This is the proverbial big question for me. From the genes and the formation of the body and brain, from the mother in the womb, information derived through our senses or is it from some fundamental nature of just being. Or even, since archetypes are not unconscious (that is if you have interaction with them and take the trouble to remember), some combination of all or just some of them.
I tend to think it's some combination of all of them depending on at what level they're being discussed.
I would put archetypes in at a subconscious level (just below conscious). The unconscious (in the psychiatric terminology rather than the medical "knocked out") is much harder to reach.
I think archetypes at least as Jung conceived them, are at the unconscious level. That is why so much of reality exists beneath a level we can easily access, and why we do not not perceive all of reality. We perceive it only in glimpses, like synchristic events and symbols.
You would have to imagine a level of consciousness in which you can see without eyes and talk without speaking. In NDE's people refer to conversations that are above their intellectual level, but they understand.
I don't know about merging totally with a universal consciousness. Buddhism has said it will be you, but not you. Possibly a hard concept to grasp if you are not enlightened.
Can I just ask, how is it you think brains happened to evolve to tap into this universal consciousness? And, indeed, did the universal consciousness itself evolve, or was it fully formed at the beginning of time?
That first hand 'death' experience was very interesting for a number of reasons.
Firstly, not all NDEs have been reported as being pleasant.
They tend to follow a pattern with certain common elements (such as the peception of one's body from outside, a journey upwards, a knowledge of death and a point beyond which you do not go or then death will become irrevocable) - but the individual interprets each of these phases differently.
Watch each episode of I survived Beyond and Back on Bio - a series where NDE witnesses tell their stories first hand and their family and medical staff involved fill in what was happening from their perspective as they do - and you see this clearly.
No two NDEs are the same - they just have some or all of these elements around which personalised impressions are built.
As an analogy it might be like 100 people dreaming and having keywords like OUT OF YOUR BODY - FLOATING UPWARDS - subliminally played into theirr head as they are seen to be in dream sleep state by brain pattern monitoring. Then assess the resulting dreams.
In the end maybe 50 people do not remember anything at all because dreams are poorly transferred into conscious recall upon waking - so that half say - 'No I did not dream at all' - when they dd but just have not stored the memory consciously afterwards.
(You can easily prove this by using a dream diary to reveal how much you do dream but forget within moments of waking)
As for the 50 other dreamers they do describe dream impressions.
Maybe 20 of these show evidence that the subconscious had picked up on the subliminal cues and so have things recognisable as related to 'being out of the body' or 'floating' but each person puts them into different dream landscape so they are not 20 identikit dreams.
Some dreams will be pleasant and others nightmares. They will all contain the key experience cues but amidst very different overall dream stories.
For instance - in both cases I have investigated first hand and the witnesses on Bio there are many different ways of describing one 'cue'. These include going along a tunnel, being sucked up into a giant telescope, being hoovered into the stars, ploughing through a field of grass, travelling at speed along a forest road with trees parting as you move....
All seem totally different in detail but also describe the common denomintor experience of being pulled away from ones body upwards or outwards.
Indeed, I have also discovered quite a few 'alien abduction' stories where the same sensation is being described to me as being pulled up by some kind of energy beam into an alien spaceship. I do not think that this is what happened in actuality. I think these people had a similar experience to the NDE and have described the sensation in an alien context as this is what they thought was occurring to them as opposed to being on the point of death.
What all of this tells us about the 'reality' of the NDE is crucial. Perhaps the vision of going to an afterlife via a tunnel is no more real in actuality than that of going into a spaceship via an alien lightbeam.
However, I think it is reasonable to conclude that all of these people have had a genuine experience, undergone the same kind of sensation and have struggled to visualise it in dream like symbology resulting in what we see in both NDEs and alien abduction stories.
Is that something a physiological sensation brought upon by stress or part of the body's natural defence mechanism in a period of extreme trauma? Or is it a psychological/spiritual experience that we cannot comprehend so have to visualise in terms that make personal sense to us based on expectation or experience?
