Life, Death, and Resurrection

[ehbowen]

This has been bouncing around in the back of my head since the "Torn Between Religions" thread came out; I believe it's the last major point Solstice2989 brought up that I have yet to address. But I thought that the subject was worthy of a thread of its own.

So, what is life? What is death? Could it be like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of obscenity, "I know it when I see it!"? I think that we're all consciously or unconsciously engaged with the question, after all. Why could the psalmist confidently state, "A thousand may fall at your side, And ten thousand at your right hand; But it shall not come near you" when that seems so at odds with our life experiences? What's going on here?

I come at this question with the idea that the "timelines" theory I've been developing for nearly two decades is in fact a valid model for conceptualizing the larger universe. I'm not saying that it's the final or finished model...the physicists still don't have a complete picture of the atom (and specifically the subatomic "zoo") yet...but I think that it's a decent stepping stone, at least. As a quick recap, I believe that "alternate realities" exist, that there is an ongoing conflict between parties which I identify as "God" (of the Bible) and "Satan" in which all of us are caught up in, like it or not (I'm sure many Pacific islanders never asked to be caught up in WWII), and that the strategy of last resort once backed into a corner is for one or the other of these belligerents to desperately generate alternate realities, over and over and over, reaching back through time in an attempt to find even one person, one event, which will open up a pathway of escape.

Orthodox Christian Theology recognizes three aspects of existence or life: The Spirit, the Body, and the Soul. I'm going to tackle these in reverse order.

The Soul: In my way of thinking, that's you. The real, core you who receives and process input and makes decisions in the here and now.

The Body: Is the way in which souls communicate and relate with other souls. It is actually an "echo" of our consciousness and our soul popping from one to another to another of those myriads of timelines...billions upon billions of such echoes, in fact. You see, with possible rare exceptions (such as, IMHO, those octogenarians who are faithfully married for sixty-plus years and then pass away within days or even hours of each other), souls do not communicate with souls. While my soul is composing these words, what you're seeing is keystrokes translated to bytes of memory translated to a data stream translated to graphics on your monitor which your eyes and brain are translating back to your own soul as words. While I trust (I hope!) that you're receiving them accurately, there's lots of opportunity there for a powerful enemy...whether spiritual or the NSA...to mess with the content. Even when you're in the same room...heck, even the same bed...with someone else, you're still hearing sound waves, not thoughts, and feeling interactions of atomic particles with other atomic particles, not beings.

The Spirit: I see this as our connection, direct or indirect, with the Divine. The orthodox Christian view is that Adam and Eve died spiritually in the Garden of Eden and had to be redeemed and mankind saved. That's actually a pretty good picture, IMHO. God thought he was dealing with Adam and Eve's souls but, through sin, the enemy was able to wedge in and insert a counterfeit. God wasn't seeing the true Adam & Eve, and they weren't seeing the true God...at the time. What we have is the two sides reaching out through sacrifice, prayer, and ritual trying to keep as close to that echo as possible...until there was a rip, contact was lost, and a reset became necessary. The Good News is that the reset eventually succeeded and true contact was re-established...at first with just a few, and humans only. A Christian who is "born again" has made that true contact with the divine; it means that God sees the way, however long it might take, to bring that soul home. That would be "direct" contact in the near term; a century to a millennium or so. My own thinking now is that, as the time scale has expanded from millennia into eons and beyond and as other intermediaries have been identified, it either has been or will be possible to broaden that contact to include every being, human or not, in the past, present, and future.

So, how do these aspects interact? (Again, this is In My Opinion.) Well, if my concept is correct, there are billions of echoes of your consciousness in each alternate reality. Actually, "billions" is too small a word; for the major branches such as the one you're reading this in right now I believe that "googolplexes" is too small a word. A googolplex, as a reminder, is a number so huge that it's impossible to write down; even if you were to use fine print it would take more blank sheets of paper than there are atoms in the known universe. That's how many dimensions and alternate realities that there are to get lost in. You're in one of them. So, your body is the mechanism which amplifies your soul so that it can touch enough of those alternate realities and dimensions so that you can, fairly reliably, communicate and interact with other souls.

