Immortality, Religion, and Choices.

Death.
Peace.
Suffering.
Permanence.
Balance.
The body.
The mind.
The experience.
The soul.
The being.
Being.
Essence.
Belief.
Spirituality.
Religion.
Nothingness.
Morality.
Immortality.
Death.

I find myself pondering immortality more and more frequently. Whether or not it is, or it is not, and how or why it occurs is beyond me. But the more I experience death, the more I wonder... Is there such a large gap between the faith in religion and the belief in immortality? As technology and medicine advance, fewer and fewer people maintain their religious beliefs.

Religion explains the unknown. It explains phenomena that could not, can not yet, will never, be explained. But as we learn more, we need it less. As we advance, we hide the broken and the sick more and more. Illness and death become more and more separate from the lives of the masses. There is a tendency for individuals to become religious or return to religion when they are approaching death, experienced or experiencing the death of another, or after a traumatizing event. It gives an explanation, a direction, a spark to continue. Is the exploration/pursuit of immortality not merely another way to escape the thought of the inevitable?

As religion becomes less mainstream, the exploration/belief of immortality withers with it. Already a small group, it continues to shrink. To become thought of by the masses as the refuge for the mentally ill and cult like groups.

The more I ponder it, the sadder the idea of immortality becomes. It leaves two choices. To withdraw and only interact with those of a similar lifespan to your own, or to interact with flashes on a timeline and watch them waste away again and again and again.

It is exhausting, wrenching, frustrating, heartbreaking, shattering.
Watching again and again as life escapes a body. The tension, then the slack of a sudden death. The slow unwind of a slow one. Watching the suffering as someone fights to hold on. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, and for the most unfortunate, years. To watch someone lose consciousness, knowing they will never wake again but caring for their body until their heart or lungs finally decide to slow and stop. To watch someone fight for air and see the fear in their eyes, knowing that they know as well as well as you do that they will never again take a deep enough breath to sustain them again. To look upon their face, their life already gone from their body, and seeing the tension that remains their, their final indication of their suffering. To listen to the screams, wails, and silence of their loved ones. Listening to them beg you to tell them what to do as they sob. Offering false comfort for something you know can never be fixed.

Maybe it is a reflection of my weakness, but I struggle to figure out how I will continue to cope with it throughout my lifetime. Let alone countless lifetimes. But is choosing solitude any better, or just another embodiment of cowardice?

I can say I felt breathless while reading what you wrote. As I can see you deal directly with this situation.

A long time ago , when I was a kid, my dream was to be a doctor, and work in the emergency of the hospital.

I still have this feeling of being able to help, somehow, and I already had to save 2 lives, doing specific CPR procedures.

But, reading your text now, it made me think so hard about that, about actually watching life leave a body, about dealing with the suffering from the family.

I see that people tend to return to their religious thoughts, especially in difficult moments.

When you mention we have about 2 choices when dealing with immortality, one would be the interaction with those of the same kind of ways of thinking, and the other .. the others.. the mass...

I don't know, here I will write a feeling. I feel sometimes just like in a void, lost, sad. Like you, and I believe like many who decide to embark on a Journey of self discovery, it is painful, most of the times it hurts.

It hurts to overthink, to feel things more than the regular people, to be sensitive. It is terrible to understand beyond some layers, to see and yet, not be able to see it all, but just know there is something else.

I think the real life is really not "here", but the now, the here is part of the eternal Journey.

What Journey? That is the thing. There are so many things trying to explain life, so many theories, beliefs... and not and absolute Truth.

It may be the one that really echoes inside you, that way, the only real true one, is INSIDE US, as it is personal.

Maybe it is really like some say, the Universe is experiencing itself through life in different forms...

Lynskha wrote:

What Journey? That is the thing. There are so many things trying to explain life, so many theories, beliefs... and not absolute Truth.

So True... and applies to every conversation and topic.

I had a feeling, and some different people said the same things, in different situations, when I was talking to them, in different moments, but about me and this Spiritual Journey.

The thing is that personal feeling of looking for something, answers, and believing the Journey is to reach the goal, fidn the answer, the door, the "IT" , but then, the sentence these different people mentioned, aligned with my feeling... and if my Journey at this moment IS discovering the Journey?

What I am saying is personal, and applies to my moment, but I am sharing because I think it maybe applies to a more general view. Our Path is built at the same time we walk it...

I have some personal issues regarding to Spirituality, and I believe I am getting "back on track" after, let's say... unsolved or moments of "being away" in .. other times...

Now It is like having to go back, find the path, the door.. the hard way... so maybe, for me, it is not the door, but the Journey that will lead me there...

There is an interesting book from Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist. I enjoy this story... maybe I feel like that story...

We are always looking for the treasure, but we have to realize that it is the Journey that really matters...

"so maybe, for me, it is not the door, but the Journey that will lead me there..."

What I meant is - maybe for me , this life is not about "the door" or the answer, but find the correct Path, the Journey itself...

It is called "growing"

Thank you Maxx.

I have sat here and typed four or five different responses, trying to figure out how to verbalize my thoughts and questions in a way that makes some semblance of sense. In this process, I think I've realized something. I will have to reflect on it a bit more, but I don't think I actually want answers.

I do not have heightened emotions for others. If anything I am frequently too thick to notice the emotions of others unless they are overwhelming, but I enjoy my interactions none the less. I have no special sense of enlightenment, no internal guiding light toward a certain path. If anything, I think absolute knowledge is death. It is either found in death or to obtain it while alive is to separate one's self from all living things in a way that prevents continued worthwhile interactions with the living. A death in it's own way. I am not willing to pay that price.

I want answers to things that I have no right to ask, especially if I cannot find the words to ask them. If that makes sense.

Having only read a couple of your discourses here and not trying hard to be critical on purpose......  The first thing I felt from your writing is that you would spend a lot of time in a darker mood with your thoughts.  That, in itself, would make it easier to find a good friend named depression.  If that is where you want to wander, I wish you well.  But if you want to change the vibration of your thinking, happiness, joy, thankfulness, (get a jar and a small sheet of paper every day and write down the one thing from that day that you are thankful for and date it.  Put it in the jay.  Pull them all out every 3o days and reflect on them.  At the end of a year you have so many things to be grateful for you do not have time to waste spending a lot of time in depression).  

But what do I know?    Not much....

It was not my intent to cause concern. But I will keep your words in mind.

I guess I abuse this place a bit to explore topics I cannot explore in my day to day life. My apologies. I have been experiencing many things that are new to me and it has pushed me to contemplate things in a new light. This is one of the topics more... complicated to explore with the people I interact with regularly. So I thought I would bring it here for further insight. I guess my increasingly frequent experiences with death (a concept I have previously spent a lot of time avoiding) are causing me realize that life, death, and beliefs are much more closely intertwined than I previously imagined. Which sounds silly, but how often do we truly stop to think of death as process rather than a state? How much does fear of death affect our beliefs and actions whether we realize it at the time or not?

Could be. But I have no fear at all of death. I spend time interacting with those I have known that have lived during my time here and we laugh and talk just like we always did before they moved over. I know that death is only a subject many dwell upon quite a bit but actually only lasts a couple of seconds. I am surprised that most people do not really know the actual process or at least remember it from former times. The damn religious teaching has had a lot to do with this.

The rest of my existence I am living life and so I am planning on the joy of living and learning new advancements for my soul. In that, I realize that we are all immortal, if only we want to be. If we make death a bigger item than it actually is, then we get over into the area of unbalance.

The soul is immortal, in some from, I believe. After all a soul in energy and, that can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form. I do not think all souls are given sentient, or even conscious immortality. Fully conscious, sentient immortality is the province of the vampire and even that only after a time, when the level of development needed for it has been reached.

So, I sit here, sipping my glass of Syrah wine, contemplating whether seclusion or diving into the current society in any one lifetime is better. For a moment, I think a balance of the two may be best, then I realize that it is all one lifetime for me, body not withstanding. While I do need my seclusion, my space, I cannot learn and grow if I do not interact with the world around me.

If I never spoke to mortals, never loved them, then how would I know how society has changed, how ideals and preconceptions have been altered over time? How would I find new ideas, philosophies and even new religions to ponder, the learn of if I did not interact with the world?

I do not think we are meant to live in complete isolation, though as time goes on, I find I do need the occasional company of my kindred more frequently. Those few with whom I can discuss the present, how it came to be so, how it relates to what has been, what is to be gained by this current experience and, what might the next experience hold for us.

I struggle with the grandiloquent tone some of your posts take, but you have given me food for thought. Thank you. I will chew on it a while.

LittleWanderer, if I am unclear to you, please don't hesitate to ask.

My family is rather well off and,, I am accustomed to the mannerisms of such people. We spend hours discussing ideals and philosophies that, in the grand scheme of thing mean very little but, they are important one or the other of us.

I do have friends among my own that live in near complete isolation. True they have their reasons, sound reasons but, they also suffer for it. I might talk of some current event, or change I see in the world and, they know nothing of it, dismiss it as irrelevant, only to find that it is relevant years later and was when I mentioned ti to them but, they did not see it then due their isolation from society.

We should be in society but, not a part of it. If we become a part of it, then we can no longer be objective and critical toward what we see in society but, if we avoid it and, learn little of it, then we may miss some enlightenment, or some new lesson that we need to learn.

For me, human society is one of many tools which I can use to learn, to grow. Society reflects the expected, the average and, what is currently held as good, right and beautiful. I need to know these things, the check myself and see if I am missing something good, right or beautiful. I need to know what the spiritual average is because when combined with what AI know of myself and, where I was in the past, it give me a gauge by which to measure my own growth.