You can make a case for either argument. But for me the NDE is on an identical footing to the alien abduction. Both are real experiences that almost certaionly are NOT what the person experiencing them believes them to be. But genuine, fascinating and important examples of how the mind/body interface behaves at a point of severe trauma.
Can I just ask, how is it you think brains happened to evolve to tap into this universal consciousness? And, indeed, did the universal consciousness itself evolve, or was it fully formed at the beginning of time?
Brains might not have evolved to do this. They could have emerged out of it. Then in some instances they (or consciousnesss) enfolds back into it. How long I can't say because if there is a level of no spacetime and obviously this is a scientific theory not just a philosophical one.
Here is one of our cases that combines many of the things I talk about.
A man told us of being in a dentist's chair having work done when he suddenly was 'out of his body' and passed upwards through the ceiling towards a light that he decided was a UFO. He then found himself surrounded by beings with knowledge of time and space that he thought were aliens who told him to return back. He started to move back towards his body but evil 'spirits' were trying to get in first and he had to fight them off to win back entry into his own body.
As this return downwards was going on he could also see the dentist in panic doing chest compressions on 'him' down below whilst singing 'Hit the Road Jack!' to maintain rhythm.
After he 'came to' the dentist confirmed that he had nearly died after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic and that he had indeed used this then popular tune to help him keep his compressions going.
So is this just an hallucination under the influence of a drug? Or is it a 'bad' NDE experience? Or an alien abduction? Or a spiritual battle?
Either way it shows the complexity of what you might think to be a very simple set of NDE experiences. The pose questions that are not nearly so easy to answer.
So unless they find a way of downloading our memories somehow I think we just go into... nothing. Atoms.
Have witnessed enough deaths (both humans and animals) to know that our outer shells are just like a handbags/ boxes and when we die the shell that is left behind is nothing. It's just an empty box that used to contain something alive.
So I think what any living things is, it's just a complex array of electrons etc that just get released back into the universe when we go.
So unless they find a way of downloading our memories somehow I think we just go into... nothing. Atoms. .
We already do that in a sense, we 'download' whatever bits of our consciousness and memories that we choose to express to others and some of it sticks. 'Download' via speech, writing, our actions as seen and interpreted by others and modified by two-way feedback via further communication.
So yes, although we as individuals disappear on death, our existence is in one sense not lost at all, bits of our very being, our soul if you like, just get redistributed and I for one am happy with that situation. We all influence others and therefore, all is not just 'lost'.
So unless they find a way of downloading our memories somehow I think we just go into... nothing. Atoms.
Have witnessed enough deaths (both humans and animals) to know that our outer shells are just like a handbags/ boxes and when we die the shell that is left behind is nothing. It's just an empty box that used to contain something alive.
So I think what any living things is, it's just a complex array of electrons etc that just get released back into the universe when we go.
Of course you don't really know what is going on though. I mean they aren't necessarily going to tell you if they are soul traveling, and you can't determine by looking at an empty shell.
We already do that in a sense, we 'download' whatever bits of our consciousness and memories that we choose to express to others and some of it sticks. 'Download' via speech, writing, our actions as seen and interpreted by others and modified by two-way feedback via further communication.
So yes, although we as individuals disappear on death, our existence is in one sense not lost at all, bits of our very being, our soul if you like, just get redistributed and I for one am happy with that situation. We all influence others and therefore, all is not just 'lost'.
exactly. The important memories of us are carried on by other people. So in effect
As my mum said before she died, she was looking forward to a nice, long rest. The memory of her carries on though in every life she touched. As we all do.
I'm quite at peace with the concept of becoming "nothing" when I die.
Of course you don't really know what is going on though. I mean they aren't necessarily going to tell you if they are soul traveling, and you can't determine by looking at an empty shell.
