Pantheistic view on death?

[TMK18]

Hey guys, just wondering, in as much detail as possible, could you explain the pantheistic view of death and afterlife? Or at least, what your personal beliefs are.
I do have a point, but I want to make sure that I'm addressing the correct topic and that I understand it correctly!

 

[Storm]

I'm a panentheist. Close enough?

 

[TMK18]

Ha, possibly. Either way, I'm still interested. So then: yes!

 

[Storm]

OK.

First, like pantheism, panentheism is a theological model like theism, not a religion like Christianity. IOW, it's a basic idea that people are free to run with, so there's a lot of answers to your question, and none of them carry any authority over the others.

Now, one popular model of panentheism is that the universe as we know it is God's literal body. This is my foundation, but then I get really weird. I believe that God is a juvenile, and reality as we know it is the process of God growing up. The purpose of life is for the "soul" to gain wisdom. We live, we learn, we die, we go on to new lives and lessons. So, the short version is that I believe in reincarnation.

 

[no-body]

Only the ego and body die. There is no true death as such, the ever present life force (God) simply exists continually and just is.

 

[TMK18]

Ah, very interesting. I've never heard it put like that.
So my question is, and I'm not sure if this applies to you or not, what qualifies as death? According to most pantheists, if I understand correctly, when we die, we come back in a new life as any object, animate or inanimate. However, if we are all God, how can we die? And if God is a part of every molecule in this world, how can we die? If I come back as a rock, when would I ever die? Even after I'm turned to dust, my molecules are still present, and nothing has changed. I am still the same rock I was, only in many different pieces.
I'm not sure if this is applicable to you or to most pantheists, but I know it applies to some, and it's just a thought I had the other day.

 

[Storm]

Ah, very interesting. I've never heard it put like that.
So my question is, and I'm not sure if this applies to you or not, what qualifies as death? According to most pantheists, if I understand correctly, when we die, we come back in a new life as any object, animate or inanimate. However, if we are all God, how can we die? And if God is a part of every molecule in this world, how can we die? If I come back as a rock, when would I ever die? Even after I'm turned to dust, my molecules are still present, and nothing has changed. I am still the same rock I was, only in many different pieces.
I'm not sure if this is applicable to you or to most pantheists, but I know it applies to some, and it's just a thought I had the other day.

It's applicable to all pan(en)theists I've known. I'm pretty weird, but most look at death as simply returning to the source. SO I would say that nothing really dies to the average pantheist.

It's kinda the spiritual equivalent of really getting how deeply a part of the universe your body is. Whether there's an afterlife or not, the molecules of your flesh were born in the hearts of stars, and will nourish and express life long after you've stopped using them.

It's pretty cool, at least to me.

 

[Twig pentagram]

I don't know what the after life has in store for us. We could return to the source or we could just be on a constant path of death and rebirth. One thing we know for sure is that we will all know one day.

 

[no-body]

Ah, very interesting. I've never heard it put like that.
So my question is, and I'm not sure if this applies to you or not, what qualifies as death? According to most pantheists, if I understand correctly, when we die, we come back in a new life as any object, animate or inanimate. However, if we are all God, how can we die? And if God is a part of every molecule in this world, how can we die? If I come back as a rock, when would I ever die? Even after I'm turned to dust, my molecules are still present, and nothing has changed. I am still the same rock I was, only in many different pieces.
I'm not sure if this is applicable to you or to most pantheists, but I know it applies to some, and it's just a thought I had the other day.

We are all God experiencing itself subjectively, as such reality has certain rules of decay and renewal that must be followed. God is fine with this.

When I say that death is an illusion I mean that the "I/ME" statement is not true. Your individual consciousness will probably not survive.

There might or not be some sort of spirit realm, but that too is just God experiencing itself.

 

[TMK18]

Well, I'm officially confused, but thanks for the input.
I was just curious.
It just doesn't make sense to me how reincarnation works in a pantheistic worldview. How are we able to reincarnate if our molecules are still present in this world?

 

[Twig pentagram]

Well, I'm officially confused, but thanks for the input.
I was just curious.
It just doesn't make sense to me how reincarnation works in a pantheistic worldview. How are we able to reincarnate if our molecules are still present in this world?

