After Death... comes what?

[lordcloudx]

I posted this same reply in a different forum, but I can't help posting it here where I believe the members would give more thought-provoking responses... if this isn't too off-topic. Besides, we might be able to incorporate any ideas gathered here into future VNs no?

I believe in an after-life in a way. But although, it may sound contradictory, I believe this after-life is something intangible and doesn't really manifest itself in any form. Death is just a transition (which If I'm not mistaken is also it's meaning in some old languages). A process of change from one type of consciousness to another. Not exactly reincarnation, but just a shift of the self to another field of existence.

Of course, the self that I'm talking about isn't the acquired personality with the memories and experiences that we have in this life, but the part of us that recognizes individuality and distinguishes our consciousness from others. So I believe that the only time we are truly dead is when our self becomes disoriented and loses the ability to be distinct from the consciousness of others. Isn't it strange that none of us ever remembers when our actual personalities began? When we started the memories and experiences that we would cherish in our lifetimes?

So I guess, you can also say that when we are dreaming and sometimes the dream shows us lots of different scenes, but we don't seem to be looking at the scenes from any kind of perspective, we are dead in a way for those brief moments when we can't recognize the existence of our own consciousness.

After all, I've always found it strange that only we, (the individual) can be in our own consciousness (I'm not sure if that's really the appropriate term) at all times and not anyone or anything else. Science doesn't even have an explanation for the existence of this consciousness that allows us to be inside only ourselves.

Thus, I can't believe that this consciousness would just disappear after death and then what? The self wouldn't even see black? or white? or experience anything else for that matter? Would this be what we call perfect freedom? One with no restraints from our bodies, no physical, moral, divine or man-made laws.

I guess if you're religious, this self or consciousness as I like to call it would be the soul, and the unfathomable source of this consciousness would be called God. But you can call it whatever you like, the fact is, this "self" does exist and to deny it would be to deny that we even exist.

Well... don't dwell too deeply on it though. Just a little food for thought.
Incidentally, Rene Descartes' famous line might just be contemplating the self that
I'm talking about.

"I think therefore I am."

Kinda applicable to what I've said, but I believe that we can exist even without the ability to think. It happens in some types of dreams. Even though our brain is formulating the mental image for us, we're sometimes just watching it from not even a 3d perspective but from a perspective that we can't even describe or paint or digitally render, and during these times we're not really thinking or we've lost the ability to think of stuff like: I am myself, I'm a computer scientist, I have to get to work by 9, I'm short on cash this week etc. etc. but we are still conscious of being distinct from the image being shown to us, that we are existing and that flying car that's turing into an urban cityscape in our dreams is also existing differently from us.

[yummy]

Strange. When I began reading your post I thought about a proverb from Confucius:

We have not yet learned to know life. How can we know death?

[mikey]

I posted this same reply in a different forum, but I can't help posting it here where I believe the members would give more thought-provoking responses... if this isn't too off-topic. Besides, we might be able to incorporate any ideas gathered here into future VNs no?

Secretary Of Death
- death is the meaning of life
- nothing that people do matters at all
It has to be said that this isn't a philosophy, it's not religion or emotion or explanations. It's the truth. (append "in the world of SoD", if you want)

Ori, Ochi, Onoe.
- the deeper the thoughts, the less love in them

[Glasskitten]

Religion makes these deep philosophical questions much simpler...

...except for those religions that are based on the meditation of unsolvable enigmas...


In any case, I kind of like your analysis of how we are aware of our own consciousness. Yay, consciousness!

[DaFool]

Ori, Ochi, Onoe.
- the deeper the thoughts, the less love in them

Hmmm. Is it because being more rational leaves less to the heart? I would want to fully agree, if it weren't for some rare media I've encountered that expressed 'mental love' and 'mental sadness and loss'. Like Mushishi...some people who like sappy stories couldn't get into it, then I realized when I got so deep into it that it wasn't my heartstrings that were being pulled, it was my brainstrings. But the bittersweet feeling is almost the same...it was longing, it was crying, it was cherishing.

I recommend Mushishi for learning about life and love, about meaning and purpose. The fact that it also explores different psychological states of consciousness fits in with this theme.

[lordcloudx]

- the deeper the thoughts, the less love in them

Maybe I'd understand this better after playing through Ori, Ochi, Onoe. I've got a huge backlog of VN's to play through including insani's latest releases because of a certain policy of mine I pointed out some time ago.

Could you be talking about something like if we knew all the thoughts of every person we meet, we'd be too afraid to love because we know not only just how much that person loves us but also that person's slightest feelings of animosity towards us. Like in the first episode of Kino's Journey.

[mikey]

Well, the O3 thought isn't complicated.

When Yoshiyuki was alone, he looked for complexity, depth and meaning. But when he found Ori, he was able to appreciate simplicity. Because beauty and happiness are simple. So in other words, loneliness, sadness and similar things seemed to be deep and meaningful to him, because he could dwell in their complexities forever. But once with Ori, simple things (like say a blue flower) didn't have to have a meaning to be appreciated.
Note however, that none of this is in the game, it's just the basis for Yoshiyuki's thoughts in one of the game's sequences - this is basically his way of thinking in that sequence. And the thought is as simple as it sounds, so making some philosophical conclusions would just be playing around with words.

SoD is also simple in this respect. But people don't like simplicity when it comes to the meaning of life and the purpose of existence. So of course, a one-sentence statement will probably never be accepted.

[tyciol]

I think it's likely that there's nothing. While I do really like ideas about consciousness being something besides the brain tissues, I'd rather not risk it. That's why I plan to try to live forever, or as long as feasible.