If you believe in a personal soul, why?

[SanteriSatama]

I'm not equating soul with the ego.

Neither do I. Our view of soul is tripartite: Self, Spirit and Nature.

When I had my peak experience, I had a very definite empirical experience of the distinction between what I ordinarily think of as "me" (which is just a bundle of sensations, memories and feelings tied together into a tidy package, but are nevertheless no more a single entity than a bunch of groceries that happen to be in the same basket), and the thing experiencing "me". If there is indeed soul, than it is this thing experiencing "me".

I don't mean to devalue your experience in any way, on the contrary. But there could be some wisdom in not calling it "peak", which kind of implies that after that everything is just down-hill. Nothing wrong in rolling, rolling, rolling either.

[Hedge90]

You may be right, I don't know. To me, it felt like, just, total, complete wholeness, a unity with everything. Completeness, but also "nothing". I thought of it as a peak experience because I can't imagine anything more transcendental and "whole" than that, but then again, before I had it, I couldn't have imagined anything like this either.
So yeah, it may possibly not have been the highest of all states, I just don't have a higher reference point imaginable to me that I could compare it with.

I don't mean to devalue your experience in any way, on the contrary. But there could be some wisdom in not calling it "peak", which kind of implies that after that everything is just down-hill. Nothing wrong in rolling, rolling, rolling either.

[ScottRoberts]

As I see some of you here have a belief in a personal soul that retains some degree of identity and integrity after a person's death. I see no good logical reason for this.

Why try to answer the question logically or philosophically? Why not dive into the mountain of anecdotal evidence for personal post-mortem existence (NDE's, OOBE's, mediumistic communications) and decide for yourself whether it (or at least some of it) is likely true or that it is all lies and delusions? Myself, I have found the former option more credible than the latter.

[SanteriSatama]

You may be right, I don't know. To me, it felt like, just, total, complete wholeness, a unity with everything. Completeness, but also "nothing". I thought of it as a peak experience because I can't imagine anything more transcendental and "whole" than that, but then again, before I had it, I couldn't have imagined anything like this either.
So yeah, it may possibly not have been the highest of all states, I just don't have a higher reference point imaginable to me that I could compare it with.

There could be some life-wisdom in avoiding superlatives. It could be also possible to revisit the experience, perhaps even at will, and explore how that effects everyday life. This is just an abstract thought, but perhaps it could become some way also genuinely meaningful: what if instead of superlative, the quality of life could be experienced as comparative, which keeps on just getting better and better?

This just popped in my feed, and out of a whim I did the meditation:
https://odysee.com/@DeepakChopra:b/medi ... -daily-2:7

[AshvinP]

I know I have not yet given any arguments for either of those conclusions. I will have to get back to you on that later.

I'd appreciate it. You are right, what I currently think is I have no idea what's beyond death, so I go with the simplest answer I can conceive, which is what I wrote down. I never said, though, that there's anything "physical" generating consiusness - I said that how your separation from M@L came to be in the first place is the emergence of your body and brain. It is, basically, your brain that "cuts you off" from being one with everything else. I don't see how an "I" can remain without this instrument. But I'm looking forward to your argument.

I am not clear on what distinction you are drawing between physical generating consciousness and body/brain generating separation from MAL (self-consciousness)? If you mean the appearances of brain and body being related to self-consciousness in humans, then yes that is certainly true. But I do not hold the physical body and brain to be the totality of our bodily organism, bc there is also etheric and astral bodies which are now invisible to most people.

I still don't have time for full argument now, but consider that your "I" is an immanent given of your experience, so it must be accounted for. And if you are going to claim it disappears after death, I would say the burden is on you to make that argument. It can't simply be "physical body generates ego so when we die ego goes away". I am sure you will admit that is not a satisfying account of the most central aspect of our experience.

That being said, there are strong positive arguments for the essential ego being eternal, and I will try to get to those later. Related to another thing you mentioned about MAL purpose for dissociating, consider that MAL is eternal and atemporal in essence. All possible experiential states are "superimposed" so to speak. What we call time and past-present-future is how the relational and sensible unfolding of these states appear to us. So we only ask about "purpose" of fragmentation because we are reifying linear temporality and then wondering why MAL went from point A to point B.

