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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (29981)	6/25/1999 8:38:00 PM
From: Gauguin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

"Heaven" isn't boring?: Suppose this universe is something for god to do, as you said. E.g., Mirdad's "Wheel of Time." He illustrates it like a ring, with people/stuff injected anywhere and everywhere. All over this visible universe and well beyond. Time merely being a feature that is completely nonprogressive, even though it appears so. Actually, that's a lil different point, but the same. Anyway, the thing about boring is, when you step to the center of the wheel of time, or "go to heaven" or yadda, it isn't boring. That's a thing we're maybe assuming (duh). It's a natural assumption. Mine too. Really. But as explained to me, that concept is incredibly naive. (I admit sharing it. I've written that several times. How can a heaven be appealing to all the different culturats on a zillion earths? Or even one?) But it's a limited human worry, so they say, because it's nothing like that. It's literally never boring, and operates on principles so different from ours that the concepts don't apply. Sort of "wrong question." And again, these worries are apparently quasi-universal, and that's why most Indian philosophy (I'm aware of) addresses them. It will be perpetually satisfying; the newness of satisfaction never decreases, it is ever fresh. Now how is this possible? Don't ask me; I'm one of us. But it's what they consistently say. So I try to enlarge myself to it. It's a very peculiar thing to "imagine". We cannot enjoy things constantly. It's not wired in us. We tire of everything. But suppose what they're saying is true. It's said consistently, so it behooves to suppose; to contemplate. Just postulate it, and we see how peculiar it is. Yah, it is. But it doesn't mean it isn't accurate and beyond us. We assume we are able to see everything that can be explained to us, experienced by anyone, anywhere, if someone just does it right. What if we're really stupid and inadequate for the task? They might say ever-fresh because there is no time. ("Well, then it's going to be all the same; ever the same. A miserable Ground Hog moment." "No. It's nothing like that.") They may say "Not this, not this, not this." (What the hell?) It's a capacity problem. They say. Ours. I assume I can generalize with "they", because how else can you do it. They say, it's a gas, without a doubt, and you would never rather be here.

To: Ilaine who wrote (29981)	6/25/1999 10:58:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Re: The Cosmic Ferris Wheel Interesting notion. Very. Now, if I personally were in a store, trying to decide which Afterlife to buy, I wouldn't pick this one, because it lacks three basic features I would insist on having in an Afterlife: 1) Justice, understood as fairness. (Legacy of a Catholic girlhood.) That old business of Judgment Day, when God divides the sheep from the goats, etc., won't do, so we go for Universal Memorialization. 2) No Memory. That, in my mind, is the corollary of Justice: everybody gets remembered, and becomes part of the remembering. We will eventually know everything, but serieally, and forget it again. Unh, unh... 3) Some sort of teleological sense (another legacy of a Catholic girlhood). Like the evolution of a cosmic consciousness, or something along those lines, rather than the idle play of a bored Creator. BUT....the Cosmic Ferris Wheel may be much closer to the "real thing" than my artificial construct. And aesthetically, if not morally, it may even be preferable to mine. Have you thought of some possible permutations of this theory? For instance, the idea of The Cosmic Man. Normally, to say we are all part of a Cosmic Man -- in the way that our little white blood corpuscles rushing to work in the morning are part of Us -- makes no logical sense, if most of the universe is inanimate. But if you consider everything in the universe not just animate, but conscious as well, then it makes perfect sense. So, if all this is going on in the body of Cosmic Man, then what kind of man is he? Is he a nasty man? Is he a nice man? Is he an ordinary, so-so man? Does he take good care of his health (us), or is he a self-abuser? Is he the only one of his kind, or are there a lot of other Cosmic Men walking around out there? Is there a different God for each Cosmic Man/Universe -- as, I gather, the Mormons say? And what is The Point of It All? What fun, snuffling at the traces of all these possibilities...<g> Joan