And neither do you. And neither does anyone. That was only my opinion, based on my life experiences.
And neither do you. And neither does anyone. That was only my opinion, based on my life experiences.
Yes I know. I just wasn't clear what clue you would get that nothing happened. I mean when I view a dead person they don't look anything other than a shell of their former selves either, yet I believe in the survival of consciousness.
Interesting though that some nurses and doctors who deal with terminal patients day after day think they see a 'look of peace or serenity' that appears to come over their face in the final moments.
This fits the scenario suggested by the NDE that something happens. Who knows whether it is a separation of body and soul or an inbuilt 'go softly into the night' electrochemical cocktail that our body has evolved for this process.
Both pose questions. I wonder what purpose easing the passage has in terms of genetics and evolution? If when you're dead, you're dead there seems little value to a computer programme that makes the computer feel better during the moments that it implodes.
Whether you die feeling good or bad seems to have no purpose in a strictly biological sense as you are not going to pass that on to anyone else and until recent advances in medicine NDE stories were not really shared because those telling them mostly did not survive the process until the past few decades.
Interesting though that some nurses and doctors who deal with terminal patients day after day think they see a 'look of peace or serenity' that appears to come over their face in the final moments.
This fits the scenario suggested by the NDE that something happens. Who knows whether it is a separation of body and soul or an inbuilt 'go softly into the night' electrochemical cocktail that our body has evolved for this process.
Both pose questions. I wonder what purpose easing the passage has in terms of genetics and evolution? If when you're dead, you're dead there seems little value to a computer programme that makes the computer feel better during the moments that it implodes.
Whether you die feeling good or bad seems to have no purpose in a strictly biological sense as you are not going to pass that on to anyone else and until recent advances in medicine NDE stories were not really shared because those telling them mostly did not survive the process until the past few decades.
Perhaps someone who knows evolution better can explain, but how could such a trait (or any other trait for that matter) be passed on once the subject was past breeding age?
Can I just ask, how is it you think brains happened to evolve to tap into this universal consciousness? And, indeed, did the universal consciousness itself evolve, or was it fully formed at the beginning of time?
I don't think this theory depends on the concept of 'evolved into.' If there is consciousness outside the body, I imagine it would pre-exist. We know ( or assume) from psychology that people understand things unconsciously during interchanges without their having to be spelled out. I imagine it's similar in NDE.
Life after death? Well, nobody really knows - that's all we do know for sure. But you will still find people who think they do. They will state with complete confidence and certainty that such a notion is nonsense and has no place in science. Then, having arrogantly decided in their own minds THEY are corrcect in their thinking, will proceed to ridicule or dismiss anyone else who does believe or at least has an open mind on the subject.
Same thing with other subjects such as the supernatural, ghosts, aliens, bigfoot and UFOs and many other mysteries. There have been many strange events in recent times and in our history that defy rational scientific explanation even to this day.
The fact that we are these strange things called human beings existing on this gigantic piece of rock spinning in the black void of space is completely and utterly mind blowing in itself. Yet, if the 'sceptics' didn't know better, you can bet they would dismiss that idea out of hand in just the same way.
Life after death? Well, nobody really knows - that's all we do know for sure. But you will still find people who think they do. They will state with complete confidence and certainty that such a notion is nonsense and has no place in science. Then, having arrogantly decided in their own minds THEY are corrcect in their thinking, will proceed to ridicule or dismiss anyone else who does believe or at least has an open mind on the subject.
Same thing with other subjects such as the supernatural, ghosts, aliens, bigfoot and UFOs and many other mysteries. There have been many strange events in recent times and in our history that defy rational scientific explanation even to this day.
The fact that we are these strange things called human beings existing on this gigantic piece of rock spinning in the black void of space is completely and utterly mind blowing in itself. Yet, if the 'sceptics' didn't know better, you can bet they would dismiss that idea out of hand in just the same way.
