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Post by Lee on Mar 31, 2011 8:55:03 GMT -1
seeing as this has come up recently in the cosmology thread i thought it might be a good idea to see what people think of this place and thrash out some ideas and maybe a consensus.
I dont honestly think there is an actual realm where the dead go, as in some sort of spirit realm where they hang out and have a laugh. Death is the end of the physical body and the spirit body simply melts back into the world.
I think the best way of explaining what i would call the realm of the dead is some sort of collective unconscious place, a species memory bank of sorts.
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Post by Adam on Mar 31, 2011 9:16:36 GMT -1
My understanding would be different as I believe that we encounter the living personalities of the ancestors... however, this is not in a medium/spiritualist sense... my "theological" understanding is somewhat different
I believe that we are patterns of cause-effect and feedback loops, self maintaining patterns of energy and matter (imagine a whirlpool... it isn't really a "thing" but an appearance produced by the interaction of forces... when the relationship between the forces change, the appearance of the whirlpool changes or even disappears, but the forces remain in relationship... the whirlpool is not a thing but a manifestation of the forces... similarly we are not the people we look to be, but manifestations of forces in the meta-reality that continue in different relationship after our apparent death)... at death, the cause-effect chain does not break simply changes. We can, in certain states, encounter the cause effect chains that are our living ancestors as personality, though not as as human personality. Their lives are current and bound to us (or maybe better put, us to them) in dynamic, real and living ways.
In that sense I see the Land of the Dead as I see all other aspects of the Otherworlds... part of a meta-existence which we have access to different perspectives of, depending upon state and natural predilection.
I like this quote from a website
though for humans, we restructure our own perceptions of our "ambient" to give us access to other aspects of the meta-reality
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Post by Lee on Mar 31, 2011 9:41:39 GMT -1
so not them as such, more 'them' as an echo of them and their existence?
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Post by Adam on Mar 31, 2011 9:43:16 GMT -1
so not them as such, more 'them' as an echo of them and their existence? I would suggest that the echo is actually what we normally think of as them or us... the deeper reality persists beyond death (I edited to try and make that clearer as you responded) Edited to add: I think it is important to state that I believe all this is absolutely describable without recourse to any "supernaturalism"
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Post by potia on Mar 31, 2011 10:26:29 GMT -1
This is a hard one to pin down. I have felt the, to me, unmistakable presences of individuals that have died. In some cases I have been able to get a sense of someting they seemed to wish to convey. It wasn't as clear as words and I couldn't see them as such but I felt them.
I have on some occaisions experienced a very similar effect with a living person, feeling them close to me when they are physically much further away.
I believe that there is some part of us that exists beyond our physical form. How long that non-physical aspect retains a sense of individuality without the physical can vary I think but when we commune with such presences in what ever way we do I think it strengthens that individual presence.
I don't think there is one place the spirits of the dead go but I do think that using an image of such a place and a shamanic style journey to it could give a place where spirits of the living could go to interact with spirits of the dead.
So if I wanted to try and interact with the distant ancestral voices of the land I live on I would journey to that place in the hopes that I would meet something or someone there that could communicate with me.
If, on the other hand, I wanted to interact with my grandmother I would probably look elsewhere or hope to feel her presence near me as I think of her.
Does that make any kind of sense?
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Post by Adam on Mar 31, 2011 10:38:53 GMT -1
I don't think there is one place the spirits of the dead go but I do think that using an image of such a place and a shamanic style journey to it could give a place where spirits of the living could go to interact with spirits of the dead. Indeed... we construct the experience we receive from our senses as meaningful narrative anyway... its what our brains are good at. In order to engage with the dead we have to provide ourselves with a meaningful context, a metaphor, within which that can take place, Does that make any kind of sense? Totally... and is consistent with several indigenous traditions regarding death and dying that I am aware of, that we are in someway many-souled or many-spirited and that the different aspects of the self depart after death in different ways and to different "places"
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Post by Lee on Mar 31, 2011 10:42:54 GMT -1
Yep it make sense.... it's a construct as Adam says. something we see to 'interface'.
i see myself using the Windows analogy more and more, a means for us to interface with something we cant really grasp (MS Dos)
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Post by nellie on Mar 31, 2011 11:07:55 GMT -1
I've always had trouble understanding the idea of a 'soul' that is something seperate from what I percieve as self. Potia - do you mean the land of the dead is more a psychological construct that we use as a meeting place with departed spirits if we are seeking contact? It would make sense that if it's the spirit that wants to make contact it needs no such construct. I've never tried to journey to the underworld or otherworld, but I have seen what would popularly be refered to as a ghost. When I was very young I saw my maternal grandma who died before I was born. She looked like a perfectly solid person to me, I never understood that she was dead. The visit didn't appear to have any point - she asked me where my mum was, and I told her that my mum was in the kitchen. There were no special circumstances, she was just there and then she wasn't. I personally feel that it has much to do with perception. If I change the way my eyes focus, just tighten the muscles a fraction, I can see things. 'Things' is a little vague but I haven't really got a better description. I normally think of it as energy and it looks very much like heat rising on a hot pavement. Very often it takes the form of people shapes, but I can also see it around living people (not like the common description of auras that - I can hardly ever see any colour) and also sometimes around objects that can be as mundane as a cuboard. I've seen this since I was really young, and I always tried to describe it to my mum as looking inbetween spaces. It's this that makes me feel 'the land of the dead' is as much 'here' as it is any other place, but talking of a land of the dead helps my rational brain make sense of things. I'm going to have to keep reading Adams post as it's going to keep me thinking!
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Post by Adam on Mar 31, 2011 11:19:01 GMT -1
I personally feel that it has much to do with perception. If I change the way my eyes focus, just tighten the muscles a fraction, I can see things. 'Things' is a little vague but I haven't really got a better description. I normally think of it as energy and it looks very much like heat rising on a hot pavement. Very often it takes the form of people shapes, but I can also see it around living people (not like the common description of auras that - I can hardly ever see any colour) and also sometimes around objects that can be as mundane as a cuboard. I've seen this since I was really young, and I always tried to describe it to my mum as looking inbetween spaces. It's this that makes me feel 'the land of the dead' is as much 'here' as it is any other place, but talking of a land of the dead helps my rational brain make sense of things. A large amount of what we "perceive" does not come to our awareness through the senses. It is constructed by the brain to 'fill in gaps' as it were. we actively engage in making sense of our experience of the world, it is not a passive process. I relate to your experience of perceiving an "energy"... I regard it as a constructive hallucination... under certain trance conditions I can see auras and I would consider them to be constructive hallucinations... me making sense of the millions of pieces of sensory information that are too complex for me to interpret at a conscious level so I collate and interpret at an unconscious level and then present the results to my conscious awareness as a visual metaphor. But this is no different to the significant and probably greater part of our perception in all states of consciousness, even waking. Much of it is constructive hallucination... us filling the gaps in a meaningful way. Go and look in a mirror. Look at your left pupil. Then look at your right. Look back to the left. Can you see the actual movement of the eye? You know the eye moved so logic says you should have seen it move. If there is a mechanism that suppresses vision when the eye moves, (and there is) then there should be a momentary period of blindness. But there isn't.
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Post by potia on Mar 31, 2011 12:33:36 GMT -1
Potia - do you mean the land of the dead is more a psychological construct that we use as a meeting place with departed spirits if we are seeking contact? It would make sense that if it's the spirit that wants to make contact it needs no such construct. I think that is what I mean yes. Beings that are not tied to a physical form can choose a wide range of methods of interaction with us physical types. They might choose to use such a construct if we seem to need it. I think the same principle can apply to interactions with deity.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 31, 2011 15:22:29 GMT -1
I don't think there is one place the spirits of the dead go but I do think that using an image of such a place and a shamanic style journey to it could give a place where spirits of the living could go to interact with spirits of the dead. So if I wanted to try and interact with the distant ancestral voices of the land I live on I would journey to that place in the hopes that I would meet something or someone there that could communicate with me... Does that make any kind of sense? Yes, that does make sense to me. I was going to say that a story of the land of the dead for me would have to have some sort of mythic resonance with what I sense might happen to us after death. Which is - my thoughts so far - that we might 'see' deities or spirits we connect with and people we know who have already died and experience the tunnel of light as we are dying. But after death I think my body will go back into the physical elements it's composed of and my 'spirit' or what animates me will go back into the vast 'cosmic energy' (for want of a better name or concept). It may be that what I have thought or done in my life will change the vibration of that energy in an infinitesimal way but a way that might be more significant if it combined with others with a similar vibration...or maybe not... I don't think I shall retain the individual personality I have now but just as some of the elements that make up my body may go to make up other beings on earth, my energy may go into animating other beings. But - I think some imprint or echo of me might remain - a bit like a hologram - which people might be able to perceive in some way and which would have a (probably limited) ability to communicate. Maybe the more people do remember and communicate and think of me, the more robust this imprint might become. (I always wonder about Jehovah and how he forbad his followers to communicate with any other gods and had to have loads of cherubim and seraphim continually saying his name and praising him - is this because by doing so they increased his power and influence in the world in an occult way as well as the more mundane? Is this how heroes become gods and did fame really make people immortal, again, in a more than mundane way?) Anyway, I was wondering what image of the land of the dead would work as a metaphor for this idea, something that would resonate. This idea of yours, Potia, makes sense. It would work for me I think. A place to inner journey to to connect with those who are dead, a place with a guardian or facilitator. (Although I usually try to communicate directly - but a guardian or protector is not a bad idea. Another role for the psychopomp? Manawydan? Or an animal?) Like others here, I see the Otherworld as interwoven with our world but in another dimension - so it is 'here' but also 'there'. I think the 'cosmic energy' animates both our worlds and probably others too...
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Post by Deleted on Mar 31, 2011 22:02:20 GMT -1
My experience suggests that some of the ancestors do exist in the Underworld as discrete personalities and some exist elsewhere, possibly on an even deeper level, as energy (that's the best description I can think of!) that (whether merged or discrete) I can only describe as having the potential for rebirth. Whether that happens naturally, as some process, or whether it's a special place one would need to go to in order to seek that energy, I couldn't say. It does make me wonder, if there is somewhere deeper than what we see as the Underworld, whether our perspective may skewed ... what if the top level is our world, the middle plane is what we see as the Underworld and the real Underworld is below that. Or, in other words, what if the true division of up and down exists in reference to what is beneath us, rather than on our plane. Apologies if I'm talking utter nonsense, I've never tried going "up" from this plane, so my experiences can only speak to what's "down"
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Post by nellie on Apr 1, 2011 7:19:55 GMT -1
Draighean, I've often wondered something similar. Some of us see further than others but what if even their perceptions are limited, what if there is more beyond what we know? There are many levels in hell no? And are there quite a few worlds in norse mythology?? I think potentially you're right that there may be some deeper reality beyond the otherworld that we have no understanding of.
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Post by nellie on Apr 1, 2011 7:25:15 GMT -1
Just another thought - what do people think of instances of meduims recieving messages from departed loved ones? Does that muddy the waters at all?
For me (I@m not saying it's going to be improtant for everyone) part of the question about the underworld is tied to what does happen to us after we die. Rebirth, disintergration... why do some souls seem to hang around while others move on and seem to visit from time to time, where as others seem to move on completely and utterly. Is it the case that spirits have to journey to speak to us and the journey is too much sometimes? And where does rebirth fit into that? Are there different stagaes after physical death?