So I think the simplest approach to this issue is the one Cleric already tried, but I don't think you responded. When you went on the moon trip and felt your "I" dissolve, your "I" was still existing and experiencing but "helplessly spread out". Otherwise, how could you remember and communicate that this experience actually happened to you? That seems to be the central thing a lot of mystical types ignore - that Self-"I" (sometimes called "Ego" too, not to be confused with limited personal ego in normal cognition, as many of those same mystical types do for no good reason) who makes the continuity and recognition of any mystical experiences possible. I am not sure there is much point going further into any other argument until this point is seriously contended with.

[Hedge90]

I didn't answer him because I've yet to formulate a good answer. But you've had some good points I didn't think about.

[SanteriSatama]

So I think the simplest approach to this issue is the one Cleric already tried, but I don't think you responded. When you went on the moon trip and felt your "I" dissolve, your "I" was still existing and experiencing but "helplessly spread out". Otherwise, how could you remember and communicate that this experience actually happened to you? That seems to be the central thing a lot of mystical types ignore - that Self-"I" (sometimes called "Ego" too, not to be confused with limited personal ego in normal cognition, as many of those same mystical types do for no good reason) who makes the continuity and recognition of any mystical experiences possible. I am not sure there is much point going further into any other argument until this point is seriously contended with.

The situation is comparable to metacognitive remembering of a dream, except for the "I", if a dream was experienced in first person. Experience of asubjective awareness can similarly become "owned" as "my experience" in metacognitive afterthought. And I'm not saying that is wrong, how else to talk about experiences, from pragmatism of general linguistics where 1st person is simply a marker for who is speaking. Internal dialogue is clearly also a form speaking, most of it 1st person navel gazing blather.

In the Deepak-guided meditation I linked, the awareness/whole (or if you prefer "higher-self) felt this local and partial bodily awareness from "outside", like whole feels a part inside it.

To call awareness/inclusive whole "Ego" and "I", from my ego-perspective, as felt and observed as partial internal mechanism, I see no other reason for that but projection. The awareness/whole was not babbling, just feeling/listening, so in the concrete sense that aspect of self is not 1st person.

[AshvinP]

So I think the simplest approach to this issue is the one Cleric already tried, but I don't think you responded. When you went on the moon trip and felt your "I" dissolve, your "I" was still existing and experiencing but "helplessly spread out". Otherwise, how could you remember and communicate that this experience actually happened to you? That seems to be the central thing a lot of mystical types ignore - that Self-"I" (sometimes called "Ego" too, not to be confused with limited personal ego in normal cognition, as many of those same mystical types do for no good reason) who makes the continuity and recognition of any mystical experiences possible. I am not sure there is much point going further into any other argument until this point is seriously contended with.

The situation is comparable to metacognitive remembering of a dream, except for the "I", if a dream was experienced in first person. Experience of asubjective awareness can similarly become "owned" as "my experience" in metacognitive afterthought. And I'm not saying that is wrong, how else to talk about experiences, from pragmatism of general linguistics where 1st person is simply a marker for who is speaking. Internal dialogue is clearly also a form speaking, most of it 1st person navel gazing blather.

In the Deepak-guided meditation I linked, the awareness/whole (or if you prefer "higher-self) felt this local and partial bodily awareness from "outside", like whole feels a part inside it.

To call awareness/inclusive whole "Ego" and "I", from my ego-perspective, as felt and observed as partial internal mechanism, I see no other reason for that but projection. The awareness/whole was not babbling, just feeling/listening, so in the concrete sense that aspect of self is not 1st person.

The above is just waving the white flag and surrendering to modern age of materialist form-obsession and spiritualist escapism, two sides of the same nihilist coin. Your explanation for the first-person Self experiencing and remembering is no different than a physicalist would use to dismiss the transpersonal reality of a dream, a mystical experience, NDE, OOBE, etc. The physicalist simply denies the first-person experience any transpersonal reality by chalking it up too "metacognitive afterthought" of the individual. They say, "yes you must talk about these things in spiritual symbols, but that does not mean there is actually a spiritual reality outside of your personal fantasy (navel gazing blather)". If we tell them the Ego-Self we are speaking of is not identical to merely personal ego-perspective, they ignore that distinction because they cannot imagine a higher all-encompassing Self-perspective. For some reason you are unable to see the relation between your view and that of the modern age physicalist, but it still exists.

