out that there might be, or that there might come to be, memory of previous existence in the present life, though, and if there were then the situation would still not be symmetrical because we cannot have memories of a future existence.
My earlier post was quoting bits of Watts from a fairly well-known youtube clip of his (called The Real You). What's funny (to me) is that I have a friend who has absolutely no time or patience for philosophy, but he said to me one day he had suddenly realised what happens after you die - but he wasn't really able to verbalise what he thought (which I thought was pretty just considering his dislike of philosophy, but anyway). He kept saying, literally, "after you die other people are born" which is almost verbatim how Watts puts it. He went round and round in circles trying to explain it to me. There were diagrams, timelines, and established names such as "The Andy Life Theory". Eventually I got an inkling of what he was trying to get at ("I'm telling you, after you die, other people are born! It's so obvious!") and I asked him to listen to this clip of Alan Watts, who came to the same realisation. He couldn't believe someone had got there before him and explained so clearly where words failed him. He was pretty gutted.
Basically, the idea is this (I'll be using Watts' words verbatim as well as my own). The only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience, as when you were born - because you can't have an experience of nothing; nature abhors a vacuum. After you die, someone else is born who thinks they're an 'I' and that their sense of self is the centre of the universe, just how you feel now. Someone else 'wakes up' and gets a first person perspective and begins experiencing the world. Only, it's you. Well, it's not 'you' in the sense of reincarnation; you died along with your material body. But, in a sense it is still you because everybody is an 'I'. You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing. What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. Wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference; you are all of them. Only, you can only experience it one at a time. Your 'self' dies upon death, but there is never any 'nothingness' because, as said, you can't have an experience of nothing. There is only more experience, and for there to be more experience, someone else needs to wake up. What happens after you die is a continuing succession of I's one after the other. And as Watts would say, they're all you because you are everything. That is what is meant by The Real You.
Take that for what you will, but that's the gist of it all. In my more contemplative moods it makes a lot of sense to me, especially considering our earliest ('mechanical') biological roots were something purely physical/chemical that the world 'did' when in a particular state. Only, that state became more complex through evolution got us to where we are now with a sense of self and a 'separateness' from our origins and the world of our surroundings. But we are both still it and in it, we never became separate from it nor did we emerge from it, it's still ongoing and therefore "what we do is what the whole universe is doing at the place we call here and now". I especially like the idea that the 'self' is what makes us think we're separate from the universe when we aren't. I think of it as The Fall from God (or the universe, in the ancient Greek sense as per the Stoics, a thought I'm sure you can appreciate). "Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself" (Rust Cohle from True Detective, but pessimistic theory in general) and to get back to living in accordance with nature one has to lose their sense of self, thereby 'delimiting' it so that we become once again immanent with all creation - realising that The Real You is "something that the whole universe is doing in the same way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing". Otherwise you'll stay pretending that you're just a 'poor little me', as Watt's puts it. To me, that's what ego death is. It also ties in nicely with the pessimistic idea of 'self-consciousness under time' (Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism, 2006). "We suffer because we desire" things from the past that we can't retrieve, and because we desire things from the future we are perpetually unable to attain (the strict Buddhist sense probably fits somewhere in here also). We project our sense of self into the future and the past because self-consciousness is what makes us able to do that. Our self-consciousness of/under time doesn't allow us to live in 'the place we call here and now' (Watts). This would also explain why "you can't have an experience of nothing", because without a self there is no experience, and without experience there is no time. Hence there might be a billion years between your death and the next person who 'wakes up', but it will go by, for want of a better phrase, like nothing (that is what makes the continuing 'succession' of separate experiences after death). That is how it was before you were born; this was all here for billions of years but as far as you and your self are concerned, it came into being when you did. As I said it makes sense to me, but to really appreciate it you need to almost think 'outside' your self and "discover who you really are", which is what caused the whole problem to begin with. Only in my more contemplative moods.
Anyway, that's going quite far from what Watt's said himself, but I think there is a 'grand unifying theory' of many different philosophies (including pessimism, Buddhism, determinism, some form of idealism, Stoicism, Christianity, neo-Platonism, philosophy of time, and every-day understandings of death and the self) to be found somewhere in my ramblings.
Anyway, that's going quite far from what Watt's said himself, but I think there is a 'grand unifying theory' of many different philosophies (including pessimism, Buddhism, determinism, some form of idealism, Stoicism, Christianity, neo-Platonism, philosophy of time, and every-day understandings of death and the self) to be found somewhere in my ramblings.
This is most certainly not true historically speaking.
As regards the general gist of your statement, I will say this. Most people never doubted that existence itself continues after they die (and hence others are born, etc.). Their concern was exactly the preservation of their identity - their habits, their ideas, their way of being, their character, and their particular features. They always were concerned whether this identity keeps on existing - to say "no it doesn't, but the rest of existence keeps on existing" is irrelevant. It doesn't mean anything. It's a denial of one's own self. Just as absurd as saying that killing yourself will cure your headaches!
Like Socrates, I think it is better to hope in an afterlife - and hope is the most we can have in this life. We're going to die anyway, might as well die with hope and gladness in our hearts.
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 23, 2016 at 11:40#229800 likes
I'm not speaking 'historically'. I'm talking about a bare underlying idea that runs through some parts of these different philosophies. Like I said in another post, there are going to be many differences in the details, but I think there's something there that is worth considering, and makes sense to me. Going on about identity after death is a red herring as to what I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with it and that wasn't what I was referring to. Whether people had those anxieties or not has little to no bearing on my idea.
Edit: and from what you said, it sounds like you don't really understand what I said. It was exactly the same attitude I took to my fiend when he said "after people die, other people are born". I said well that just sounds like a common sense truism and everyone knows that. There is another meaning beneath that which is what Watts was saying, and one which I didn't immediately see as a similarity between them.
I'm not speaking 'historically'. I'm talking about a bare underlying idea that runs through some parts of these different philosophies. Like I said in another post, there are going to be many differences in the details, but I think there's something there that is worth considering, and makes sense to me. Going on about identity after death is a red herring as to what I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with it and that wasn't what I was referring to. Whether people had those anxieties or not has little to no bearing on my idea.
What is the purpose of your idea then? What does it aim to do? If it's just to inform us that existence keeps on existing, and other people will keep being born and feeling that they are an "I" just like we did, sure, but that's just trivially true.