Do you want a rational scientific explanation for these things?
Is there a chance that Scientists in way into future can invent something that tells them where people go when they die?
or is that too impossible?
Its not a bad question, its just Technology is not limited, and they can find a way around it,
This can sort out this 50/50 Chance of Heaven and Hell stuff.
You actually do not know if Heaven an Hell exist, or reincarnation, Is there life after death?
I do not want to live believing in religion when we dont know for sure where were going!
I'm damned if I'm going to plough my way through this entire thread to see if it's full of the brain rot that I suspect it will be – but when you die you're gone forever. You're no different to the flies you swat, the chickens you eat, or all the human beings who existed before these stupid notions of soul and spirit were ever conjured up. You've been here and now you're gone. Why does anybody have a problem with that?
This is a really complex subject, my head may start to hurt....,
When people talk about hell, I sometimes wonder if being alive on earth might be hell. There's plenty of people who are unhappy with life & plenty who really do have it bad, eg child labour, people working stupidly long hours every week just to stay out of debt. My situation is no where near comparable but even I don't want to work for 200 years, retire for 10 then pass away...that would be a sort of hell.
Now, what happens to our soul or consciousness is up for debate. There is a little research on this (Google search). When people report seeing things like devils, I wonder if what they are seeing are alien creatures from other worlds which have died. The leap I make here is that death and after death is the same for all life inc life on distant planets. And since when you or any life form is dead if you continue to exist you won't be restricted by where your body can go or do, so yes why not travel vast distances between the stars. Connected with dark matter, dark energy, gravitational waves (?) which could be a useful method travel, speculate....maybe we contine to exist only at the quantum level, in between the individual atoms, etcs. They say that there's a lot of space at the quantum level, from the basic atom down to stuff like quarks is like as big as a soccer stadium. That's a lot of space!
I wonder if any gov in the world has ploughed money and effort into researching this stuff? If they had firm results such as, we are not just a fragile body which dies and that's it, maybe the fall out would be a 60s style mass drop out of people from society.
Perhaps someone who knows evolution better can explain, but how could such a trait (or any other trait for that matter) be passed on once the subject was past breeding age?
With all the clued up savants on DS I'm surprised no one ever mentioned Epigenetics as a means of passing on traits via influence on the young.
I'm damned if I'm going to plough my way through this entire thread to see if it's full of the brain rot that I suspect it will be – but when you die you're gone forever. You're no different to the flies you swat, the chickens you eat, or all the human beings who existed before these stupid notions of soul and spirit were ever conjured up. You've been here and now you're gone. Why does anybody have a problem with that?
If you rearrange the letters in 'rational scientific explanation' you get:
Comments
I think archetypes at least as Jung conceived them, are at the unconscious level. That is why so much of reality exists beneath a level we can easily access, and why we do not not perceive all of reality. We perceive it only in glimpses, like synchristic events and symbols.
Can I just ask, how is it you think brains happened to evolve to tap into this universal consciousness? And, indeed, did the universal consciousness itself evolve, or was it fully formed at the beginning of time?
Firstly, not all NDEs have been reported as being pleasant.
They tend to follow a pattern with certain common elements (such as the peception of one's body from outside, a journey upwards, a knowledge of death and a point beyond which you do not go or then death will become irrevocable) - but the individual interprets each of these phases differently.
Watch each episode of I survived Beyond and Back on Bio - a series where NDE witnesses tell their stories first hand and their family and medical staff involved fill in what was happening from their perspective as they do - and you see this clearly.
No two NDEs are the same - they just have some or all of these elements around which personalised impressions are built.
As an analogy it might be like 100 people dreaming and having keywords like OUT OF YOUR BODY - FLOATING UPWARDS - subliminally played into theirr head as they are seen to be in dream sleep state by brain pattern monitoring. Then assess the resulting dreams.
