i_don't_understand_death anne-girl do you? 050712 ... polla death comes to all life it's a natural result of sin in the world every natural thing must die, eventually but not souls, they have a choice, and hence, a destination. 050712 ... andru235 its quite simple, really. in order to return to the form of your greater self - be it physical, spiritual, gyroxual, ujunuloptual, ualualaul, etc. - you will have to be re-born. and before that happens, you will have to die. for the most part, it irritates people greatly to hear that they will live again, and again, and again; in particular, it annoys members of religions whose historical predecessors quashed those reincarnationist pagans. and what *really* gets people riled up is telling them they will eventually exist amongst strata completely unrecognizable to us now. it_all_exists, but they want to believe that nothing exists, despite the fact that they would have to be existing in order to believe they weren't. humans: go figure! it_all_exists. surely one of the most annoying - and yet liberating - concepts ever to exist on earth. well, toodles. as a blather i must now die, so that i may blathe again elsewhere. (i suppose if you think i blathed poorly, my next blathe is doomed to be unpleasant and wretched. but there is no guarantee of that. in fact, i think i will blathe in a mirthful, spritely fashion. ha!) 050713 ... anne-girl if when you're reincarnated you don't remember your previous carnations does it make a difference? if your sense of self is gone are you the same person? 050713 ... zanna even after watching it occur, one is no wiser to the expected outcome .. 050713 ... Lemon_Soda Your a line of code in the cosmic computer program that was running since the start of it all. Death is just what happens when your part of the code isn't needed any more. When the program is finished running, there won't be anything. Where do all the zeros and ones that are me go? No where. They simply cease to be. Lord, I hope we have souls and we're just playing a video game. 050713 ... andru235 if, after the passage of many days, our self-image has changed, are we still the same person? if i cannot remember who/how i was ten years ago, could it possibly have anything to do with how i am today? if cannot remember being a baby, is that conclusive evidence that i never was one? if i cannot foresee my life's events during the next lunar cycle, is that a guarantee that i will die before the new moon? it will remain impossible to know if children remember past lives for as long as we hastily condition them to disbelieve in the possibility. by five, most children have begun to talk about 'god'/'goddess'/'deities' in the phraseology of their parental figures. so i find the claim that we do not remember to be as tenuous as the inverse. perhaps at death, our previous life telescopes into a single point which becomes the launchpad for our next sentient experience. inertia of a sort. most attempts to debunk after-lives are based upon an inability to justify continued physical (and thus, tangible) sensation. but that is exactly what death releases an entity from! indeed, upon dying, one is more likely to experience a voihjosief of fwoefw than to experience a delightful biscuit. in the west, we ask, "where is there any evidence of reincarnation?" in the east, they ask, "where is there any evidence against reincarnation?" what i always wonder is, why are people so annoyed at the belief in multiple lives? they seem so desperate to divest believers of that belief. i am reminded of the_fox_without_a_tail. people accuse me of proselytizing, and it merely indicates an accusatory temperament. i am not telling anyone what to think about the cosmos, etc. i'm merely trying to show that the possibility of a next-life is just as possible as that of a 'tomorrow'. whether you believe in eleven goddesses named samantha or a tyrannous devil named acwihndal, what do i care? as for the claim that our waking existence is contingent upon a corpse, this cannot be scientifically demonstrated either. despite the complexities of the brain, there is no explanation for why 'you' exist 'within yourself'. an identical pile of organic material might behave exactly like i do, but there isn't the faintest scientific hint as to why i sentiently inhabit this specific body. my point? when it comes to fundamental questions of existence, science is no further along than religion. yet, the two primary reasons people deny multi-life is because of their religious and scientific beliefs!!! given that there is plenty of support offered to budding nihilists, or born-again christians, etc, i feel it is only fair to offer similar support to the varying reincarnatory persons here in the west. i'm not alone in doing this; but there aren't a lot of us (unless they all are hiding). so ultimately i must observe that neither do we understand life. we lust after the 'steak' of understanding and, not finding it, content ourselves with the bones, eventually convincing ourselves, "hey, this is really it!" then again, better to have a bone and liberty than plenty and a chain...an analogy for death and life? also, biological entities are not the only things that experience peculiar behavior near death...stars, for instance, or atoms in the moments prior to successful fissioning...!!! even the endings of various processionary art-forms (music, novels) tends to be anomalous - although relevant (can anomaly be relevant?!?) - to the rest of the work...i'll leave it to the curious to investigate further... [[[speaking of anomalous, did you die or something? would you please reincarnate as 'aberrance' or something? come back!]]] 050714 ... anne-girl how does reincarnation make life/death more understandable? why's there a need for it to exist? why is it important that we are reincarnated? i have no evidence for or against reincarnation 050714 ... anne-girl tangentially related to reincarnation, i think is nietzsche's idea of eternal return... encountered it in the_unbearable_lightness_of_being that there is infinite time and a finite number of events, and eventually the events will recur again and again infinitely. does this makes life more weighty, if your every action is repeated infinitely? just a thought i haven't grokked it properly yet 050714 ... andru235 for some (and only some) the idea of reincarnation explains the wild array of coincidental material in their lives. like any explanation, it can be empowering or disempowering. for instance, some say that