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 23, 2016 at 11:47#229830 likes
The point isn't that "existence keeps on existing". That's the most superficial interpretation of it, look deeper. There's clearly something which my friend, Watts, and myself saw that you haven't. The issue is not with us.
Edit: "other people will keep being born and feeling that they are an "I" just like we did". Refer to my previous post about this sort of line.
Like Socrates, I think it is better to hope in an afterlife - and hope is the most we can have in this life. We're going to die anyway, might as well die with hope and gladness in our hearts.
Socrates last words:
I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius”
According to Nietzsche this was not hope, it was resentment. Life is an illness and death its cure. From The Gay Science, The Dying Socrates:
Is it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully and like a soldier in the sight of everyone, should have been a pessimist? He had merely kept a cheerful mien while concealing all his life long his ultimate judgment, his inmost feeling. Socrates, Socrates suffered life! And then he still revenged himself – with this veiled, gruesome, pious, and blasphemous saying. Did a Socrates need such revenge? Did his overrich virtue lack an ounce of magnanimity? – Alas, my friends, we must overcome even the Greeks! (340)
Reply to WhiskeyWhiskers Look what Watts is saying is true in a very abstract sense. But it's not in any way true that "the real me" or "the real you" is the whole of existence. Sure the whole of existence is our ground - that which gives rise to the movement we call us. But how do we go from here to ignoring our particular existence? We clearly don't exist as "the whole of existence" - we exist as us. I don't have access to what you're thinking for example - regardless of how hard I try. I am "forced" to exist as me, and as no one else until I die. As Voltaire's Candide replied: "Yes, but we must still cultivate our garden" . The fact that I am the whole of existence changed absolutely nothing. All the problems and issues of life are left intact, exactly as they were prior to this gnosis.
Reply to Cavacava Nietzsche's interpretation is clearly not the one that Plato suggests in Phaedo though. Socrates wanted to ask the gods to aid him in his journey from this world to the next world. Hence the Asclepius comment, which referred to the God of healing and medicine.
Reply to Agustino
In reference to what WhiskeyWhiskers is saying, it can be described in a different way by analogy.
If one imagines that when a being is reborn, the body of the baby they become is rather like a suit of clothes(a vehicle of incarnation). During the beings life they attach experiences to the suit like badges, or stylistic details. These badges are like the personality of the being shaped by experience and learning. When the being dies they leave behind the suit and get a new one and in the next life they attach new badges. The being has not changed, it is the same person, but wearing a different suit. All the suits are the same to begin with and all beings are the same, that is you, or me. It is only the badges of the personality where there is variation.
If one imagines that when a being is reborn, the body of the baby they become is rather like a suit of clothes(a vehicle of incarnation). During the beings life they attach experiences to the suit like badges, or stylistic details. These badges are like the personality of the being shaped by experience and learning. When the being dies they leave behind the suit and get a new one and in the next life they attach new badges. The being has not changed, it is the same person, but wearing a different suit. All the suits are the same to begin with and all beings are the same, that is you, or me. It is only the badges of the personality where there is variation.
Okay - but I find the idea that all these beings are the same, there is no difference between them, highly suspect. In what sense does a being change suit if it brings nothing with it into the next suit? If that's the case, this is pragmatically equivalent to there being just the suit with no being.
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 23, 2016 at 14:38#229990 likes
I know you like philosophy to be practical for it to be of value, but there are (whether 'useful' or not) ways of thinking about philosophy that do not adhere to such a strict definition. To me, philosophy need not tell us what to do, only show us how to think about ourselves and our place in the world. You might (or might not) say it's not real philosophy, but there we'll have to agree to disagree. I dunno what else to say, you state your opinions in opposition to mine and add a truth tag to them. You seem to not disagree all that much with what I'm saying, as I'll explain in a minute, except you disregard it because it doesn't do away with any problems in life. I don't know how to go from here to ignoring our particular existence, but from what I've read on ego death it is possible in some brain states (typically through brain damage, which doesn't exactly sound achievable through any path of 'enlightenment'). Nor is that any kind of refutation to what I'm saying; if anything it can seen as being consistent with it because, like you say, we can't not feel like an 'I' because it's the core of who we feel ourselves to be (unless forcibly removed, as mentioned) as my larger post more or less said. We are forced to exist as us (separate from nature). That's the fall. Enlightenment might not be possible, but I'm ok with that aspect of the philosophy.
I was only expanding on what Watts said because he's being talked about without people knowing all that much about his philosophy. Take from my other extrapolations what you will, if anything.
Reply to WhiskeyWhiskers Okay thanks for clarifying. I do think philosophy should be practical - hence why many such considerations I feel are not so significant when we really get busy living!
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 23, 2016 at 14:44#230010 likes
This is a good way of looking at it. At the risk of sounding less helpful, it's like perpetual reincarnation, except there is nothing carried over from one life to the next that could be considered that same person (because the person dies with the body). After you die, there's another in the succession of first person personal experiences. The same sort of experience as when you were born. After you die, other people are born.
At the risk of sounding less helpful, it's like perpetual reincarnation, except there is nothing carried over from one life to the next that could be considered that same person (because the person dies with the body). After you die, there's another in the succession of first person personal experiences. The same sort of experience as when you were born. After you die, other people are born.
In other words: you die, and that's that >:O
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 23, 2016 at 14:58#230030 likes
Reply to WhiskeyWhiskers LOL - you know actually I think that this type of answer (the one I quoted previously) is the politically correct one in today's world. We don't want to tell the poor guy he's going to die, all his hopes and dreams, the things he liked, etc. are going to vanish - so we tell him he will reincarnate except that nothing will carry over during that reincarnation >:O - let's hope he doesn't ask what reincarnates!
Reply to WhiskeyWhiskers But who has died, was it the badges of personality, was it the I that never changes?if the former, I would argue that that wasn't the person anyway, just a mask being worn by the I. If the later, how can it die? it is still alive in the next person to be born, or those that are still alive in bodies.
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 23, 2016 at 15:47#230070 likes
Watts would agree with you that it was the mask being worn by the I. I think he's even used that phraseology before to make a similar point. If you accept his idea, it does beg the question of what, exactly, it means to die at all. It would be like the universe closing one aperture through which it knows itself only to open another. I think Carl Sagan said something similar.
