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Eternal Life

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?

Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?

What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?

What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?
 

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
First off, I should state my current beliefs. I believe in reincarnation, usually occuring multiple times, before one moves onto an eternal existence.

I think your thoughts tend to generally get wiped each time you pass from one body to another. However I think your personality and feelings at least somewhat continue off. I'll give an example. A couple of sources, which you cannot prove one way or another, of course, both kind of told me that my last life was spent as a woman, an African woman to be exact, as well as they told me kind of what my life was like to some extent. Who knows whether this is true. I have skepticism as most people would. But if it was true I was female in a previous life, it would possibly explain my gender dysphoria and past unsatisfaction in this one.

The subject was about the eternal though. While some faiths and views may believe you spend an eternity worshipping God, I take a different view - that possibly when you become eternal, you may outlive your dependence on God and while you still may thank and revere such power - you gain some form of independence and freedom from reliance.

But that's just what I think. I see the gods as not really meddling much in human affairs. Kind of being just and indifferent. However when I say just, I don't mean "seeking justice".
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
First off, I should state my current beliefs. I believe in reincarnation, usually occuring multiple times, before one moves onto an eternal existence.

I think your thoughts tend to generally get wiped each time you pass from one body to another. However I think your personality and feelings at least somewhat continue off. I'll give an example. A couple of sources, which you cannot prove one way or another, of course, both kind of told me that my last life was spent as a woman, an African woman to be exact, as well as they told me kind of what my life was like to some extent. Who knows whether this is true. I have skepticism as most people would. But if it was true I was female in a previous life, it would possibly explain my gender dysphoria and past unsatisfaction in this one.

The subject was about the eternal though. While some faiths and views may believe you spend an eternity worshipping God, I take a different view - that possibly when you become eternal, you may outlive your dependence on God and while you still may thank and revere such power - you gain some form of independence and freedom from reliance.

But that's just what I think. I see the gods as not really meddling much in human affairs. Kind of being just and indifferent. However when I say just, I don't mean "seeking justice".

Do you think reincarnation has a beginning and and end? If so, what lies at either end? As in before the cycle started and after your last incarnation?
 

Unveiled Artist

Veteran Member
For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?

Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?

What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?

What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?

I believe I'll have no soul/identity and that my spirit/energy that keeps me alive will be "held" by loved ones and/or by the personal things I've owned and places I have strong attachments to.

I liken it like when you have religious and/or personal items, rosaries, church atmosphere, to loved ones ashes, and things like that you can experience the spirit or people who those items represent, owned, or embodied in.

As for believing there's a person/soul that lives on forever, I don't believe that-rather, we all die body/mind/soul. I can't control who keeps me alive by spirit but what I can do is learn to accept death-even if everything we believe is false; I would never know. Take nothing for granted, in other words.
 

PoetPhilosopher

Veteran Member
Do you think reincarnation has a beginning and and end? If so, what lies at either end? As in before the cycle started and after your last incarnation?

I think at one point, a soul may have been somehow created by a god or maybe gods.

I have a theory. And it's just a theory, and my own thinking. I'm sure you yourself have studied how to break the reincarnation cycle, and I kind of see you on that path to enlightenment assuming you're not there already, Salix. However, here's my theory: we each have a secret thing we need to do or learn, perhaps even just one thing, to break the reincarnation cycle. But we don't know what that thing is.

I'm not trying to be disagreeable with those that may have become enlightened and taught others on the subject. But there's one way we can attempt to determine whether I'm correct, if fact-checking is needed. It's to look at every wise person who talks of breaking the reincarnation cycle, who you believe is legit, and see if all their ideas match up. If they don't, it tells me that we each may have a secret goal, rather than a predefined set of like goals breaking the reincarnation cycle.