In the end maybe 50 people do not remember anything at all because dreams are poorly transferred into conscious recall upon waking - so that half say - 'No I did not dream at all' - when they dd but just have not stored the memory consciously afterwards.
(You can easily prove this by using a dream diary to reveal how much you do dream but forget within moments of waking)
As for the 50 other dreamers they do describe dream impressions.
Maybe 20 of these show evidence that the subconscious had picked up on the subliminal cues and so have things recognisable as related to 'being out of the body' or 'floating' but each person puts them into different dream landscape so they are not 20 identikit dreams.
Some dreams will be pleasant and others nightmares. They will all contain the key experience cues but amidst very different overall dream stories.
For instance - in both cases I have investigated first hand and the witnesses on Bio there are many different ways of describing one 'cue'. These include going along a tunnel, being sucked up into a giant telescope, being hoovered into the stars, ploughing through a field of grass, travelling at speed along a forest road with trees parting as you move....
All seem totally different in detail but also describe the common denomintor experience of being pulled away from ones body upwards or outwards.
Indeed, I have also discovered quite a few 'alien abduction' stories where the same sensation is being described to me as being pulled up by some kind of energy beam into an alien spaceship. I do not think that this is what happened in actuality. I think these people had a similar experience to the NDE and have described the sensation in an alien context as this is what they thought was occurring to them as opposed to being on the point of death.
What all of this tells us about the 'reality' of the NDE is crucial. Perhaps the vision of going to an afterlife via a tunnel is no more real in actuality than that of going into a spaceship via an alien lightbeam.
However, I think it is reasonable to conclude that all of these people have had a genuine experience, undergone the same kind of sensation and have struggled to visualise it in dream like symbology resulting in what we see in both NDEs and alien abduction stories.
Is that something a physiological sensation brought upon by stress or part of the body's natural defence mechanism in a period of extreme trauma? Or is it a psychological/spiritual experience that we cannot comprehend so have to visualise in terms that make personal sense to us based on expectation or experience?
You can make a case for either argument. But for me the NDE is on an identical footing to the alien abduction. Both are real experiences that almost certaionly are NOT what the person experiencing them believes them to be. But genuine, fascinating and important examples of how the mind/body interface behaves at a point of severe trauma.
Brains might not have evolved to do this. They could have emerged out of it. Then in some instances they (or consciousnesss) enfolds back into it. How long I can't say because if there is a level of no spacetime and obviously this is a scientific theory not just a philosophical one.
A man told us of being in a dentist's chair having work done when he suddenly was 'out of his body' and passed upwards through the ceiling towards a light that he decided was a UFO. He then found himself surrounded by beings with knowledge of time and space that he thought were aliens who told him to return back. He started to move back towards his body but evil 'spirits' were trying to get in first and he had to fight them off to win back entry into his own body.
As this return downwards was going on he could also see the dentist in panic doing chest compressions on 'him' down below whilst singing 'Hit the Road Jack!' to maintain rhythm.
After he 'came to' the dentist confirmed that he had nearly died after an allergic reaction to the anaesthetic and that he had indeed used this then popular tune to help him keep his compressions going.
So is this just an hallucination under the influence of a drug? Or is it a 'bad' NDE experience? Or an alien abduction? Or a spiritual battle?
Either way it shows the complexity of what you might think to be a very simple set of NDE experiences. The pose questions that are not nearly so easy to answer.
So unless they find a way of downloading our memories somehow I think we just go into... nothing. Atoms.
Have witnessed enough deaths (both humans and animals) to know that our outer shells are just like a handbags/ boxes and when we die the shell that is left behind is nothing. It's just an empty box that used to contain something alive.
So I think what any living things is, it's just a complex array of electrons etc that just get released back into the universe when we go.
We already do that in a sense, we 'download' whatever bits of our consciousness and memories that we choose to express to others and some of it sticks. 'Download' via speech, writing, our actions as seen and interpreted by others and modified by two-way feedback via further communication.