CiceronianusSeptember 23, 2016 at 16:12#230100 likes
I think of it as The Fall from God (or the universe, in the ancient Greek sense as per the Stoics, a thought I'm sure you can appreciate). "Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself" (Rust Cohle from True Detective, but pessimistic theory in general) and to get back to living in accordance with nature one has to lose their sense of self, thereby 'delimiting' it so that we become once again immanent with all creation - realising that The Real You is "something that the whole universe is doing in the same way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing". Otherwise you'll stay pretending that you're just a 'poor little me', as Watt's puts it.
I don't think the ancient Stoics thought there had been any kind of "Fall" in the sense Christianity, for example, conceives it. Humanity wasn't inherently defective by virtue of some failing. There simply were those who lived according to nature and those who did not. Those who did not were ignorant, fearful, irrational, discontented and often immoral. They were themselves responsible for that state, yes, because they concerned themselves with things not in their control. But they were not inherently defective in the sense we supposedly are according to Christianity (at least that Christianity with which I'm familiar) courtesy of Adam and Eve, until we're saved by God.
As for death, the Stoics thought our individual selves would ultimately be dissolved, as it were, in union with the Divine Reason. Some claim that Seneca and the Roman Stoics came to believe an individual's personality survived after death; I'm not sure that's the case, though.
While the Stoics felt we all partake in the Divine, and, I think, that the Stoic Sage (the ideal Stoic) could become "like the gods" as I believe Epictetus put it, I question whether they would maintain that we can be said to survive in others because we're really everyone and everything. So I don't know if they accepted any concept like the "Real You." The fact that all is interconnected and the universe is matter directed by a Divine Intelligence which is itself immanent in nature and internal to it ,as a unique kind of material (sometimes called a fire or breath), doesn't mean that we're all one.
What I'm spinning is made up of a few threads from many different philosophies. I understand I need to be careful of what I'm saying here, because reading back I can see how some things I've said don't quite reflect my intentions. I was trying to tie together the idea of The Fall with the idea that God is equivalent to nature, meaning that, in returning to God in the Kingdom of Heaven, you also at the same time return to nature, hence 'in accordance' with it. I understand that The Fall means we are each born with original sin, but if you merge the two further you get a slightly different reading. Bear with me.
The Fall began in the Garden of Eden after we (collectively) obtained knowledge of good and evil and lost our obedience to 'God'. God, understood in Stoic terms, is nature, the logos, or universal reason. Stoic doctrine holds that, by living in accordance with nature, we are living according to universal reason. Part of my 'thesis' is that this knowledge of good and evil (in the Christian sense) that expelled us from the Garden/separated us from God (nature) is the mistaken view that good and evil exist in the external world, when in fact, they do not (the Stoic sense). "It is not things that trouble us, but our judgement about things". I won't spend too long on the Stoic idea of externals being neither good or bad because I'm sure it's one with which you are well acquainted.
"It is human beings who, thanks to their freedom, introduce trouble and worry into the world" (*The Inner Citadel*, Pierre Hadot, p. 107). Freedom here, in my understanding, is the same freedom of will that, in the Christian sense, allows us to choose to either obey or disobey God (nature, or universal reason). God "created humankind in the beginning, and he left them in the power of their own free choice" (Ecclesiasticus 15:14). "Nature created and aspect of nature separate from itself" (pessimistic theory), by endowing us with a sense of free will and a self. It is this same sense of self, which is a necessary condition for free will, that makes us think we're separate from everything outside our bodies, and Zapffe would agree. But we should realise that "we are something the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing" (Watts).
Self-consciousness 'Others' every thing that we do not feel to be a part of us when we interact with the world, which is to say, everything else. It is the very thing that makes a sharp distinction between us and the universe. There is 'us', and there is 'not-us'. As Watts also said, "we speak of coming into this world, we didn't; we came out of it". The world 'peoples'. The process of 'waking up', of finding out who you really are, is the discovery of The Real You.
Hadot talks about 'delimiting the self'. "The first step to delimitation of the ego consists in recognising that, of the being which I am, neither the body, nor the vital breath which animates it, is mine in the proper sense of the term [...] because they are imposed on me by Destiny, independently of my will." It is not a stretch at all to claim that God/nature imposed this 'vital breath' or 'Divine Intelligence', as you put it, on a material body. I understand that as being made in the "image of God" from Christian theology or the "divine spark" in the Gnostic sense. The parallels are all there, as I said I think they require a unifying theory to tie these small threads from the larger schools of thought together.
Hadot goes on to say, "Marcus describes in a quite remarkable way, the different circles which surround the ego or the 'I', as well as the exercise which consists in rejecting them one by one, as something foreign to my self." This is in XII;3. The first circle is "the others", the second is the past and future, i.e. self-consciousness under time as I already mentioned in my first post in this thread as relating to general pessimistic theory, and the third is "constituted by the domain involuntary emotions [in the sense that we did not control them, not in the sense that they can't be controlled], these are caused by impressions received by the body". Hadots general thesis with regards to Stoicism is one which I largely agree with, and he goes into the various "spiritual exercises" alluded to in the meditations, and drawn on from Epictetus, for living according to nature (the discipline of desire, action, and judgement). There's quite a great deal more said by Hadot on the subject, and if you haven't already then I highly recommend his work on the meditations of Marcus Aurelius - though it is certainly more coherent, scholarly, and related to Stoicism than what I've said. The rest of what he has to say doesn't correlate exactly with my thesis (it just becomes less relevant), but I would depart here somewhat onto the accounts given of ego death generally and how that ties back in with Watts' idea of The Real You.
I'll leave it there for now, but there's more that can be said I think. I hope I've managed to show where I was coming from by drawing a common thread through many different areas of thought. I can see there are definitely parallels with many of these ideas, which is hardly surprising given that they all emerged from intermingled cultures roughly around the same time period. I said in a previous thread there will be differences in the details, and large parts will not be relevant, but I do think that philosophies that propose a higher or altered state of mind are all trying to get at a common experience we can all share, and our sense of self is something extremely peculiar and troubling to us indeed. But who knows. I haven't even mentioned how Buddhism could tie in with all this, and I think it certainly does.
