So, What Happens when Mr. D. Comes to Call?

What do you think happens after we die? Is there a spirit/soul that survives? If so, where does it go, and what happens to it?

If the idea of soul is too concrete, then how about personality or consciousness? Or maybe the person's "energy"?

This is a topic that was brought up in another group...many of these people are very science minded....like biology and chemistry...I'd like another opinion, or at least another way of looking at it. Call me romantic, but the idea that there's nothing at all after this life is very depressing, not to mention frightening to me.

What if "you" don't exist as a separate and independent entity? What if the concept "self" is an illusion? Or what if Atman = Brahman?

Then the "problem" of death is not solved so much as dissolved.

I've tried to think of this idea that my "self" is an illusion - and I just can't get my head around it. How can I not exist as a separate and independent entity? I always kind of liked the idea of reincarnation - that I was placed in the circumstances that I was in so that I could work through the challenges and problems that I faced in that particular environment. I've always hoped for another go-round, so that I could do better next time.

(as an aside - you remind me of "myself" when I was 25.)

Can you get your head around the fact that the earth is a ball? It appears to the naked eye as flat.

Or can you get your head around the fact that matter and energy are the same thing? That always seemed rather counterintuitive to me.

How about the big bang occuring 13.7 billion years ago? The earth being 4.5 billion years old? How about the fact that 99.99 per cent of that 4.5 billion years went by before humans ever evolved and appeared on the scene? How important in the grand scheme of things can we humans be - I mean, really, if we look at the facts as objectively as humanly possible?

If you really can only accept "yourself" as a separate and independently existing entity, then you (the "self") are either temporal or atemporal. If the former, then that's that. If the latter - do you remember existing, e.g., a thousand years ago? A billion? A trillion? Do you think "you" must needs be around - somewhere - in a thousand or a billion or a trillion years, just because "you" are here now?

Reincarnation seems a fair deal, but what if the universe isn't "fair" as we humans define "fair?

For reincarnation to be real might be considered desirable, but I can think of hundreds of realities I would find just as if not more so desirable, e.g., being a multi-billionaire, having super powers like Super Man, etc., but if wishes were electricity there would be no energy crisis. LOL.

I wonder - have you ever read any Alan Watts? Read a couple of his books - perhaps some mind-expanding might be just what the doctor ordered.