So yes, although we as individuals disappear on death, our existence is in one sense not lost at all, bits of our very being, our soul if you like, just get redistributed and I for one am happy with that situation. We all influence others and therefore, all is not just 'lost'.
Of course you don't really know what is going on though. I mean they aren't necessarily going to tell you if they are soul traveling, and you can't determine by looking at an empty shell.
As my mum said before she died, she was looking forward to a nice, long rest. The memory of her carries on though in every life she touched. As we all do.
I'm quite at peace with the concept of becoming "nothing" when I die.
And neither do you. And neither does anyone. That was only my opinion, based on my life experiences.
Yes I know. I just wasn't clear what clue you would get that nothing happened. I mean when I view a dead person they don't look anything other than a shell of their former selves either, yet I believe in the survival of consciousness.
This fits the scenario suggested by the NDE that something happens. Who knows whether it is a separation of body and soul or an inbuilt 'go softly into the night' electrochemical cocktail that our body has evolved for this process.
Both pose questions. I wonder what purpose easing the passage has in terms of genetics and evolution? If when you're dead, you're dead there seems little value to a computer programme that makes the computer feel better during the moments that it implodes.
Whether you die feeling good or bad seems to have no purpose in a strictly biological sense as you are not going to pass that on to anyone else and until recent advances in medicine NDE stories were not really shared because those telling them mostly did not survive the process until the past few decades.
Perhaps someone who knows evolution better can explain, but how could such a trait (or any other trait for that matter) be passed on once the subject was past breeding age?
I don't think this theory depends on the concept of 'evolved into.' If there is consciousness outside the body, I imagine it would pre-exist. We know ( or assume) from psychology that people understand things unconsciously during interchanges without their having to be spelled out. I imagine it's similar in NDE.
They concluded yesterday that there was nothing when we die, so don't worry about it.
I had some sardines for my lunch yesterday. I can tell you where they went. We go much the same way just not so good on toast.
Same thing with other subjects such as the supernatural, ghosts, aliens, bigfoot and UFOs and many other mysteries. There have been many strange events in recent times and in our history that defy rational scientific explanation even to this day.
The fact that we are these strange things called human beings existing on this gigantic piece of rock spinning in the black void of space is completely and utterly mind blowing in itself. Yet, if the 'sceptics' didn't know better, you can bet they would dismiss that idea out of hand in just the same way.
Do you want a rational scientific explanation for these things?
Next question?
When people talk about hell, I sometimes wonder if being alive on earth might be hell. There's plenty of people who are unhappy with life & plenty who really do have it bad, eg child labour, people working stupidly long hours every week just to stay out of debt. My situation is no where near comparable but even I don't want to work for 200 years, retire for 10 then pass away...that would be a sort of hell.
Now, what happens to our soul or consciousness is up for debate. There is a little research on this (Google search). When people report seeing things like devils, I wonder if what they are seeing are alien creatures from other worlds which have died. The leap I make here is that death and after death is the same for all life inc life on distant planets. And since when you or any life form is dead if you continue to exist you won't be restricted by where your body can go or do, so yes why not travel vast distances between the stars. Connected with dark matter, dark energy, gravitational waves (?) which could be a useful method travel, speculate....maybe we contine to exist only at the quantum level, in between the individual atoms, etcs. They say that there's a lot of space at the quantum level, from the basic atom down to stuff like quarks is like as big as a soccer stadium. That's a lot of space!
I wonder if any gov in the world has ploughed money and effort into researching this stuff? If they had firm results such as, we are not just a fragile body which dies and that's it, maybe the fall out would be a 60s style mass drop out of people from society.
Didn't read the thread but I have no doubt this is the best reply in it
With all the clued up savants on DS I'm surprised no one ever mentioned Epigenetics as a means of passing on traits via influence on the young.
If you rearrange the letters in 'rational scientific explanation' you get:
Coincidence? ... I think not. :cool: