Though I don't particularly believe in hell per-say I do believe in the great mandala and each person is creating their own heaven or hell based on how they respond to this world and the trials put forth.. Thanks to this group I had my beliefs evolve to the point that they are making more sense.. I think we as we live in this world are dual being operating both in the spiritual and physical world.. that has evolved to that we our souls are spiritual beings operating with in the human body vehicle trying to improve our social status (for lack of a better description) on the great mandala.
As spiritual beings we do already know the rules to the game..
Allan
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 7:17 AM, William L Houts <lukaeon@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder if humans do dream of uncorrupted worlds, in general. You'd think that would be universal, and it does seem to be borne out by Western mythologies, with some exceptions. For instance, the Greeks had Olympus, but except for Heracles no one got to go there; everyone else went to Hades, which was gloomy and boring if you were lucky enough to land there in general population, and terrifying if the gods put you in Tartarus. And the Romans didn't seem to place faith in any sort of afterlife at all, which is one of the main reasons whyChristianity sold like hotcakes. Eastern religions such as Buddhism had various hells and heavens, but they were sort of besides the point: your karma is / was supposed to boil down to nothing and liberate you from the Wheel of Rebirth, which was supposed to put you in Nirvana, which was less a Heaven than it was a Nowhere. And Taoism doesn't have much to say about heavenly afterworlds; its whole point is to make this world more just and balanced and leaves heavens to the individual to figure out.
But as to your question of whether humans long for uncorrupted worlds, I think that besides the Abrahamic religions noone takes them very seriously. And I think they've got a point: I mean, if you're taking your present existence at all seriously, then just what is an afterlife supposed to be about? Are we supposed to be eating bonbons all day and living in some version of American luxury? I'd like to believe in Heaven --which for me looks like a kind of liberal college town, with libraries and funky old cinema houses-- but all of that seems kind of empty if there's no gravitas, no seriousness. Without death, without a final marker which howls at us, Do what you must do NOW and die knowing that you've used your life well--without that, I think heaven would become kind of slouchy and boring, or worse. Unless, of course, what's waiting for us on the other side is something superrational but beautiful, like being absorbed into the godhead, if such there be.
So in answer to your question, I think we do dream of uncorrupt worlds, but if we examine them too closely, they tend to be bustable soap bubbles. And maybe I lack imagination, but I wonder, how could it be any other way? Frankly, I'd like to be told how. I sound sensible about all of this if a little pessimistic, but in reality I'm a scared ex-Catholic who is terrified of death and wants to solve the Big Question before they're performing Last Rites on his sorry ass.
--Bill
On 9/27/2012 7:20 PM, rigsy03 wrote:
I wonder where you put the mythological and religious other-worldlies-
from gods to guardian angels, etc.? Or the construct of Dante's
"Divine Comedy", for instance. Do humans long for uncorrupted worlds?
On Sep 27, 6:23 pm, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm with the pragmatists on the question of intelligent alien species.
Many scientists who speculate on this sort of thing --though there
really aren't that many of them-- say that such species wouldn't
resemble anything so comforting as a humanoid physiology, but I think
they're partly mistaken. Surely there would be surprises in the way
nature cooks up life on other planets with radically different
chemistries than our dear old Mama Earth. But I think there's reason to
suppose that many alien species would resemble us. After all, any
species we might imagine has to cope with gravity as it evolves. So
they're much more likely to evolve some form of locomotion which
involves two, four or six pedal extremities (as Fats Waller calls them)
rather than three or five: even-numbered legs are less wobbly and more
amenable to balanced movement which consumes fewer calories. . Also,
sense organs like eyes and ears are likely to be located in or close to
a head, as there is survival value in having sense organs located close
to a brain, or whatever such species might use for brains. Finally,
everyone in the cosmos requires energy to get going, so they're either
going to evolve photosynthesis and take their energy directly from their
sun or suns, or they're going to take their sunbeams indirectly by
consuming something lower in the food chain. I'm sure there are lots of
evolution pathways I'm leaving out, seeing as I'm a curious poet rather
than a serious scientist type of guy, but I think these notions are, as
Allan named other ideas of mine, sensible provisos.
PS. I left out centipedes and millipedes with their scores of legs, but
I think y'all's get what I'm saying here.
--Bill
On 9/27/2012 3:57 PM, archytas wrote:
Goldacre, He finds a �600 billion industry in which more money isI haven't seen any UFOs and tend not to be much interested in people
who claim to have - at least without Bill's sensible provisos. The
speed of thought as a brain process is slower than light-speed - but
then I'm basically a tropical fish realist. I'd have a bet that no
one in this group would really have much of a definition of light-
speed and the Ricel curvature tensor, Euler Langrangian and the rest
of Einstein's field equations. I mean no offence and don't do much of
this science myself.