Sorry if I didn't answer your question properly. I'll re-read it but my phone's a little slow today so I'm posting my thoughts in bite-sized chunks.
 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
I've posted this several times before but it answers the questions in the OP. We as "drop souls" are born out of the ocean of divinity, evolve in a broader sense by assuming gas forms, stone, metal, animal and finally human form. We reincarnate over and over again until we've experienced everything and then enter into the spiritual path of involution before finally merging our drops once again in the ocean from which we were born.

creation.png
 

Gargovic Malkav

Well-Known Member
I've posted this several times before but it answers the questions in the OP. We as "drop souls" are born out of the ocean of divinity, evolve in a broader sense by assuming gas forms, stone, metal, animal and finally human form. We reincarnate over and over again until we've experienced everything and then enter into the spiritual path of involution before finally merging our drops once again in the ocean from which we were born.

creation.png

I'm always fascinated by cosmological maps such as this one!:cool:
 

dybmh

דניאל יוסף בן מאיר הירש
For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?

Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?

What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?

What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?
I view my existence between as non-corporeal. I am, at that time, an idea, nothing more. This idea has affinities and aversions, talents and flaws, which carry over lifetime to lifetime.
 

Vouthon

Dominus Deus tuus ignis consumens est
Staff member
Premium Member
For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?

I believe that consciousness is essentially distinct from material, cognitive brain functioning in neurons and thus will persist after bodily death.

Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?

I tend to take as my working premise, the orthodox Catholic belief that the individual 'spiritual soul' came into existence either around the time of, or some time after (during gestation of the unformed foetus), in vitro conception within the womb.

However, there is also a consensus in the mystical tradition of my church - as part of a doctrine known as 'divine exemplarism' - to the effect that all creatures, indeed the entire universe in all its varied forms, pre-existed in God from all eternity as "ideas" in the Divine Mind before and beyond their creation in time.

Ontologically speaking, we are dualists (God and the soul are distinct in essence as far as time and creation are concerned), yet the soul has an eternal being in God beyond itself as a result of God's eternal Idea of it (which is more akin to a non-dual Advaita conception).

So, in one sense, Vouthon is a created being whose body and soul came into being 29 years ago in my mother's womb. Yet in another sense, I was always and eternally existing in the Divine Mind, and God knew me in Himself from all eternity.

What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?

Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are spiritual states of being (as opposed to physical locations) that occupy no location in space and are even apart from time as well, with the souls of the deceased thought (according to time-honoured, theological speculation) to exist in something mysterious called “aeviternity”.

It entails an existence which is a form of “participated eternity". This lies between the timelessness of God and the temporal experience of material beings - to us, for all intents and purposes, it is akin to “no-time” - although this isn't strictly true.

I believe Vouthon will continue to exist in aeviternity as a disembodied soul, aware both of my eternal being in God and my created being in time. I will always simultaneously be aware of both. God granted me an independent existence from Him by creating this embodied human soul in time. This was so that I could freely love and turn to Him. He will never revoke this gift of existence.

Nor, however, will I ever be "fully" creature again, for I will have been penetrated through with God by means of my direct, uninhibited enjoyment of the Beatific Vision in heaven (the sight, awareness and knowledge of God as He is in Himself, in His Essence) and have become by grace what God is by nature, as I always was from all eternity in His Mind, where I should hopefully: "enjoy the same perfect happiness wherewith God is happy, seeing Him in the way which He sees Himself" (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentes). Hopefully, anyway!

What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?

This is a very good question.

Blessed Henry Suso, who claimed to have experienced a foretaste of the Beatific Vision in this lifetime through infused contemplative mystical experience, had this to say on it:


"...Essential reward, however, consists in the contemplative union of the soul with the naked Godhead, because it never rests until it is led beyond all its powers and capacities and is directed into the natural substance of the Persons and into the simple nakedness of Being. Face to face with this it then finds fulfilment and eternal happiness.

The farther it enters into the wild wasteland and the deep abyss of the pathless Godhead into which it plummets, where it is swept along, and to which it is so united that it cannot want otherwise than what God wants. And this is the same Being God is: They become blessed by grace as He is blessed by nature.

Eternity is life that is beyond time but includes within itself all time but without a before or after. And whoever is taken into the Eternal Nothing possesses all in all and has no ‘before or after’.

Indeed a person taken within today would not have been there for a shorter period from the point of view of eternity than someone who had been taken within a thousand years ago…

Now these people who are taken within, because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing.


