To Dispel Hell...
A comment by Squirrel to a previous post posed a question: "Why is it that many of us non-believers seem to be so miserable in our environments. If you're not this way then what is it that makes you giggle like a little kid?" In that same comment, Squirrel stated that heaven is the mental state of people that believe that something better follows this physical reality and hell is the mental state of believers of a post mortem non-existence.
I replied that the misery of the non-believer is due to the dread of death, for they don't want their existence to cease. Indeed this life is hell. Everyday the person lives in terror over what could possibly kill them. This fear becomes the driving force of their every decisions.
The non-believer's life is quite the opposite of the faith in love model of Christ. But the Christian belief of a life (as we know it) after death has no real proof. It is faith and hope. And those that adhere to this ideology are basing their beliefs upon conjecture. They smudge the truth to make themselves happier with reality. But that is simply living in ignorance.
The proponents of this ideology have built an elaborate house of cards to support their claims. Adherents of this false reality swear by this manufactured truth; they're willing to sacrifice themselves and loved ones just to prove to themselves that they truly believe in it. They act radically claiming it is God's will, when indeed it was a form of dementia brought on by the incongruity of their mental construct with reality.
This Christian model of a happy life does not mesh well with the pursuit of truth. Certainly we've all heard the mantra that "God is truth". But when god is the subjective perception of the interconnectedness of all things, then truth varies from individual to individual based upon their exposure to all things.
A major fault of Christianity is that they impose a version of God amongst all their followers. This may be done under the assumption that having a generalized and flexible definition of God allows for leverage incorporating a wide array of concepts for the subjective God. However, this assumption is still a constraint and inhibits growth. This may be one of the reasons why the followers of Christ have experienced many revolutions within their faith so as to incorporate ideas the central leadership deem heretical (that could be a topic for another entry).
So where are we? Non-believers are in hell from a dread of non-existence. Believers are in bliss at the cost of ignorance. Non-believers cannot become believers because they cannot bring themselves to accept a false reality and therefore must stay in hell.
So, what option does a non-believer have to become happy? Forbid themselves from peering so deeply? That is just another form of ignorance. Do they accept the conflict between faith and happiness as unsolvable and continue on with their lives? That is mere complacency. Or do they cling to a hope that one day they will discover the answer to the problem of existence after physical death? I have chosen the last option.
The answer to existence after death, for me, must be grounded in science, meaning that it is arrived upon by doubt. A non-believer should have no problem with believing in doubt. How, then, does science deal with existence?
Existence for people is synonymous with their consciousness. Consciousness is simply reaction to stimuli. We enjoy higher consciousness because of our 100 billion neurons with over 100 trillion interconnections all resonating impulses brought on by stimuli.
The essence of reality gets tied up in our brains and eventually settles to form mental models in the form of neural interconnections. Over time these mental models gain or loose strength depending on the outcome of events. If a perception cannot fit within an existing model, a new model is formed to accomodate it.
Our character is therefore defined by pattern of the strengths of the connections between the types of neurons. The hieghtened sense of consciousness is the result of the recursive property of neural interconnections. Example: a mirror is placed a distance before our eyes, a wave front collides with the photon receptors of the retina sending a signature signal cascading through the brain to the occipital lobe, filtering through the neural network the signature signal of our face settles into the neural model of our own likeliness, disheveled hair marks an incongruity with the ideal model and a signal travels to the frontal lobe where a decision is made whether to send impulses to the motor cortex to move the hand to the head in a direction that would result in the hair being moved to a more fitting location, the decision is made based upon factors of expectation and present conditions, expectation is based upon past experience, etc...
What may upset some people is that when we die the pattern that governs our reactions to stimuli degrade and the energy that was once tied up in our minds is now free. That imprisonment of energy was what constituted our higher consciousness. We must remember that the mind is a restriction upon the flow of energy.
Pleasure is, for the most part, the result of a mental state transition from a higher energy state (ie. Tension, pressure, resistance, heart rate) to a lower state.
We sometimes find pleasure in exciting activities that at first glance don't appear to lower our energy state. For instance watching a football game. Our energy increases with tension, heart rate and blood pressure throughout the game. When our team scores a touchdown, we cheer and are slightly relieved. This change of energy state is brought about by the drama of the game, and we therefore find it pleasurable to watch.
The best example is the orgasm. Before orgasm, the blood pressure is high, brain activity spikes, the heart rate is up, and the muscles are tensed. But suddenly a threshold is breached and endorphins are released into the bloodstream, causing a rapid decrease of energy state. The French call the orgasm the "little death" and rightly so. The swift change in state from high to low is also experienced during death. Death is the door to what is, most likely, everlasting pleasure.
I'm not advocating that all people should start committing suicide in droves to experience everlasting pleasure. There are qualities of existence that are inherent only to this tied up knot we call a brain. There is a power that we wield, and hardly ever realize it.
The source of the power resides in observation of stimuli, also known as consciousness. I explained, in an earlier post that consciousness is a force that guides energy in conjunction with the path of least resistance. We have the ability to prime our brain cells to expect a certain stimulus. This priming decreases the resistance that energy must overcome in order to travel. Every one of those 100 billion neurons observes stimuli, and therefore possesses the force consciousness. When this force is compounded it can create an environment that "causes" certain primed events to occur.
Telekinesis, time travel, telepathy, and teleportation could all be possible. Sure it sounds like science fiction, and I'm not even certain if it is entirely likely, but right now there is a potential, although very slim.
I don't know if I answered any question with this rant, but certain problems don't have answers (i.e. NP Complete Algorithms). I do think that hell has been dispelled, from hope from growth. The human potential seems endless, and with that in mind, this little time segment we call ours seems inconsequential.