One of the key ideas behind my theory is that personalities can be following many branches at a time, but that personalities do not "split". There is not "another you" in that other timeline; it is the same you living out an alternate set of circumstances. Now, if a branch separates the aspects of your personality by more than you can bear, you yourself choose which branch that you will follow. I think that this is happening all the time, especially as we sleep; many of the dreams that we awake from are in fact timelines which we have chosen to abandon either temporarily or permanently. But if you like the alternative of the dream more than the (eventual) outcome in this world, then...people die in their sleep in this world all the time.

As an example: I believe that there is, or at least there will be, a sequence of events in which, on the evening of June 18, 1994, Jessica told me, "Yes, I'll have dinner with you." And that I got the full name she was using then, her mailing address, possibly even her phone number, and that a courtship ensued. And I think that those events are proceeding in parallel with these, because they're compatible. So one of the big temptations I face, regularly, is "Oh don't you wish this had happened instead..." But, you see, for my core being to jump from this sequence of events to that one would mean that I give up and lose contact with this one...and, consequently, miss out on everything good which God is preparing for me in this here and now. And perhaps for you as well. You see, I think that if my soul had continued on that track, I would never have found The Cauldron. Oh, I might have found an echo of it, but I believe that in the here and now of this reality my core identity is a great deal closer to the core identity of most of you now reading these words.

So physical death, then, comes about when a personality is strained beyond what it can endure and loses contact with this reality...IMHO. That strain can take many forms, including physical ailments which make it impossible to maintain continued contact (Alzheimers, IMO, comes about because someone is very slowly, step by step, leaving this reality for another; the echo which we see of them in this world is a very real part of their larger personality and is important to keep contact with because eventually it may help him, or some higher being working with him, to find YOU; remember the googolplexes!) or actions of others, deliberate (murder) or accidental, which do the same. Once the echoes which make up your body lose contact with your soul which provides the motivation for that body, there is nothing left to echo except the you of the past...which becomes more and more distant and degraded, like a Xerox copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a....

Christian theology also speaks of a "second death". I mentioned that I believe that physical death comes about due to personalities being strained beyond what they can bear; where does that strain come from? I believe that, ultimately, it comes from Satan. "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy." (John 10:10a) And I don't believe that the stress and strain end after physical death. Oh, it may ease up if he sees you as a favorite...for that matter it can ease up in this world as well; how many of the 1% outsourcing their work to slave labor and environmental abandon are thoroughly disgusting people from a moral standpoint? But when Satan is done with you as a plaything or if you start to develop into a threat, the gloves come back off. I believe that Satan's goal in this multibranched structure of reality is first to get you isolated from every other individual, human or divine. Oh, they may still see an echo of you and you may still see an echo of them, but there is a gap there where he can "wedge in". Then, he springs the trap and pours on the pressure...which may take the form of "classical hell" fire but also loneliness, frustration, fear; fill in the blanks...until you despair of ever regaining contact with another soul and give up. It's essentially spiritual suicide. Once you give up on reaching out to another soul, you have zero hope...unless someone, someday, can follow the links which lead through the maze to you and rescue you.

So I see Satan as analogous to a kid with a piece of bubble wrap. First he identifies and isolates you; then he squeezes you until you pop. Those who fight back hardest are merely a more interesting challenge. On the other hand, though, I believe that my God is working through the eons in order to find and to follow those links to every lost soul. The work is going on quietly, and a lot of you may doubt that he's even there. But, once every single link is found and Satan's essential core being is identified, it will be time to hoist him with his own petard. It will be possible to converge every single one of those myriads of timelines and restore every individual, and every individual's body...the Resurrection. You won't lose any of those alternate realities, any more than I will lose the one in which I courted Jessica beginning twenty-three years ago; you will see them all at once. The more which exist for you, the larger the person you will grow to be. And it will be Satan who finds himself completely isolated and alone. I don't believe, in Final Reality, that he will experience "hell fire"...been there, done that. At the time (several thousand years ago), my God didn't fully appreciate that he was dealing with the original sado-masochist. But I think that Satan will respond to being utterly isolated and powerless. If given the choice between truly solitary confinement for the rest of eternity, or submitting to ultimate judgment and re-entering the general prison population with a finite, albeit very long, sentence, I honestly think he will choose the latter.

I hope.