If you point out to a physicist that the people from the future who
have invented the time machine are in extraordinarily short supply in
our present he may come up with some mathematical guff on the shape of
the universe that explains this or makes time travel only possible to
the future. I have seen demons - plodding back to camp after a week's
endurance exercise with no food for two days I was visually convinced
the sentries were vampires but still asked them where the Naffi was.
My guess is that we travel through space as primitive life-forms with
evolution built-in and waiting to unfold. We may thus have come from
a much more advanced civilisation than ours bound by the speed of
light, capable of the biological engineering but not space-flight much
more advanced than our own. Calculations give 28 years as the time to
reach the edge of the known universe - but this is the time inside the
ship accelerating to near light speed fairly slowly. Space is not
friction free and it's doubtful we or our instruments could take the
radiation of light-speed flight.
I rather hope there are some nice, genuinely civilised aliens thinking
of coming here. In my speculation, intelligent life tends to worry
about food chains led by apes as these have been notoriously war-like.
I'm into bees and ants rather than UFOs at the moment. Bees use
'pharma' to combat fungal infections. Ants take slaves - killing the
adults of another species and taking the larvae. These slaves then
raise the slaver brood. Interestingly, the ant slaves rebel and kill
the pupae of their masters - an act that does not favour the
individuals a they will die, but does seem to be altruistic in favour
of other colonies of the enslaved species. I mention this to suggest
science is not a human invention, just something in evolution we are
expanding.
UFOs remind me of religion generally - people seem to bond around
ludic claims about golden salamanders and what cannot be proved. I
guess we will find life or past life-sign on Mars. Salvation may come
from a mother-ship, but my own feeling is that our inability to
develop science as we could is a more important thought experiment.
In respect of this problem I recommend 'Bad Pharma' by Ben
spent on marketing than on research and development, where the results
of clinical trials of new drugs are massaged, and in which regulators
fail to regulate. Papers supposedly by respected academics are
ghostwritten by drug companies, and patients' pressure groups are
covertly sponsored by pill manufacturers.
I can't for the life of me work out why we aren't directing our
collective towards tapping into the asteroid belt and beyond instead
of ADMASS.
On 24 Sep, 20:15, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm placing my bet on thoughtspeed. It's a great concept and it's a
great word. How could I do any better than that?
--Bill
On 9/24/2012 7:17 AM, Don Johnson wrote:
I agree with Allan the distance challenge is daunting. In an endless--
universe there's also no doubt in my mind there are other inhabitable
planets out there but very unlikely any "aliens" will be visiting us.
But there is hope....
http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw81.html
It's fun to speculate. The ball is in your court.
dj
On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 4:51 PM, William L Houts <luka...@gmail.com> wrote:
I've been around for a while now, so I thought I'd put in a topic for
discussion. I'm very interested in the UFO phenomenon and wonder what the
singing minds here have to say about it. As for me, I don't have a dog in
this fight --I tend to think that there's something to them, something very
unusual, but I'm not at all certain that they're even piloted. Jacques
Valee, one of the more interesting theorists on the subject, says that
they're something like external dreams. Well, he doesn't say that exactly,
but that's how I interpret him. Carl Jung, who was also very interested in
the topic, says something very similar.
I have an experience to relate, too. About fifteen or sixteen years ago, I
was flying down to Las Vegas on Southwest. Looking out of my window I saw,
perhaps 20,000 feet below us, a disc-shaped object. It was featureless and,
in the bright sun and from this angle, almost perfectly white. It wasn't
particularly fast and other than the fact that it was round, it wasn't all
that interesting. I told my three travel mates, and they all basically
called me a liar. (I was very interested in occult topics in those days, so
my judgment was highly suspect.) I'm not convinced that it wasn't something
like a military test craft or something like that, but it was a UFO both in
the high woo woo sense and in the sense that it was an unfamiliar flying
object. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Tennis, anyone?
--Bill
-- "I just flew in from the Land of the Dead and boy are my arms tired."
--
"I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
and boy are my arms tired."
--
"I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
and boy are my arms tired."- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
--
"I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
and boy are my arms tired."
--
(
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|_D Allan
Life is for moral, ethical and truthful living.
I am a Natural Airgunner -
Full of Hot Air & Ready To Expel It Quickly.
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