By being so precise and argumentative with other people, Bernardo certainly brings it on himself when he speaks in an incoherent or sloppy manner. I know he doesn't mind at all
Very often Bernardo says that he thinks that when we finally 'die' the experience will be more like waking up to our actual self. He says things like, "I will say, 'oh, this has been who I am the whole time!"
Firstly, this contradicts his claim that M@L is not self-conscious and it also doesn't fit his general way have talking about the nature of the end of dissociation.
Secondly, it doesn't really fit with his claim that Idealism makes him much more afraid of dying than the notion that death simply is the end of experience.
I'm not trying to make stupid arguments. But he often slams people for inconsistency and errors in logic and this is something I often find myself scratching my head about.
I have ideas as to why he makes these claims, but he simply states them as such so I will wait to hear if he ever elaborates.
I agree that BK is not as consistent when he gets into speculating about what kind of experience is entailed in some after death state, and becomes prone to contradiction. The way I interpret him saying that he 'fears' less the utter oblivion of the materialist death, is precisely because idealism opens the possibility of a post-death continuance of experience, the nature of which one can't be certain about, while he is quite skeptical of the idea that one just carries on in some state of heavenly bliss. As such, he remains open to the possibility that the dissociation is gradated, and thus there could remain some stratum of the psyche that recognizes the corporeal construct as being a consensus dream state, from which it 'awakens'—which is consistent with many NDE accounts. And taking purported experiences of a bardo state into account, there may well be good reason to feel some trepidation about it ...
"Used without qualification, "bardo" is the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth. According to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one's next birth, when one's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of degeneration from, just after death, the clearest experiences of reality of which one is spiritually capable, and then proceeding to terrifying hallucinations that arise from the impulses of one's previous unskillful actions."
Here out of instinct or grace we seek
soulmates in these galleries of hieroglyph and glass,
where mutual longings and sufferings of love
are laid bare in transfigured exhibition of our hearts,
we who crave deep secrets and mysteries,
as elusive as the avatars of our dreams.
1. What Soul_of_Shu said: You are assuming that at death one enters M@L in its ultimate disassociated state. That's not necessarily true. There may be intermediate levels in which there is a level of reflecting self-consciousness.
2. Pay attention to the difference between Bernardos formal philosophical work vs. his speculative side.
3. Remember that B. doesn't have all the answers. He is not claiming that he has a complete and contradiction-free metaphysic. He's trying to figure out how the finer details connect just the way we are.
1. No, I wasn't making that assumption. I believe the opposite. However, Bernardo often says that he thinks after we die are surprised to suddenly discover that we are the all.
2. I do. My comments don't blur that distinction. In fact, they rely upon it.
3. Of course. Remember: it is okay for us to carefully look at his comments as he does those he pontificates upon. As he often points out, finding contradictions can help us see how blind-spots are functioning in other contexts as well.
Even from a materialistic point of view, do not be afraid of non-existence: there can not be nothingness after physical death FOR YOU, because you cannot experience your own non-existence. According to yourself, you can't die, because you are not there if you are death. So, it will be, for a materialist, as under general anesthesia: one moment you are going to sleep (i.c. to die), and the next moment you are awake in the or (in a next rebirth). The time in between, even billions of years of being death, when you were not there, your consciousness has not experienced it, even trillion of years of being death were in between. The time gap of billions of years where you did not exist doesn't count for your consciousness. So, even from a materialistic point of view: you can't die according to your own consciousness.
Bernardo often says that materialists don't fear death because they simply know there is no pain or suffering any longer after they die. This does not match my experience of when I was a materialist at all. It doesn't match anything I see out in the world.
What often makes people fear death is the idea that they will stop having the loving and pleasurable interactions with the people they care the most about. That is why even an idealist can be just as afraid of popping back into the Soup of God if it means that they are done having experiences as a self with these friends and family members.
I'm not sure of what Bernardo thinks about this, but I always hate it when materialists say that believing in an afterlife is "wishful thinking". I rather think that it is wishful thinking to convince oneself that there is nothing after death, so one can carry on with one's life without worrying about the possible repercussions of one's actions. Not that I think most materialists will go around causing suffering to others because they don't have the fear of an afterlife punishment. I suppose most materialists are decent people (most people are, just by nature). But when you truly believe in an afterlife, you have to do some inner work to prepare yourself for that journey. Materialists don't need to do any of that. It's a sort of spiritual laziness, I think.
Believing in life after death doesn't necessarily imply believing that it will be an easy trip. We can be pretty sure that if our individual consciousness survives the death of our body, we will have to deal with all our unresolved issues, our traumas, our unconscious regrets, our self-judgments, etc. Maybe that's what Bernardo meant.
As for fear of death, on a deeper level it is quite independent of any beliefs we hold. There is an instinctual component to it, and deeper than that is the fear of losing oneself (losing our separate identity), and at the root of it all is the fear of nothingess, which I believe lies at the core of all our terrors.
So, I would say that, more than our philosophical positions, what really makes a difference in regard to our fear of death is our spiritual maturity. When you have had some spiritual experiences or insights (for example, experiencing the dissolution of the individual self as blissful liberation, or experiencing the fundamental nothingness at the heart of reality as the source of creation), you are less afraid of losing your body and even your individual identity. Our ideas are less important than our lived experiences.
Physicalists hold two fundamental beliefs:
1. The essence of Nature is Mathematics.
2. Consciousness is a product of the human brain.
But the two contraries are true:
1. The essence of Nature is Consciousness.
2. Mathematics is a product of the human brain.
findingblanks wrote: ↑Sun May 16, 2021 3:43 am
Very often Bernardo says that he thinks that when we finally 'die' the experience will be more like waking up to our actual self. He says things like, "I will say, 'oh, this has been who I am the whole time!"
I have had dreams when I have been talking about myself, talking about lucid dreaming, even enlightenment, but it has been entirely phenomenological, without any lucidity or metacognition. So that exclamation you quote does not necessarily entail metacognition.
Its like the conditioning of that lifetime has been fed back into mind at large and is just playing out. I am a buddhist so in my view it is our craving and grasping that brings us 'back' into a dualistic world of suffering with another 'body' of some type. That craving expresses in both positive and negative resultants which have to play out somewhere.
