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BK article - https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2024/02 ... sobes.html
Response:
The 'dissociative boundary' is a completely unwarranted assumption that then leads to postulating a 'phantom world' that is entirely unnecessary. Nevertheless, BK has stumbled upon something true about NDEs. That is the fact that the after-death state is experienced with the same mode of cognition that we normally use and that is completely adapted to sensory-like conditions. This fact by itself explains pretty much all the facts of NDEs, without needing some 'phantom world' instinctively assembled by MAL, which in turn raises many ontological issues by creating a new sphere of reality within MAL.
When we loosen our consciousness from the sensory organization at death, we are not transported into a different world where we can now magically access inner mental states of others, but simply awakening to what made our sensory experience possible. When we are merged with that sensory experience, we don't have enough cognitive distance to understand how it is that we can interact, communicate, empathize, etc. with other beings. We are like a fish in water. After death, we gradually gain this cognitive distance by loosening the sheaths from the physical body and begin to realize how our 'private' experiences were never private to begin with, but the interference of all other experiential perspectives. We begin to experience the consequences of our thoughts, feelings, and deeds in their distributed interferences with the experiential perspectives of others. This is what BK points to here - "the experiencer expects to perceive the world from his or her own unique and contingent point of view, not the objective perspective of other people."
Again, this is not some special ability we acquire or some 'phantom world' we go into, but simply an awakening to what is always the case. We start to realize how nonsensical our abstract explanations for our experiences were during life, such as packets of 'information' traveling through 'empty space' to reach the senses and brain. Then the reality of completely interwoven perspectives begins to shine through into our consciousness. Neither our brain nor our biological organism is the image of a 'dissociated alter', but an image of a whole Cosmic interference of the most varied archetypal perspectives. These archetypal influences provide the matrix of support in which we can unfold our localized activity during life. Our physical and biological organism doesn't belong to our localized consciousness but to the whole Cosmos, to which it mostly returns after death (hence the natural decay of the corpse).
With NDEs, the experiencers are actually expanding into the real spiritual Cosmos, which is the only reality there is. Far from entering into some phantom world of perceptual memories, they begin to experience the true ideal nature of the One World. The familiar sensory world is but a temporally decohered manifestation of this One ideal Cosmos. However, the purely ideal experiences can only be captured in the sense-based concepts developed between birth and death. These would be gradually dismantled as the soul expands from the soul world into more archetypal layers of activity (spiritual worlds), and then the ability to remain lucidly conscious would depend on what sort of inner forces were developed during life. If the soul simply flowed along with sensory experience its entire life, then it would drop into a dream consciousness and then dreamless sleep, like we do each night. But since the experiencers don't make it this far, or they drop into dream and sleep conditions, they only remember the sensory-like manifestations of the spiritual world.
(borrowed from Cleric) The 'spiritual world' has nothing to do with parallel universes of non-spatial nature. If we don't understand this, we fall into a characteristic duality where we imagine that we're presently entirely in the physical world (including our psyche) and thus the spiritual world is a speculative realm that can only be allegedly accessed by certain gifted individuals. But we live in the non-spatial spiritual world all the time. Imagine that you think about literature. Now you switch to politics. How did you reach that new topic? By turning left, right, up, down? When we try to understand how our states of being metamorphose, we clearly discern that we're following lawful relations that are non-spatial. These are the same lawful relations we experience after death except without meditation through the senses.
The above may sound like yet another speculative hypothesis for what is going on after death. How could anyone know these details with any concreteness? The answer to that follows completely logically from an ideational and unified structure of reality. There is no hard boundary between our current ideational perspective and those that we inhabit after death, free from the formatting of the sensory organism. The latter can also be systematically grown into during life with the proper inner training. And our current capacity for reasoning through these ideas is but a more constrained form of that direct spiritual perception across the threshold of death. Through our thinking, we are probing the consonances and dissonances of these purely ideal curvatures that modulate our transforming states of being (not just perceptions, but also desires, emotions, ideas, intuitions), which we then call "logical" or "illogical".
It could be an interesting experiment to compare NDE experiences between the average person and a trained mathematician who had learned to think completely independently of the senses. I suspect the latter would return with a much more spiritually oriented understanding of the after-death state, i.e. of how the soul expands into a musical hierarchy of MAL's higher-order intents (not some instinctive MAL that has created a perceptual replica of the physical world based on the memories of alters)
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After suggesting that crude experiment at the end, I googled "mathematician near death experience" and the first link was this one:
Elsevier, the world's leading provider of science and health information, published an academic/scientific textbook about a new mathematical discovery discovered in a near-death experience (NDE) that matches the dynamics of living and life-like (social) systems and has applications in general systems theory, universal systems modelling, human clinical molecular genetics modelling, medical informatics, astrobiology, education and other areas of study. This article is about Lynnclaire Dennis and how she brought back perhaps the greatest scientific discovery ever from a NDE. The Mereon Matrix's sequential process generates a coherent link to living and non-living systems whether they are physical, mathematical, philosophical, or social.
I then found the website for Mereon, which has some interesting videos.
I'm not clear on what if any spiritual significance any of that may have, but just found it very interesting at a hazy intuitive and imaginative level. As soon as I saw the image in the video above, I was reminded of Steiner's planetary seals.