Dontaskme wrote:Greta wrote:
Really? If right this moment something happened that sliced off your arm you would be on the ground, screaming in pain and shock, and fearful of your life. I would still be sitting here, blissfully unaware of your situation. Therefore, you and I (and everyone else) are separate at a profound level. It's when reality becomes harsh that our rationalisations and notions are tested. Without duress, anyone can claim anything.
Also, your knowledge of someone else in pain is impossible if you yourself had not experienced it, when we aid others in distress, we are aiding ourself. If we were all separate and one person never experienced pain, they would have no idea of the others plight.
Yes, all animals know pain.
Nonetheless the point is that each of us has separate:
- circumstances
- relationships
- sensations
- emotions
- perceptions
- abilities
- limitations.
Billions of beings, all with their own sets of the above list, all accessing the information of others by second-hand means because they are separate.
It's funny to be debating such an obvious thing. It's like debating whether we are alive or not. Then again, you don't accept the reality of death either, which I suspect is at the crux of your fierce blocking out of all information that might destabilise your paradigm. I think your "all is oneness" line is about denying death as reality.
Generally when people have unusual or mystical beliefs the bottom line is a defence against an overwhelming fear of death. I do the same thing myself because the idea of dying and then being obliterated terrifies me, which of course is illogical given that we each crave obliteration every night. It's the loss, the waste of it all and and the pain left behind that's upsetting (for most).
Then again, continued existence, paying for the bad karma I've no doubt accumulated isn't a welcoming idea either. Meanwhile, the prospect of hanging around in Heaven with smug Christians desperately brown nosing The Boss is worse again!
So I have different kinds of "comforting ideas", like the possibility of everything being preserved at the Planck scale. Or that we might each be parts of larger groupings that live on after our individual passing, effectively playing the kind of roles in life you may have done had you been alive and well.
There are many reports from dying patients of going towards a welcoming light (some would say this is just what happens with dying brains as the mental visual field shrinks to a point and the brain is flooded with dopamine). It would seem that going into the light is the end of consciousness but, then again, plenty of dying people have claimed that their relatives came out of the light to greet them. Maybe just memories - or, speculatively, they might be preserved information on the Planck scale that's only accessible in the death state, with the light as a firewall or filter limiting access between realms. Of it might just be that we are blobs of water and carbon-based goo that simply snuff it after a while, which I suspect would be the popular pick on the forum. Whatever, accepting death appears to be one of the great and terrible challenges of life.