We could be more than just our molecules, but who knows. The one thing I do know is that the universe is filled with mystery.

 

[St Giordano Bruno]

Below is mine, I wish I could express it a little more eloquently but in a nutshell I believe the self is necessary rather than contingent I shall explain:

I don't believe there is any supernatural force beyond nature and it is only nature and nothing external that created us.

I take up issue with those believers you can only live one possible life on this earth due to issues with the perception of time, because it is only through consciousness we gain any perception of time. So if you never exist for an eternity then you have no perception of time for that eternity then even time itself would come to an end so to speak. But IMO I think that would be paradoxical, because time should never end wouldn't it? Like with my own research into cosmology it became abundantly clear the universe had been around for at least 13.7 billion years or time before I was born, but I was not aware of one nanosecond of it. I could not find a more graphic example of how much consciousness matters in the very nature of time.

But I have a theory that can circumvent that paradox, and that is that we simply MUST exist in one certain spacio-temporal location of the universe. So when one dies the sense of self not entirely obliterated but instead just becomes very much reduced - reduced to a single unifying principle at a phase the universe reached a critical level of complexity to permit consciousness to happen, just as it needed to reach a critical level of complexity for metallicity to happen, so momentarily you are one with a collective principle such as a collective ensemble of foetal brains obeying genetic information of until a person or some other conscious living thing is consciously actualized for you. This could also be a good explanation as to why we exist as this person in spite of the vanishingly slim odds, just simply because it is not possible to be aware of any of the failed attempts to exist.
If this process keeps you, you may eventually personally experience the life of every person that has lived and ever will live and even other intelligent animals, because consciousness is so fundamentally necessary for any perception of time.


This is also a theory consistent with a Weak Anthropic Principle which posits that it is only through intelligent beings you gain any sense of time and time has any subjective reality. In other words the universe only appears fined tuned for our existence and does not mean it has to be fine tuned any more any planet has to be fine tuned like our earth is, and as well we know most planets are anything but. It also means there need to be only one self in the universe in keeping the principle of Ockham’s Razor instead of the clumsy assumption that there are billions of individual “souls” that have all been created uniquely inside individual brains. Instead you just collectively exist as being at one with the human Brain as a pattern of biological design first then you are randomly selected as the person you are. The reason why you will never be aware of any conscious existence in the young universe is because there would be no carbon based life forms to make you an observer and the reason why you will never know of what conditions feel like in a dying black dominated universe is that is too full of entropy and disorder. So you we be forever locked in the time frame of a 13.7 billion year old universe as you switch backwards and forward through physical time.

That is my theory, just a theory and I treat it only as a theory but I must stress, you do not have to believe it, it just happens to be the theory I find most plausible. One thing I feel more sure of, whatever happens after one dies one's religion or religious conversion will not make any difference to you whatsoever.

 

[St Giordano Bruno]

I don't know what the after life has in store for us. We could return to the source or we could just be on a constant path of death and rebirth. One thing we know for sure is that we will all know one day.

Similar to me, I have just come closer to the conclusion we MUST exist out of anthropic necessity as it is not possible to be aware of exponentially greater number of ways of not existing. Like the mind of Schrödinger’s Cat. The cat will never know he is dead only the states of existence

 

[brbubba]

Well, I'm officially confused, but thanks for the input.
I was just curious.
It just doesn't make sense to me how reincarnation works in a pantheistic worldview. How are we able to reincarnate if our molecules are still present in this world?

Energy could lend part of the explanation. But asking this question is pretty futile due to the extremely vast range of pantheist viewpoints.

 

[St Giordano Bruno]

Well, I'm officially confused, but thanks for the input.
I was just curious.
It just doesn't make sense to me how reincarnation works in a pantheistic worldview. How are we able to reincarnate if our molecules are still present in this world?

I am more of the view we do not "own" our molecules. It is just the way they are configured that makes us the person we are. Because if our existence was contingent of the assembly of specific molecules in the universe then that chances of us existing in the first place would be exponentially improbable.