Part 2
This is part two of three parts. Part 1 dealt with the science of things in the makeup of the material world. This Part 2deals with the spiritual dimension active in the material world. As in Part 1 is deep and I hope not too confusing. It is my key to surviving the onslaught of AD.
The confusion in it all makes sense if you choose to believe in accordance with your religion that there is life after death. That is the key. If there is life after death, what is it; where is it; what’s it all about?
Is this after life the great soda fountain in the sky? Is it one or fifty virgins waiting to greet you, and for what are they greeting you? Certainly it is not to join them in saying the rosary or attending a novena!
So many differing views exist of after life, none of which make sense if seen as a spiritual dimension and not a material dimension. The soda fountain or the fleeting virgins are something we can only envision in a material makeup.
I suspect most theologians would consider an afterlife to be a mystical dimension spiritual in its makeup.
If there is this spiritual, mystical, afterlife where is it? How long does it last? What do we do in it? Although I ask this question redundantly it merits repeat. These are all questions asked if afterlife is of material consequence. They have no application if asked of something that is spiritual, not of this material world. It is about this that insight of what it might be comes to a screaming halt.
If we accept an afterlife, why not accept before life? Do we as a person, as a soul, as a being, spontaneously generate when conceived, at some time in natal development, or upon birth? Were we nothing before, all permanent GetGo after?
Thinking in this range, the concepts of Buddhism offer some help. Buddhism sees all of the material world as illusory much as quantum science sees it. It isn’t what it appears to be, it just looks like it. It is all illusion, purposeful illusion, mutually the same for all of us to the extent that we are cosmologically separated from one another.
The appearance of what is with us immersed in it has the purpose of giving us experience while wholly being part of this material life. It offers a variety of purposes primary among them acquiring knowledge and discernment as we deal with the events given us in life to deal with.
The product of it is found in the solution that we reach dealing with the events presented us in life. The solution is based on what we do with it rather than what we have of it. We can’t acquire a solution. We can acquire the results accrued by reaching a solution.
Anything we encounter or which we evoke in this dimension offers us the opportunity to derive something more from it. That which we derive is spiritual in kind and in no way material. It is the only absolute we can take from here when we die. It is included in the measure of how well we did while we were here.
A Buddhist believes he/she lives many incarnations in this life charged with the same absolute directive. Use the time and events well, love one another and do for one another. That is it in its simplest form.
The most I can glean out of this is we are given the opportunity to travel an ascending path while incarnating in this dimension. Where it takes us may be answerable but I do not have that answer. What I do have is the sense of what it is. It comes to us as an improvement over what we were before we encountered that which was outside of us.
The best I have is an existential appreciation of it. Living this life affords us instances wherein we experience something more than what is available to us in our finite state. What it is, where it comes from, is it real, are all questions for which there is no answer. The only observation I can give it is this something more can be acquired, I can make it part of me. Its nature is not material. Its quality is ethereal in contrast to material. It is transcendent and becomes available to me as I encounter an object or being and evoke with it that essence of it in the encounter.
To describe it is impossible. To experience it and have the benefit of it remain after the encounter is validation. It comes when we educe or extract something more than the world and able to be acquired as we encounter it.
Examples the philosophers describe range from a sense of wholeness gained while in nature, the joining with the composer as we listen to a beautiful composition of music, the sense of some higher power coming out of the mix of: needing help, asking for help, and receiving help as a result.
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