Watts would agree with you that it was the mask being worn by the I. I think he's even used that phraseology before to make a similar point. If you accept his idea, it does beg the question of what, exactly, it means to die at all. It would be like the universe closing one aperture through which it knows itself only to open another.
This is how I see it. That which all apertures have in common is therefore deathless. "Mask" dies. Mask is beautiful. It provides for the massive variety of personalities. But masks/snowflakes keep falling to replace those that melt on the street. A bitter and defensive identification of the "deep I" with its mask simultaneously gives death its sting and takes from life a vision of its massive fecundity. "Do you want to fix the world? I don't think it can be done." As I see it, it's not about condemning any particular mask (including anti-pride or anti-egoism talk, itself an egoistic mask), but simply a matter of being (partially sometimes and completely at others) liberated from identification with 'mask.'
I was trying to tie together the idea of The Fall with the idea that God is equivalent to nature, meaning that, in returning to God in the Kingdom of Heaven, you also at the same time return to nature, hence 'in accordance' with it. I understand that The Fall means we are each born with original sin, but if you merge the two further you get a slightly different reading. Bear with me.
I like this. We can frame the original sin as the belief in sin itself (knowledge of good and evil). I associate this "belief in sin" with sitting in opposition to God/Nature/Life as its judge. From this perspective, most religion is the fruit of the forbidden tree. You can find this in Blake who contrasted (for him) true religion (creativity and forgiveness) with false (self-righteousness and accusation.) This tension runs right down the middle of Christianity.
I'd probably use "world" for "nature" to stress the interpersonal aspect of the Fall. (Ever read Camus' The Fall? Great stuff.)
The Fall began in the Garden of Eden after we (collectively) obtained knowledge of good and evil and lost our obedience to 'God'. God, understood in Stoic terms, is nature, the logos, or universal reason. Stoic doctrine holds that, by living in accordance with nature, we are living according to universal reason. Part of my 'thesis' is that this knowledge of good and evil (in the Christian sense) that expelled us from the Garden/separated us from God (nature) is the mistaken view that good and evil exist in the external world, when in fact, they do not (the Stoic sense). "It is not things that trouble us, but our judgement about things".
This for me ties in with a reading of Job, which is a vision of God/Life/Nature as unjust, unfair --and yet to be affirmed nevertheless. I like we can also link living in accordance with nature or universal to the notion of ordinary mind or creative play. If we get out of the way of our guts, we can take real pleasure and interest in the things of the world. Absorption obliterates the anguished knowledge/assertion of good and evil. We can live beyond such aggressive abstractions, at least at our higher moments.
CiceronianusSeptember 23, 2016 at 21:11#230320 likes
Reply to WhiskeyWhiskers Christianity assimilated a good deal of Stoicism and other pagan philosophies and religions popular in the Roman Empire, and there are of course similarities between them as a result. But I think what you're attempting requires too radical a reinterpretation of Christian doctrine, if I understand you correctly.
Pantheism, Stoic or otherwise, is and has for centuries been heresy as least as far as Catholic Christianity is concerned. Christianity requires a transcendent personal God, and rejects pantheism as a result. It views pantheism as limiting God to the material, changing, and therefore imperfect universe, and as negating the need for Jesus' mission, his sacrifice and salvation.
Our Fall according to Catholic Christianity is the result of the Adam and Eve's disobedience of God's commands (after temptation by the Devil). It's by that act that sin was introduced into the world, and that sin taints all of us. So, the world became evil as a result of this original sin. We're responsible for the evil of the world. It isn't merely that evil is external to us; we caused the evil to begin with. It's fundamental to Christianity that we and the world are sinful, and we're responsible for that state of affairs.
Since the Christian God is clearly not nature, and nature is necessarily inferior to the Christian God and even sinful, living according to nature is definitely not something a Christian would or should do. I don't think there's much of a common thread there.
Reply to Ciceronianus the White
But, C, why not explore something like a synthesis for personal use? Why be bound by previous uses of strings of marks and noises? We stand as readers above various systems, contemplated side by side. It seems quite natural to see how we can read each of them in the light of the others and find something valuable and new in a curated set of analogies. Why not creative misreading that seeks to salvage an otherwise obsolete tradition or text?
TheWillowOfDarknessSeptember 23, 2016 at 21:51#230350 likes
[reply="Agustino;23004]
On the contrary, to ask that is perfectly fine. The world left to future generations is an important question. Who will be and the environment which is left for them is a key ethical question.
Awareness if death only scares the traditionalist because it takes away the necessity of their way of life. Future generations have a different identity to you. On going culture and tradition is ultimately in their hands. They may well choose to abandon the tradtion you love much. One's one identity ceases to be the master of the world. Other people continue, not your own identity.
To say nothing caries over is utterly false and is not argued here. Plenty of stuff carries over, it is just not you. Telling someone their hopes and dreams vanish is exactly what "You're gone" does.
The insistence otherwise is a selfish act-- where one covets their life so much, that they do not accept their end and the existence of other people. They try to say they aren't really dead, that they have been reincarnated within the lives of others. It's fear of death which has someone claiming the dreams of other people are their own.
Awareness if death only scares the traditionalist because it takes away the necessity of their way of life.
Doesn't scare me. I have good hope and faith in the Divine. As Socrates said, either it's sleep, or it's a continuation. I hope it's a continuation, and I pray to die hoping so - for it is better to hope for the best and be deceived than to hope for nothing and be correct ;)
Having said that, I would obviously face some anxiety if I was to know I would die soon - I mean I want to live, I think there's a lot of good things I can do on this Earth. But some things are not under our control - so I can't do much about that. The time that has been granted me has been granted, that which hasn't been granted, hasn't. One must obey.
Awareness if death only scares the traditionalist because it takes away the necessity of their way of life. Future generations have a different identity to you. On going culture and tradition is ultimately in their hands. They may well choose to abandon the tradtion you love much. One's one identity ceases to be the master of the world. Other people continue, not your own identity.
I would hope they maintain the order that is required for them to achieve fulfilment here on Earth. But as soon as I exit this world, I exit it - it doesn't concern me in a direct way.
The insistence otherwise is a selfish act-- where one covets their life so much, that they do not accept their end and the existence of other people. They try to say they aren't really dead, that they have been reincarnated within the lives of others. It's fear of death which has someone claiming the dreams of other people are their own.