Yours is a non-explanation which seeks to deny all reality of interiority and substitute in its place an abstract "pragamtism of general linguistics" where the profound experience of that interiority is "simply a marker", a dreamed up illusion of the unsubstantial ego which is simply useful for its survival. And because it is so fundamentally incorrect, it is also extremely dangerous. For one thing, it does nothing to actually explain how the duration of experience was sensed - how Hedge90 came back to normal cognition and actually felt that time had passed. That cannot be chalked up to "metacognitive afterthought". It also manages to demote and relegate dreaming consciousness to unsubstantial fantasy at the same time, which is exactly the opposite direction we should hope for society's understanding to head in. All these years after Jung systematically explored the shared symbols of the "collective unconscious", and most still pretend its a metaphor at best.

[SanteriSatama]

The above is just waving the white flag and surrendering to modern age of materialist form-obsession and spiritualist escapism, two sides of the same nihilist coin. Your explanation for the first-person Self experiencing and remembering is no different than a physicalist would use to dismiss the transpersonal reality of a dream, a mystical experience, NDE, OOBE, etc. The physicalist simply denies the first-person experience any transpersonal reality by chalking it up too "metacognitive afterthought" of the individual. They say, "yes you must talk about these things in spiritual symbols, but that does not mean there is actually a spiritual reality outside of your personal fantasy (navel gazing blather)". If we tell them the Ego-Self we are speaking of is not identical to merely personal ego-perspective, they ignore that distinction because they cannot imagine a higher all-encompassing Self-perspective. For some reason you are unable to see the relation between your view and that of the modern age physicalist, but it still exists.

Yours is a non-explanation which seeks to deny all reality of interiority and substitute in its place an abstract "pragamtism of general linguistics" where the profound experience of that interiority is "simply a marker", a dreamed up illusion of the unsubstantial ego which is simply useful for its survival. And because it is so fundamentally incorrect, it is also extremely dangerous. For one thing, it does nothing to actually explain how the duration of experience was sensed - how Hedge90 came back to normal cognition and actually felt that time had passed. That cannot be chalked up to "metacognitive afterthought". It also manages to demote and relegate dreaming consciousness to unsubstantial fantasy at the same time, which is exactly the opposite direction we should hope for society's understanding to head in. All these years after Jung systematically explored the shared symbols of the "collective unconscious", and most still pretend its a metaphor at best.

"Ego, it must be all ego!"

Yet, for all it's magnificent hubris, here ego speaks from having no spiritual experience to call it's own, from a not-knowing which claims to know better, from the fact of ego to Ego über alles.

No should from is.

Maybe this was written for the ego:

Αν πεθαινεις πριν πεθαινεις,
δεν θα πεθαινεις οταν πεθαινεις.

Maybe it means that it is possible for the story of ego to continue if it experiences enough of death to accept mortality, accepts the undecidable Halting of it's program run. Maybe it means that it is possible for the story of ego to continue, if ego agrees to serve and it's story is a love story.

[Hedge90]

Αν πεθαινεις πριν πεθαινεις,
δεν θα πεθαινεις οταν πεθαινεις.

That's the 2nd time I encounter this phrase in the past few days.
The way I understand this is, if your ego dies before you reach bodily death, you will know that your self will still remain after the ego's death.

Here's what I've been thinking about since I last posted.
Christians say God created man in his image. But man is also capable of sin. Therefore, the original "version", or state, of God also contains sin. So God decides to fragment itself into souls, the totality of which make up God itself, setting the rule that the end state should be only good, without the sin. So, the universe is basically a filter. Of course God wants all souls to reach salvation, because all souls are Him. But these souls (or well, the overwhelming majority of them) also contain sin. So, as a soul passes through the filter (=life), it's composition is "measured". In the end, the sinful parts are shed and only the good remain, thus meaning that if someone only consists of sin, they are basically annihilated (as only the good parts continue).
I'm not versed at all in theology and religious mythology, but I can imagine something like that, where the purpose of all Creation is for God to become a more pure and perfect version of itself.