When the good and loyal servant is led into the joy of his Lord, he becomes drunk from the limitless overabundance of God's house. What happens to a drunken man happens to him, though it cannot really be described, that he so forgets his self that he is not at all his self and consequently has got rid of his self completely and lost himself entirely in God, becoming one spirit in all ways with him, just as a small drop of water does which has been dropped into a large amount of wine.

Just as the drop of water loses itself, drawing the taste and colour of the wine to and into itself, so it happens that those who are in full possession of blessedness lose all human desires in an inexpressible manner, and they ebb away from themselves and are immersed completely in the divine will. Otherwise, if something of the individual were to remain of which he or she were not completely emptied, scripture could not be true in stating that God shall become all things in all things. Certainly one's being remains, but in a different form, in a different resplendence, and in a different power. This is all the result of total detachment from self
..."

(Blessed Henry Suso (c. 13001366), Little Book of Truth)
 
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osgart

Nothing my eye, Something for sure
Perhaps we are apart of the absolute, and eternal unconditioned reality where time, space, matter, and energy no longer have objective existence. The platonic realm. The body is a veil that hides the ultimate reality.

So ultimate reality is the mental world; the world of infinite possibility and this reality is just one form and expression of that world. The mental world contains every mathematical and semantic possibility. A non living world of ideas that spawn life, and universes.

Maybe eternal beings exist in the mental world and have relationship to it, as we all do.

So like the mental world is full of concepts and ideas. And humanity is one expression of those ideas.
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?

Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?

What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?

What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?
I think the basic composition is always there in some form. I doubt things just poof in and out of existence. I surmise there's an aspect of the universe that's indestructible in terms of potential, making us in whatever the form happens to be, intrinsically ageless.
 

George-ananda

Advaita Vedanta, Theosophy, Spiritualism
Premium Member
For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?
(Coming from my Advaita (non-dual=God and Creation are not-two) pantheist perspective), My consciousness is a spark/ray of the one God/Source/Brahman consciousness that is real and ultimately outside our linear time concept.
Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?
Most of us are in the stage of growing through reincarnation experiences with an afterlife period between each to digest the lessons and experiences of the previous life.
What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?
The body will return to the natural elements. The mind exists on a higher plane of nature and does not expire when separated from the body at death. The mind continues on into the astral/mental planes of reality.
What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?
The human is composed of a physical body with interpenetrating etheric, astral, mental and causal bodies. At physical death you retain all but the physical body (the clunky overcoat).
 

Rival

Si m'ait Dieus
Staff member
Premium Member
Nor do you have to given how young you are...I never thought about it when I was your age.;)
I had an existential crisis over this when I was 18 and I never want it to happen again.

Wouldn't wish that on anyone, it was horrific.
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
Nor do you have to given how young you are...I never thought about it when I was your age.;)

I have thought about such things since I can remember...

...Of course at my age, I really don't remember much before this morning.​
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
For those of you who believe in some sort of eternal existence, how do you envision your existence outside the window that lies between birth and death of the body/mind complex?

Did you exist before you were born? If so, in what capacity?

What will you exist as after your body/mind expire?

What parts of you will you retain and what falls away?
I do not believe we existed before we were born, as I believe that human life begins at the time of conception.

I believe that after my body and mind expire my soul will pass to the spiritual world and take on a spiritual body.

I believe that the only part of us that falls away is the physical body. The soul which is connected to the mind while we are living in a physical body will continue to exist for eternity and have full consciousness.
 

SalixIncendium

अग्निविलोवनन्दः
Staff member
Premium Member
I do not believe we existed before we were born, as I believe that human life begins at the time of conception.

Of course human life begins at conception. I don't think there are many that believe differently.

What about your soul? Did that begin at conception as well?
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
I have thought about such things since I can remember...

...Of course at my age, I really don't remember much before this morning.​
I guess we are all different. I put off thinking about it much until I got older, but maybe that is because I have had a set belief about the afterlife since I was 17 years old so there was nothing to wonder about, but now I think more about it more because I am closer to the final curtain call.
 

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
Of course human life begins at conception. I don't think there are many that believe differently.

What about your soul? Did that begin at conception as well?
I believe that the soul comes into being at the time of conception and it is the soul that animates the body and gives it life.
I do not believe the soul existed before conception.
 
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