Misreading ancient works that were written in and for times and contexts we cannot adequately understand cannot be avoided. If the misreading is not creative, then the work will be rendered obsolete.
CiceronianusSeptember 24, 2016 at 17:49#232270 likes
Reply to Hoo By all means, explore. But why misread?
TheWillowOfDarknessSeptember 24, 2016 at 22:12#232850 likes
That's a pretty clearly falsehood. You don't merely hope for a continuation. I do that too-- despite being an hard atheist who doesn't think there is going to be a continuation. To continue living a wonderful life would be great.
You think your belief will get you a continuation. It's an act which eliminates the possibility of death for yourself. In that belief, you have supposedly entered a state which guarantees a continuation. Such a belief has no such effectiveness. One might continue just as well or better by thinking their was only death and hoping for it. With respect to continuation, being deceived could work fine.
The question of deception is one your own mind's fears. Not because it is contrary to continuation, but rather because you fear a world where you have no power over death. If you were stuck in a world without means to guarantee a continuation, it would be the worst. There would be no action you migh take to get life. You really would be at the mercy of death
WhiskeyWhiskersSeptember 25, 2016 at 13:15#233650 likes
I don't doubt that you're correct in all of this, and I'm fully aware of how radical a reinterpretation I am making of certain doctrines. It is highly speculative, and it's an idea I've been playing with for some time and I thought I'd throw it out there for public consumption. As speculative as it is, for me it does make for a interesting perspective on the universe, consciousness and death. But if pushed, I know probably none of it would stand up to nuanced scrutiny by an expert on these traditions.
The question of deception is one your own mind's fears. Not because it is contrary to continuation, but rather because you fear a world where you have no power over death. If you were stuck in a world without means to guarantee a continuation, it would be the worst. There would be no action you migh take to get life. You really would be at the mercy of death
I am already in such a world. I don't personally have power over death. So what?
bassplayerSeptember 28, 2016 at 22:23#238500 likes
Hi, newbie here. My thougts...
Nothingness doesn't exist. The concept of nothingness is really something we invented to deal with gaps in our own consciousness. In reality there is always something.
When we are unconscious (e.g sleep) we can't sense change (or time if you like). When we die, our consciousness is just put on hold like in sleep, maybe until the universe starts all over again in zillions of man made years. As we won't be conscious during that time we may go from 'death' to birth without noticing the zillions of years which passed by.
Comments (63)
Nice!
It is interesting in a poetic way; I find that it does not invite me to elaborate on it at all, just as I would not attempt to explain the meaning of a poem.
:)
That is that nobody ever wakes up - in the sense of being suddenly completely lucid - having never gone to sleep. We gradually attain lucidity over the first few months (or years?) of our life. For some people the process of death may be the reverse of that - particularly in the case of dementia. But for illnesses or injuries that attack other parts of the body than the mind, the symmetry is not there. One can be there and fully lucid one moment, and have permanently ceased consciousness the next.
I've tried to imagine what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up, but it always ends with waking up again.
Very well, I've tried. Now what?
:D
Re babies, yeah, the idea that there would be something clearly like conscious experience prior to ever having slept is extremely dubious.
I don't buy that there's nothing like consciousness or sleep prior to birth, and I also don't buy that consciousness is more or less like it is as an adult for the first few years that we're alive. It would be too difficult to explain why we have (amost) no memories of being infants if we were to posit that consciousness when we're 1 or 2 is more or less similar to adult consciousness. But clearly we sleep prior to consciousness being like adult consciousness.
You can be asleep first without ever having 'gone to sleep" though; because to go to sleep implies having been previously awake.
Epicurus Symmetry argument:
"...anyone who fears death should consider the time before he was born. The past infinity of pre-natal non-existence is like the future infinity of post-mortem non-existence; it is as though nature has put up a mirror to let us see what our future non-existence will be like. But we do not consider not having existed for an eternity before our births to be a terrible thing; therefore, neither should we think not existing for an eternity after our deaths to be evil."
The problem I have with this argument is that there is an asymmetry. Any existence after death would be a continuance of present existence, however that might be conceived, whereas any existence before birth would not be. This is so because if we have no memory of any existence before birth we know it cannot be thought as related in any coherent way to present existence; whereas the possibility there might be memory of the present existence in a future existence allows that there might be a coherent way to relate the two. This doesn't rule out that there might be, or that there might come to be, memory of previous existence in the present life, though, and if there were then the situation would still not be symmetrical because we cannot have memories of a future existence.
Epicurus argument bears few assumptions.
We were not
Then we are
Then we are not
There is no presumption of continuation, it is symmetry. It is Meontology.
True, true within those assumptions, yes. "Meontology"! I like it!
My earlier post was quoting bits of Watts from a fairly well-known youtube clip of his (called The Real You). What's funny (to me) is that I have a friend who has absolutely no time or patience for philosophy, but he said to me one day he had suddenly realised what happens after you die - but he wasn't really able to verbalise what he thought (which I thought was pretty just considering his dislike of philosophy, but anyway). He kept saying, literally, "after you die other people are born" which is almost verbatim how Watts puts it. He went round and round in circles trying to explain it to me. There were diagrams, timelines, and established names such as "The Andy Life Theory". Eventually I got an inkling of what he was trying to get at ("I'm telling you, after you die, other people are born! It's so obvious!") and I asked him to listen to this clip of Alan Watts, who came to the same realisation. He couldn't believe someone had got there before him and explained so clearly where words failed him. He was pretty gutted.
Basically, the idea is this (I'll be using Watts' words verbatim as well as my own). The only thing that can happen is the same experience, or the same sort of experience, as when you were born - because you can't have an experience of nothing; nature abhors a vacuum. After you die, someone else is born who thinks they're an 'I' and that their sense of self is the centre of the universe, just how you feel now. Someone else 'wakes up' and gets a first person perspective and begins experiencing the world. Only, it's you. Well, it's not 'you' in the sense of reincarnation; you died along with your material body. But, in a sense it is still you because everybody is an 'I'. You are something that the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing. What you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. Wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies, it doesn't make any difference; you are all of them. Only, you can only experience it one at a time. Your 'self' dies upon death, but there is never any 'nothingness' because, as said, you can't have an experience of nothing. There is only more experience, and for there to be more experience, someone else needs to wake up. What happens after you die is a continuing succession of I's one after the other. And as Watts would say, they're all you because you are everything. That is what is meant by The Real You.
