Need some help

[Thought Police]

On a different forum I came across a person who said this to me and I was really taken aback. I found myself unable to respond to this poor ignorant human being who wrote this. Lets assume that it was me saying this. How would you respond to me? Dont pull any punches.

"Consciousness can become 'unconscious'; we do this every night when we sleep. But we always reawaken. The only possible way for Consciousness to permanently cease to exist is if it never actually existed in the first place, which is what happens to the ego, but not to the Soul. The ego is a personality built upon false BELIEFS about the Self, the Soul. When such beliefs are discovered to be in error, the ego disappears from perception because it never truly existed in the first place. What replaces the ego is the NEW beliefs about the Self. Sometimes this is an expanded awareness of Consciousness; sometimes it is simply a brand-new ego, formed around entirely new false beliefs.

I have experienced ego death at least once or twice in this lifetime. It is nothing to fear because literally 'nothing' dies other than an IDEA about the Self. And in my case, my deceased egos were immediately replaced by new egos, also a 'false Self.'

There is no actual "afterlife" because there is no Existence BUT Life. Life just is, and it is naturally Eternal. It simply CONTINUES within a new DIMENSION of perception, one which will be NON-physical. The Soul will then decide whether it wishes to continue living as formless spirit, or reincarnate into a new physical manifestation of Self. The former 'self,' the ego, will have long since gone POOF! and be no more missed than is any one of our 'dreaming' selves whom we temporarily believe ourselves to be several times each night while we sleep. Within the dream, we might quake with fear at the notion of not existing anymore as 'that' person. Yet thousands and thousands of times in just one physical life, do we truly cease to exist as those dream selves over and over again, and most of us promptly forget how real it all seemed at the time.

Time is illusion. Eternity and Infinity are the actual Reality of Existence, and Consciousness, being purely subjective, cannot be contained within any measurable limits, regardless of how much it seems to us that we are 'contained' within our skulls. We are all part of an Infinite Ocean of Consciousness, tricked into believing we are 'separate' due to our personal localized focus points within physical bodies. When the body loses its ability to contain our focus locally, we have the opportunity to merge once again with the Infinite field, or to continue to perceive duality in various forms from a localized focus point of our own creation."

Good luck

[Dante]

"Consciousness can become 'unconscious'; we do this every night when we sleep. But we always reawaken. The only possible way for Consciousness to permanently cease to exist is if it never actually existed in the first place, which is what happens to the ego, but not to the Soul."

...Really? The entire basis for this claim is a comparison with sleep? Consciousness demonstrably depends on brain function, which does not cease during sleep, but does cease upon death. A particular consciousness will indeed cease to exist when the brain that supports it dies, and it is irrelevant that the brain, when it was alive, had the ability to pass from conscious to unconscious and back.

[DerekN]

Basically, the idea is that the consciousness/self/soul has no identity, but at the same time it is who people really are at their core, and also it's a manifestation of the eternal. Then the ego is created around the soul because the soul is misguided and confused by the material world.

A background story:

Some time ago some dude called Plotinus taught that there was this "supreme, totally transcendent "One", containing no division, multiplicity or distinction; likewise it [was] beyond all categories of being and non-being." (Wikipedia). Then in the 20th century, some hippies started teaching that in the beginning there was this big giant consciousness called God, and everything was perfect and One, "containing no division, multiplicity or distinction." But then something horrible happened. Human beings started being born, and every time that happened, some little bit of that great big consciousness fell down to earth and ended up in a body, seperated from the rest, and these poor seperate souls forgot that they used to be One. When the bodies die, the soul then either returns to the great big consciousness, or it reincarnates. (All this is standard Platonism I think.)

According to this doctrine, combined with some pseudopsychology, newborn babies are still pretty blissfull. They are still One with everything because they haven't created an ego yet. They don't know the difference between themselves and their environment; they think their needs are being met automatically. But then they they realize that they are seperate from their mother, that they have to do things to still their hunger, and that red blocks are different from green blocks. They create an ego around their soul/self to deal with the world. They have to think, to have a seperate identity, and to defend that identity from themselves and other ego's with more and more false beliefs. All these new responsibilities are absolute torture to the infant, because they seperate him from blissful Wholeness and Oneness with the Universe. And from that moment on man is doomed to spend his entire life trying to return to that perfect blissfull state of a newborn baby (and usually gets distracted by materialsim and meaningless sex, while all he has to do is meditate in a room and find people stupid enough to take care of him).

So what these ideas essentially say is: (earthly) values are bad or just an illusion.

Edited September 8, 2010 by DerekN

[JayR]

How would you respond to me? Dont pull any punches.

Put down the bong.

The only possible way for Consciousness to permanently cease to exist is if it never actually existed in the first place, which is what happens to the ego, but not to the Soul.

This claim is arbitrary, in the first place. And, since the rest of that existentialist hoo-ha is based on that (false) claim, none of it warrants any attention whatsoever.

Doesnt Madonna buy into crap similar to this?

added on edit: welcome to OO.net....

j..

Edited September 8, 2010 by JayR