I replied that the misery of the non-believer is due to the dread of death, for they don't want their existence to cease. Indeed this life is hell. Everyday the person lives in terror over what could possibly kill them. This fear becomes the driving force of their every decisions.
The non-believer's life is quite the opposite of the faith in love model of Christ. But the Christian belief of a life (as we know it) after death has no real proof. It is faith and hope. And those that adhere to this ideology are basing their beliefs upon conjecture. They smudge the truth to make themselves happier with reality. But that is simply living in ignorance.
The proponents of this ideology have built an elaborate house of cards to support their claims. Adherents of this false reality swear by this manufactured truth; they're willing to sacrifice themselves and loved ones just to prove to themselves that they truly believe in it. They act radically claiming it is God's will, when indeed it was a form of dementia brought on by the incongruity of their mental construct with reality.
This Christian model of a happy life does not mesh well with the pursuit of truth. Certainly we've all heard the mantra that "God is truth". But when god is the subjective perception of the interconnectedness of all things, then truth varies from individual to individual based upon their exposure to all things.
A major fault of Christianity is that they impose a version of God amongst all their followers. This may be done under the assumption that having a generalized and flexible definition of God allows for leverage incorporating a wide array of concepts for the subjective God. However, this assumption is still a constraint and inhibits growth. This may be one of the reasons why the followers of Christ have experienced many revolutions within their faith so as to incorporate ideas the central leadership deem heretical (that could be a topic for another entry).
So where are we? Non-believers are in hell from a dread of non-existence. Believers are in bliss at the cost of ignorance. Non-believers cannot become believers because they cannot bring themselves to accept a false reality and therefore must stay in hell.
So, what option does a non-believer have to become happy? Forbid themselves from peering so deeply? That is just another form of ignorance. Do they accept the conflict between faith and happiness as unsolvable and continue on with their lives? That is mere complacency. Or do they cling to a hope that one day they will discover the answer to the problem of existence after physical death? I have chosen the last option.
The answer to existence after death, for me, must be grounded in science, meaning that it is arrived upon by doubt. A non-believer should have no problem with believing in doubt. How, then, does science deal with existence?
Existence for people is synonymous with their consciousness. Consciousness is simply reaction to stimuli. We enjoy higher consciousness because of our 100 billion neurons with over 100 trillion interconnections all resonating impulses brought on by stimuli.
The essence of reality gets tied up in our brains and eventually settles to form mental models in the form of neural interconnections. Over time these mental models gain or loose strength depending on the outcome of events. If a perception cannot fit within an existing model, a new model is formed to accomodate it.
Our character is therefore defined by pattern of the strengths of the connections between the types of neurons. The hieghtened sense of consciousness is the result of the recursive property of neural interconnections. Example: a mirror is placed a distance before our eyes, a wave front collides with the photon receptors of the retina sending a signature signal cascading through the brain to the occipital lobe, filtering through the neural network the signature signal of our face settles into the neural model of our own likeliness, disheveled hair marks an incongruity with the ideal model and a signal travels to the frontal lobe where a decision is made whether to send impulses to the motor cortex to move the hand to the head in a direction that would result in the hair being moved to a more fitting location, the decision is made based upon factors of expectation and present conditions, expectation is based upon past experience, etc...
What may upset some people is that when we die the pattern that governs our reactions to stimuli degrade and the energy that was once tied up in our minds is now free. That imprisonment of energy was what constituted our higher consciousness. We must remember that the mind is a restriction upon the flow of energy.
Pleasure is, for the most part, the result of a mental state transition from a higher energy state (ie. Tension, pressure, resistance, heart rate) to a lower state.
We sometimes find pleasure in exciting activities that at first glance don't appear to lower our energy state. For instance watching a football game. Our energy increases with tension, heart rate and blood pressure throughout the game. When our team scores a touchdown, we cheer and are slightly relieved. This change of energy state is brought about by the drama of the game, and we therefore find it pleasurable to watch.
The best example is the orgasm. Before orgasm, the blood pressure is high, brain activity spikes, the heart rate is up, and the muscles are tensed. But suddenly a threshold is breached and endorphins are released into the bloodstream, causing a rapid decrease of energy state. The French call the orgasm the "little death" and rightly so. The swift change in state from high to low is also experienced during death. Death is the door to what is, most likely, everlasting pleasure.
I'm not advocating that all people should start committing suicide in droves to experience everlasting pleasure. There are qualities of existence that are inherent only to this tied up knot we call a brain. There is a power that we wield, and hardly ever realize it.
The source of the power resides in observation of stimuli, also known as consciousness. I explained, in an earlier post that consciousness is a force that guides energy in conjunction with the path of least resistance. We have the ability to prime our brain cells to expect a certain stimulus. This priming decreases the resistance that energy must overcome in order to travel. Every one of those 100 billion neurons observes stimuli, and therefore possesses the force consciousness. When this force is compounded it can create an environment that "causes" certain primed events to occur.
Telekinesis, time travel, telepathy, and teleportation could all be possible. Sure it sounds like science fiction, and I'm not even certain if it is entirely likely, but right now there is a potential, although very slim.
I don't know if I answered any question with this rant, but certain problems don't have answers (i.e. NP Complete Algorithms). I do think that hell has been dispelled, from hope from growth. The human potential seems endless, and with that in mind, this little time segment we call ours seems inconsequential.
2 Comments:
The fantastic feeling is the release of energy that naturally accompany's death. The endorphins I used in the example just serve to alter the person's state closer to death. I think you're on to something with life being the pain contrast to bliss. I've known many that think that life is nothing but shades of pain. Would that make all those who love this life masochists?
By
T.S. Idiot, at 10:57 AM
This is interesting too, and I like the last line in your comment...never really looked at it that way...
By
timc, at 1:26 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home