Life and death are both unknowable in the sense that identity is. Identity as the known solves the problems of both life and death. If you take consciousness as a co determinant of identity, (they are dependent upon each other, by definition process). And view that definition as processes of “evolvement”(life) and "devolvement"death, its possible in early civilisation have developed a projection of this process. The projection of the auto pro morphic God, until the advent of nihilism. Post nihilism, post structuralism, de construction, has an inverted effect: we can no longer project our destiny in pictures (sorry bill) we are waiting for an introject, but one of a non literal variety. This is coming, and it will enhance our understanding of how life and death connects who we become (identity). We can not visualise this process, simply because our understanding would be levelled into the circular, closed/logical meaning which is/will be abandoned, in favour of the level of information attained by higher types of communication. Death, in the advanced occult literature concurs with this assessment, as the problem of identity being the focal point. At the moment the crisis of self consciousness is the block through which the passage has to be made to liberation. Sri Aurabindo’s work in this topic, is most noteworthy. What do you guys think?
Sorry for the mistake, of attributing my blog included in Yours, but might as well, where does one thought stop and another’s begin? That’s the exact idea (by accident) I was trying to express, in the boundary problems that break down in Zen. Funny!
I was able to fix it, so disregard above, please. The point has to be made, that Zen can be done without doing Zazen. However, I believe, before You can relinquish the self (for some) , an explanation as to why, has to be answered. (As the OP implies) after, Zen may come naturally! That's mypoint.
Well you would wrong about that. But I guess that makes it your fantasy.
It would be nice (to us) if you would focus more on that rationale than its conclusion.
You have no idea what that reasoning would be. The only religious people that you know are not philosophers, but followers.
But then again, so far, I haven’t seen actual philosophizing coming out of you either (not that you would be alone in that regard).
Very well then, we all know the rationale of the atheist-scientist position which rationally dismisses notions of heaven and after-life. What we observe about life indicates that it is a material process, what we observe about consciousness is that it is dependent upon the operations of the brain, and emerges from these. There is no logical basis to conclude that the idea of an after-life is necessary, nor do we have any empirical evidence for an after-life. The scientific position is one of rational scepticism and reasonable belief or non-belief based on the observations and evidence available to us. Based on this evidence there is no reason to think that anything happens after our bodies die. And there is no logical argument I have ever seen that succeeds at demonstrating the rational necessity or even the likelihood of a “soul” surviving the death of the body. In the absence of such evidence and argument there is no reason to believe in heaven, and every reason not to believe in it.
Also, people I know who do believe in heaven, they have never been there. I know, because I have asked them. They have never been there, they have never died and seen what happens after death. The basis for their belief in heaven is not evidentiary or observational. What they, the religious I have talked to, say about their beliefs in heaven is that it is what the bible says. If pressed, they continue that “thermodynamics shows that energy cannot be destroyed”, therefore this is supposed to show that there is an after-life. When I point out to them that this law of thermodynamics does not mean that material forms cannot perish, but only that the entropic energy underlying a form will always dissolve and change into new forms, tending toward greater entropy all the time, such as for instance dissipating into heat and decaying organic matter, they just shrug.
So there is my rationale for claiming that heaven and after-life are fantasies. So why don’t you tell me your religious rationale for your belief in heaven? Tell me how you know that there is a heaven and after-life?
Any kind of order, even the arrangement of atoms in a molecule, is unnatural and happens only by chance, and it eventually encounters the reverse trend. These events are statistically unlikely, and the further combination of molecules into anything as highly organized as living organisms is improbable. Thus life is a rare and unreasonable thing. Its continuation depends upon the maintenance of an unstable situation. It is something like a car that is made roadworthy by being fitted with an endless supply of spare parts.
Our own lives are a kind of miraculous arrangement. How can that be when the second law of thermodynamics states that everything tends to become more and more disorderly until the final and natural state of things is a completely random distribution of matter?