Take that for what you will, but that's the gist of it all. In my more contemplative moods it makes a lot of sense to me, especially considering our earliest ('mechanical') biological roots were something purely physical/chemical that the world 'did' when in a particular state. Only, that state became more complex through evolution got us to where we are now with a sense of self and a 'separateness' from our origins and the world of our surroundings. But we are both still it and in it, we never became separate from it nor did we emerge from it, it's still ongoing and therefore "what we do is what the whole universe is doing at the place we call here and now". I especially like the idea that the 'self' is what makes us think we're separate from the universe when we aren't. I think of it as The Fall from God (or the universe, in the ancient Greek sense as per the Stoics, a thought I'm sure you can appreciate). "Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself" (Rust Cohle from True Detective, but pessimistic theory in general) and to get back to living in accordance with nature one has to lose their sense of self, thereby 'delimiting' it so that we become once again immanent with all creation - realising that The Real You is "something that the whole universe is doing in the same way a wave is something the whole ocean is doing". Otherwise you'll stay pretending that you're just a 'poor little me', as Watt's puts it. To me, that's what ego death is. It also ties in nicely with the pessimistic idea of 'self-consciousness under time' (Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism, 2006). "We suffer because we desire" things from the past that we can't retrieve, and because we desire things from the future we are perpetually unable to attain (the strict Buddhist sense probably fits somewhere in here also). We project our sense of self into the future and the past because self-consciousness is what makes us able to do that. Our self-consciousness of/under time doesn't allow us to live in 'the place we call here and now' (Watts). This would also explain why "you can't have an experience of nothing", because without a self there is no experience, and without experience there is no time. Hence there might be a billion years between your death and the next person who 'wakes up', but it will go by, for want of a better phrase, like nothing (that is what makes the continuing 'succession' of separate experiences after death). That is how it was before you were born; this was all here for billions of years but as far as you and your self are concerned, it came into being when you did. As I said it makes sense to me, but to really appreciate it you need to almost think 'outside' your self and "discover who you really are", which is what caused the whole problem to begin with. Only in my more contemplative moods.
Anyway, that's going quite far from what Watt's said himself, but I think there is a 'grand unifying theory' of many different philosophies (including pessimism, Buddhism, determinism, some form of idealism, Stoicism, Christianity, neo-Platonism, philosophy of time, and every-day understandings of death and the self) to be found somewhere in my ramblings.
This is most certainly not true historically speaking.
As regards the general gist of your statement, I will say this. Most people never doubted that existence itself continues after they die (and hence others are born, etc.). Their concern was exactly the preservation of their identity - their habits, their ideas, their way of being, their character, and their particular features. They always were concerned whether this identity keeps on existing - to say "no it doesn't, but the rest of existence keeps on existing" is irrelevant. It doesn't mean anything. It's a denial of one's own self. Just as absurd as saying that killing yourself will cure your headaches!
Like Socrates, I think it is better to hope in an afterlife - and hope is the most we can have in this life. We're going to die anyway, might as well die with hope and gladness in our hearts.
I'm not speaking 'historically'. I'm talking about a bare underlying idea that runs through some parts of these different philosophies. Like I said in another post, there are going to be many differences in the details, but I think there's something there that is worth considering, and makes sense to me. Going on about identity after death is a red herring as to what I'm talking about. It has nothing to do with it and that wasn't what I was referring to. Whether people had those anxieties or not has little to no bearing on my idea.
Edit: and from what you said, it sounds like you don't really understand what I said. It was exactly the same attitude I took to my fiend when he said "after people die, other people are born". I said well that just sounds like a common sense truism and everyone knows that. There is another meaning beneath that which is what Watts was saying, and one which I didn't immediately see as a similarity between them.
What is the purpose of your idea then? What does it aim to do? If it's just to inform us that existence keeps on existing, and other people will keep being born and feeling that they are an "I" just like we did, sure, but that's just trivially true.
The point isn't that "existence keeps on existing". That's the most superficial interpretation of it, look deeper. There's clearly something which my friend, Watts, and myself saw that you haven't. The issue is not with us.
Edit: "other people will keep being born and feeling that they are an "I" just like we did". Refer to my previous post about this sort of line.
Socrates last words:
According to Nietzsche this was not hope, it was resentment. Life is an illness and death its cure. From The Gay Science, The Dying Socrates:
In reference to what WhiskeyWhiskers is saying, it can be described in a different way by analogy.
If one imagines that when a being is reborn, the body of the baby they become is rather like a suit of clothes(a vehicle of incarnation). During the beings life they attach experiences to the suit like badges, or stylistic details. These badges are like the personality of the being shaped by experience and learning. When the being dies they leave behind the suit and get a new one and in the next life they attach new badges. The being has not changed, it is the same person, but wearing a different suit. All the suits are the same to begin with and all beings are the same, that is you, or me. It is only the badges of the personality where there is variation.
Okay - but I find the idea that all these beings are the same, there is no difference between them, highly suspect. In what sense does a being change suit if it brings nothing with it into the next suit? If that's the case, this is pragmatically equivalent to there being just the suit with no being.
I know you like philosophy to be practical for it to be of value, but there are (whether 'useful' or not) ways of thinking about philosophy that do not adhere to such a strict definition. To me, philosophy need not tell us what to do, only show us how to think about ourselves and our place in the world. You might (or might not) say it's not real philosophy, but there we'll have to agree to disagree. I dunno what else to say, you state your opinions in opposition to mine and add a truth tag to them. You seem to not disagree all that much with what I'm saying, as I'll explain in a minute, except you disregard it because it doesn't do away with any problems in life. I don't know how to go from here to ignoring our particular existence, but from what I've read on ego death it is possible in some brain states (typically through brain damage, which doesn't exactly sound achievable through any path of 'enlightenment'). Nor is that any kind of refutation to what I'm saying; if anything it can seen as being consistent with it because, like you say, we can't not feel like an 'I' because it's the core of who we feel ourselves to be (unless forcibly removed, as mentioned) as my larger post more or less said. We are forced to exist as us (separate from nature). That's the fall. Enlightenment might not be possible, but I'm ok with that aspect of the philosophy.
I was only expanding on what Watts said because he's being talked about without people knowing all that much about his philosophy. Take from my other extrapolations what you will, if anything.
This is a good way of looking at it. At the risk of sounding less helpful, it's like perpetual reincarnation, except there is nothing carried over from one life to the next that could be considered that same person (because the person dies with the body). After you die, there's another in the succession of first person personal experiences. The same sort of experience as when you were born. After you die, other people are born.
In other words: you die, and that's that >:O
Nailed it. Dunno what took me so long (Y)
Weirdly enough the idea of "you die, and that's that" was quite comforting to believe, until my friend and Watts ruined that one for me :P
Watts would agree with you that it was the mask being worn by the I. I think he's even used that phraseology before to make a similar point. If you accept his idea, it does beg the question of what, exactly, it means to die at all. It would be like the universe closing one aperture through which it knows itself only to open another. I think Carl Sagan said something similar.
I don't think the ancient Stoics thought there had been any kind of "Fall" in the sense Christianity, for example, conceives it. Humanity wasn't inherently defective by virtue of some failing. There simply were those who lived according to nature and those who did not. Those who did not were ignorant, fearful, irrational, discontented and often immoral. They were themselves responsible for that state, yes, because they concerned themselves with things not in their control. But they were not inherently defective in the sense we supposedly are according to Christianity (at least that Christianity with which I'm familiar) courtesy of Adam and Eve, until we're saved by God.
As for death, the Stoics thought our individual selves would ultimately be dissolved, as it were, in union with the Divine Reason. Some claim that Seneca and the Roman Stoics came to believe an individual's personality survived after death; I'm not sure that's the case, though.
While the Stoics felt we all partake in the Divine, and, I think, that the Stoic Sage (the ideal Stoic) could become "like the gods" as I believe Epictetus put it, I question whether they would maintain that we can be said to survive in others because we're really everyone and everything. So I don't know if they accepted any concept like the "Real You." The fact that all is interconnected and the universe is matter directed by a Divine Intelligence which is itself immanent in nature and internal to it ,as a unique kind of material (sometimes called a fire or breath), doesn't mean that we're all one.
The reincarnation one is more, or less comfortable to believe then? :P
I concur Sir.
-Emil Cioran
What I'm spinning is made up of a few threads from many different philosophies. I understand I need to be careful of what I'm saying here, because reading back I can see how some things I've said don't quite reflect my intentions. I was trying to tie together the idea of The Fall with the idea that God is equivalent to nature, meaning that, in returning to God in the Kingdom of Heaven, you also at the same time return to nature, hence 'in accordance' with it. I understand that The Fall means we are each born with original sin, but if you merge the two further you get a slightly different reading. Bear with me.
The Fall began in the Garden of Eden after we (collectively) obtained knowledge of good and evil and lost our obedience to 'God'. God, understood in Stoic terms, is nature, the logos, or universal reason. Stoic doctrine holds that, by living in accordance with nature, we are living according to universal reason. Part of my 'thesis' is that this knowledge of good and evil (in the Christian sense) that expelled us from the Garden/separated us from God (nature) is the mistaken view that good and evil exist in the external world, when in fact, they do not (the Stoic sense). "It is not things that trouble us, but our judgement about things". I won't spend too long on the Stoic idea of externals being neither good or bad because I'm sure it's one with which you are well acquainted.
"It is human beings who, thanks to their freedom, introduce trouble and worry into the world" (*The Inner Citadel*, Pierre Hadot, p. 107). Freedom here, in my understanding, is the same freedom of will that, in the Christian sense, allows us to choose to either obey or disobey God (nature, or universal reason). God "created humankind in the beginning, and he left them in the power of their own free choice" (Ecclesiasticus 15:14). "Nature created and aspect of nature separate from itself" (pessimistic theory), by endowing us with a sense of free will and a self. It is this same sense of self, which is a necessary condition for free will, that makes us think we're separate from everything outside our bodies, and Zapffe would agree. But we should realise that "we are something the whole universe is doing, in the same way that a wave is something the whole ocean is doing" (Watts).
Self-consciousness 'Others' every thing that we do not feel to be a part of us when we interact with the world, which is to say, everything else. It is the very thing that makes a sharp distinction between us and the universe. There is 'us', and there is 'not-us'. As Watts also said, "we speak of coming into this world, we didn't; we came out of it". The world 'peoples'. The process of 'waking up', of finding out who you really are, is the discovery of The Real You.
Hadot talks about 'delimiting the self'. "The first step to delimitation of the ego consists in recognising that, of the being which I am, neither the body, nor the vital breath which animates it, is mine in the proper sense of the term [...] because they are imposed on me by Destiny, independently of my will." It is not a stretch at all to claim that God/nature imposed this 'vital breath' or 'Divine Intelligence', as you put it, on a material body. I understand that as being made in the "image of God" from Christian theology or the "divine spark" in the Gnostic sense. The parallels are all there, as I said I think they require a unifying theory to tie these small threads from the larger schools of thought together.
Hadot goes on to say, "Marcus describes in a quite remarkable way, the different circles which surround the ego or the 'I', as well as the exercise which consists in rejecting them one by one, as something foreign to my self." This is in XII;3. The first circle is "the others", the second is the past and future, i.e. self-consciousness under time as I already mentioned in my first post in this thread as relating to general pessimistic theory, and the third is "constituted by the domain involuntary emotions [in the sense that we did not control them, not in the sense that they can't be controlled], these are caused by impressions received by the body". Hadots general thesis with regards to Stoicism is one which I largely agree with, and he goes into the various "spiritual exercises" alluded to in the meditations, and drawn on from Epictetus, for living according to nature (the discipline of desire, action, and judgement). There's quite a great deal more said by Hadot on the subject, and if you haven't already then I highly recommend his work on the meditations of Marcus Aurelius - though it is certainly more coherent, scholarly, and related to Stoicism than what I've said. The rest of what he has to say doesn't correlate exactly with my thesis (it just becomes less relevant), but I would depart here somewhat onto the accounts given of ego death generally and how that ties back in with Watts' idea of The Real You.
I'll leave it there for now, but there's more that can be said I think. I hope I've managed to show where I was coming from by drawing a common thread through many different areas of thought. I can see there are definitely parallels with many of these ideas, which is hardly surprising given that they all emerged from intermingled cultures roughly around the same time period. I said in a previous thread there will be differences in the details, and large parts will not be relevant, but I do think that philosophies that propose a higher or altered state of mind are all trying to get at a common experience we can all share, and our sense of self is something extremely peculiar and troubling to us indeed. But who knows. I haven't even mentioned how Buddhism could tie in with all this, and I think it certainly does.
This is how I see it. That which all apertures have in common is therefore deathless. "Mask" dies. Mask is beautiful. It provides for the massive variety of personalities. But masks/snowflakes keep falling to replace those that melt on the street. A bitter and defensive identification of the "deep I" with its mask simultaneously gives death its sting and takes from life a vision of its massive fecundity. "Do you want to fix the world? I don't think it can be done." As I see it, it's not about condemning any particular mask (including anti-pride or anti-egoism talk, itself an egoistic mask), but simply a matter of being (partially sometimes and completely at others) liberated from identification with 'mask.'
I like this. We can frame the original sin as the belief in sin itself (knowledge of good and evil). I associate this "belief in sin" with sitting in opposition to God/Nature/Life as its judge. From this perspective, most religion is the fruit of the forbidden tree. You can find this in Blake who contrasted (for him) true religion (creativity and forgiveness) with false (self-righteousness and accusation.) This tension runs right down the middle of Christianity.
I'd probably use "world" for "nature" to stress the interpersonal aspect of the Fall. (Ever read Camus' The Fall? Great stuff.)
This for me ties in with a reading of Job, which is a vision of God/Life/Nature as unjust, unfair --and yet to be affirmed nevertheless. I like we can also link living in accordance with nature or universal to the notion of ordinary mind or creative play. If we get out of the way of our guts, we can take real pleasure and interest in the things of the world. Absorption obliterates the anguished knowledge/assertion of good and evil. We can live beyond such aggressive abstractions, at least at our higher moments.
Pantheism, Stoic or otherwise, is and has for centuries been heresy as least as far as Catholic Christianity is concerned. Christianity requires a transcendent personal God, and rejects pantheism as a result. It views pantheism as limiting God to the material, changing, and therefore imperfect universe, and as negating the need for Jesus' mission, his sacrifice and salvation.
Our Fall according to Catholic Christianity is the result of the Adam and Eve's disobedience of God's commands (after temptation by the Devil). It's by that act that sin was introduced into the world, and that sin taints all of us. So, the world became evil as a result of this original sin. We're responsible for the evil of the world. It isn't merely that evil is external to us; we caused the evil to begin with. It's fundamental to Christianity that we and the world are sinful, and we're responsible for that state of affairs.
Since the Christian God is clearly not nature, and nature is necessarily inferior to the Christian God and even sinful, living according to nature is definitely not something a Christian would or should do. I don't think there's much of a common thread there.
But, C, why not explore something like a synthesis for personal use? Why be bound by previous uses of strings of marks and noises? We stand as readers above various systems, contemplated side by side. It seems quite natural to see how we can read each of them in the light of the others and find something valuable and new in a curated set of analogies. Why not creative misreading that seeks to salvage an otherwise obsolete tradition or text?
On the contrary, to ask that is perfectly fine. The world left to future generations is an important question. Who will be and the environment which is left for them is a key ethical question.
Awareness if death only scares the traditionalist because it takes away the necessity of their way of life. Future generations have a different identity to you. On going culture and tradition is ultimately in their hands. They may well choose to abandon the tradtion you love much. One's one identity ceases to be the master of the world. Other people continue, not your own identity.
To say nothing caries over is utterly false and is not argued here. Plenty of stuff carries over, it is just not you. Telling someone their hopes and dreams vanish is exactly what "You're gone" does.
The insistence otherwise is a selfish act-- where one covets their life so much, that they do not accept their end and the existence of other people. They try to say they aren't really dead, that they have been reincarnated within the lives of others. It's fear of death which has someone claiming the dreams of other people are their own.
Doesn't scare me. I have good hope and faith in the Divine. As Socrates said, either it's sleep, or it's a continuation. I hope it's a continuation, and I pray to die hoping so - for it is better to hope for the best and be deceived than to hope for nothing and be correct ;)
Having said that, I would obviously face some anxiety if I was to know I would die soon - I mean I want to live, I think there's a lot of good things I can do on this Earth. But some things are not under our control - so I can't do much about that. The time that has been granted me has been granted, that which hasn't been granted, hasn't. One must obey.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I would hope they maintain the order that is required for them to achieve fulfilment here on Earth. But as soon as I exit this world, I exit it - it doesn't concern me in a direct way.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I agree.
Personally I don't think Stoicism is "obsolete" :)
Misreading ancient works that were written in and for times and contexts we cannot adequately understand cannot be avoided. If the misreading is not creative, then the work will be rendered obsolete.
That's a pretty clearly falsehood. You don't merely hope for a continuation. I do that too-- despite being an hard atheist who doesn't think there is going to be a continuation. To continue living a wonderful life would be great.
You think your belief will get you a continuation. It's an act which eliminates the possibility of death for yourself. In that belief, you have supposedly entered a state which guarantees a continuation. Such a belief has no such effectiveness. One might continue just as well or better by thinking their was only death and hoping for it. With respect to continuation, being deceived could work fine.
The question of deception is one your own mind's fears. Not because it is contrary to continuation, but rather because you fear a world where you have no power over death. If you were stuck in a world without means to guarantee a continuation, it would be the worst. There would be no action you migh take to get life. You really would be at the mercy of death
I don't doubt that you're correct in all of this, and I'm fully aware of how radical a reinterpretation I am making of certain doctrines. It is highly speculative, and it's an idea I've been playing with for some time and I thought I'd throw it out there for public consumption. As speculative as it is, for me it does make for a interesting perspective on the universe, consciousness and death. But if pushed, I know probably none of it would stand up to nuanced scrutiny by an expert on these traditions.
I am already in such a world. I don't personally have power over death. So what?
Nothingness doesn't exist. The concept of nothingness is really something we invented to deal with gaps in our own consciousness. In reality there is always something.
When we are unconscious (e.g sleep) we can't sense change (or time if you like). When we die, our consciousness is just put on hold like in sleep, maybe until the universe starts all over again in zillions of man made years. As we won't be conscious during that time we may go from 'death' to birth without noticing the zillions of years which passed by.