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Post by Deleted on Apr 1, 2011 14:26:31 GMT -1
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's wondered about that, it makes sense to me that if all the stories tell us how to enter a specific plane, that the associated map would be based on directions from that plane. But it is just conjecture and subjective experience.
I've only had one experience with messages from loved ones, when my grandfather died I burst into tears at the exact moment of his death and didn't stop crying all night, so I wasn't surprised when they told me he'd passed away the next morning. After that, I got a firm sense that he wanted my grandmother to have yellow roses for her birthday, when I asked my mum about it she said they planted those together when they married (I hadn't known that). Those experiences suggest to me that there is something to those kinds of messages, which does make sense. If we can travel in and out of the Underworld, it would make sense that it's possible for the ancestors to travel in the other direction. Maybe it comes down to their possessing the knowledge to know how to do so, or being given that knowledge by their own ancestors. It would make sense that the older ancestors would have that knowledge. Maybe they only share it with those who have good reasons for returning?
Of course,maybe it's simply our perception, in that they return but we don't sense them or that some return but without making their presence known, either to avoid interrupting the natural grieving process or because their descendants beliefs are such that it wouldn't be a positive experience for them. Plus, of course, if at some point they exist solely as energy, if they were still able to travel between the worlds, we wouldn't recognise them as ancestors, only as a calm and positive feeling.
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Post by redraven on Apr 1, 2011 15:42:24 GMT -1
OK, following on from my earlier post in the Cosmolgy thread, time to throw in a few IED's. If you look at the base consequence of any life form, the inescapable conclusion is that any life form has the potential to transmute energy, be that in the form of actions, words, thoughts or any form of interaction including ingestion and the biological functions. It is becoming clear that these actions are not solely restricted to the immediate area the action originated in. For example, the words of poets continue to influence people hundreds of years after they were first recorded even though the individual who first related them is now physically gone. The action when first created is, therefore, not correspondingly tied by time or form to a specific area or time period, but continues to influence outside the original parameters of it's creation. This transmutation of energy from one form to another retains the potential to carry on influencing long after the original event. And it strikes me that one of the purposes of life is to effect and sustain this transmutation of energy in an almost neverending cycle. So, I hear you say, what has this to do with the land of the dead? Well, if we accept this premise that the actions of individuals continue to have a very physical consequence upon later generations, then it strikes me that it is entirely possible that parts of an individual may continue to resonate through the consequences of the results they were part of originating, and consequently parts of their individuality may continue to exist whenever and wherever these actions continue to interact with the living world. To do so, may mean that the individual is not fully able to assimilate into the ethereal otherworld, as part of them still continues to be tied on a physical plane through these continuing interactions. This would require therefore, a sort of "halfway house area", IMO, and consequently this would make a very good candidate for the neccessity for a "Land of the Dead". If these actions were of significant relevence to the individual concerned, the need to move on fully into the other world may be severely restricted and, indeed, some may consider their actions to be of enough significance that it benefits them to maintain a presence in this land of the dead so as to continue influencing the living plane. Therefore, far from it being a solely negative area of occupation, as some of the major religions would have us believe such a place to be, the "reality" maybe of an area with the potential to be a very dynamic and positive influence on the living and their current plane of existence. RR
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Post by Deleted on Apr 1, 2011 16:14:32 GMT -1
That seems a very accurate (and well-worded) description to me
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Post by Heron on Apr 1, 2011 19:58:28 GMT -1
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Post by Deleted on Apr 1, 2011 21:36:56 GMT -1
He makes some good points about the experience of change as something outside oneself and the effects of subjectivity on our perceptions, but he ignores the fact that the experience of death and change are very potent and real and he seems to be arguing that if the hard question of consciousness can't be answered, then we cannot be conscious entities, experiencing the inner and outer qualia of our lives in a meaningful sense, which clearly isn't the case. He also refers to forgotten memories as contributing to his feel of identity, which is a bit of an oxymoron and his point about the return of memory after structural damage to the brain is a sweeping generalisation. It does raise some interesting questions though.
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