reincarnation traps us into fatalism, while others say that it frees us to greater things, because our current fate is our previous will. if our current fate is our previous will, we have complete control over our future 'fate'. this control comes from what we presently will for our future selves (thus the danger - or safety - in willing nothing[ness]). it is a very distant future, the next life. but if we retain a 'faith in' or a 'will towards' our ideals and even our bizarrest fantasies, might they not become a future reality? for when one's spirit is no longer trapped in a physical body, the laws of the physical universe no longer apply... it's the old latin phrase, and my grammar/spelling is surely wrong, "fatavium invenient?" (do we invent our fate?) a common argument against reincarnation from (some) christian thinkers over the centuries goes like this: if people are merely living out karma from a past life, what incentive is there to help them? i would argue that this is all the more reason to help someone out! but there is, of course, no correct stance on any of this... as for the nietzsche...where is there any evidence that events are finite?!? the limit of what humans can imagine does nothing to bind the greater existence to finity. indeed, isn't the common gripe, "so many [nouns], so little time" ? (not that a cliche constitutes evidence of anything...) basically what i am trying to say is that just as we arrive at this blathe, type for a bit, then depart, so it is with lives. i may go to a different topic and blathe in a completely different manner, but it is still 'i' who blathes. comparing the two, one might conclude that authorship belongs to two different persons; but upon comparison of all my blathes, the link will quite likely become apparent. we begin, we engage, we complete or abandon, we forget, we remember, we resume, we engage, ... everyone knows the infamous g g g e-flat of beethoven's fifth symphony. while this symphony has many sources of significance, one that lost on much of the public is the purpose of that little motif. in each movement, this motif is essential. but after the first movement it is hidden; one has to investigate or listen very carefully to find it. (in the third movement it is not quite as hidden). also, it appears in various forms within each movement. i'll offer some examples below... so even the simple four note theme (a simple soul?) lives again and again, in different forms. the permutations are endless. one could write thousands of totally different symphonies linked only by the use of this four-note theme (indeed can be found in thousands of other works, already). the important thing is, the first movement has to completely end in order for the second to begin. there is a necessary silence, a necessary death, before rebirth can occur. the chapters of a novel are not so different. of course, there are also the sibelius-like figures who write symphonic movements (#7, in his case) where the motif is developed severely in a single movement. but the permutations aren't even remotely exhausted. the motifs of any song, whether used again on earth or not, have an infinite potential about them... it is not so different with you. we may be more complex as motifs, but that does nothing to reduce possible permutations of juxtaposition to the rest of existence. it would seem rather silly to pronounce an orchestra dead after their first concert, because they have finished and the members have scattered...there is no concrete evidence that they will ever again regroup and perform 'live' again...yet the next night, there they are, with an entirely different programme! hidden d-d-d-DAAAHHHs in beethoven symphony five, and i am only listing the more obvious ones because it would be tedious to delineate hidden harmonic progressions, etc.: second movement: --clarinets, measure 15; bassoons + violas, measure (hence m.#) 19; etc. --strings, measure 58; etc. --in the second theme, after m.32 pickups, in m.33 one could consonantly insert three Gs and in measure 34 an E-natural, etc. third movement: --second theme, m.19, is derivation, especially the horn line, which adds the dropped third in m.24. --in the episode beginning m.85, various instruments have monochromatic d-d-d-daahs --fuguetta m129; d-d-d-dahs could be inserted almost anywhere throughout fugue, allowing for permutations fourth movement: --substituting a fourth/fifth for the third, one could insert d-d-d-dahs all over the place (this is true of most music of the 'classical' [not baroque/romantic] music) --using minor -instead of major- thirds, one could insert motif throughout second theme beginning at m.26 --triplet themes beginning pickups to m.45 reminiscent of motif --especially after m.96 the motif is almost 'right there' (at pace of half notes) yet never materializes. --from m.122, leading upward movement is sort of an inverse of motif [of course, with such a simple motif, one could see it anywhere...but then, was beethoven motif-concious? was he a motif-hider? OH YEAH, BABY!] 050714 ... andru235 oh, i almost forgot. in the last 7 measures, there is a final rhythmic D D D _ D _ DAH! *and* the same thing is done with symphonies 7 and 8; there is a motif (more complex, too) that is hidden all over the place, but never stated openly...HOORAY! *also* beethoven was not the first nor last to do this, as many of you already know 050714 ... andru235 ignore everything else i have said. a more simple analogy has revealed itself. death is the period at the end of a sentence. the question is, do you have more to say? 050714 ... epitome_of_incomprehensibility No one really understands anything... oh, what the 1134 do I know? I think life is more confusing. 050715 ... Death of a singular being no. no one "REALLY" understands me. just goes to show i need a better publicist. *death rattles his head* . 050715 ... andru235 what happens when death dies? are we all stuck living? or does death rise again from the ashes to live yet again? 050716 ... stork daddy i don't really understand anything so there you go. i don't even understand enough to say i don't understand anything. 050724 ... . you know the saying wise man, knows that he knows nothing at all socrates 050724 ... andru235 [another socratic translation goes] socrates: "i know nothing, and consequently, i know more than anyone else." 050724 ... andru235 no one really understands life, either. 051123 ... oren I_concur. The instructions are vague at best. 051123 what's it to you? who go blather from