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Maybe spirituality is pointless, but it still led me to the point where I can sincerely face the future possibility of no consciousness or infinite consciousness. I say possibility because I don't know almost anything for sure. The only thing I know is that I'm conscious (I am consciousness) right now. But my question was about the future possibility to the end of consciousness, which is ultimately unknowable for me.

@Loba I'm sorry about your disease, thank you for sharing this. This makes the topic of death more tangible

I love everyone's mental karate to avoid the possibility of the end of consciousness. Please continue

The validity of past and future is off-topic, that's not what this thread is about. Why are you trying to convert this into you teaching me a lesson about your paradigm? The question is simple: do you accept the possibility that consciousness might disappear in the future? Or are you afraid of the atheist death? ?

I didn't expect an answer like this. Thank you!

@Vincent S I have experienced many levels of death. For a point of reference: I've taken almost half a gram of 5-meo in a year. I never said that I think consciousness will end after physical death. I'm saying that I simply don't know what will happen so I'm open to anything. When I say non-existence, I mean non-existence of consciousness. Are you implying that consciousness doesn't exist? Are you not aware right now? Yes, the question of the topic is about the future. Are you able to talk about the future or are you too spiritual for that? I know that the present is the only real thing. But practically speaking, the point of death will become a present moment for all of us at some point. And it's just an interesting topic, so I want to talk about this intead of just sitting in silence and meditating on it by myself.

@Vincent S your thoughts might feel like they represent a kind of existential understanding, but actually these are just beliefs about the things that you cannot know for sure. Do you really want to hang onto these beliefs? To clarify: my question is not whether you will be okay with non-existence after death. That question would be stupid because you won't be there to care. My question is: are you okay with the future possibility of non-existence right now?

Sure, you can believe that if you want to. But do you really want to hang onto that belief? Are you afraid to be open to the possibility that consciousness might stop to exist after death?

I think you misunderstood my question. What if you die and then you don't become anything ever again. No everythingness, no consciousness, nothing. God won't take another form, there won't be a God to merge with, simply because you won't continue to exist. Are you okay with that right now?

@Vincent S thanks for sharing this So if consciousness stopped at death, and you became literally nothing (not a conscious nothing but consciousness would also disappear), would you be okay with that right now?

If eternity is outside of the paradigm of time, that means that the eternal nature of consciousness doesn't say anything about what happens to consciousness after physical death. So what's your stance? Does consciousness continue after physical death?

If you call consciousness death then we can call everything by any word, and then we cannot have a discussion because we don't have a common vocabulary. Just answer honestly, without the no-self-paradigm, do you believe that consciousness continues after death? Or you simply don't care?

You can only know the present moment in which you are conscious. If you project this consciousness into the future, that's just imagination, which happens in the now.

@Oeaohoo you're completely missing the point in every paragraph I wrote. I'm not trying to convey ideas or beliefs about love. I'm trying to express the attitude of love. You already see that you can't progress anymore without letting go of your beliefs, don't you? But instead of letting go of your beliefs, you make up a whole case against progress itself. Your ego is thinking outside of the box. My deepest congratulations to it. I've never seen such a survivor before

How I see it is that western civilization is maximizing opportunities. And I agree that this is a very dangerous experiment. Because maximizing opportunities means maximizing the possibility of addiction, maximizing the possibility for comfort, maximizing the possibility to choose what to eat, what to read, what to believe, what to spend time with. We also maximize the possibility to annihilate 7 billion people with a push of a button, or by slowly poisoning the planet. But I still call this progress. The higher we go the faster we go and the bigger we can fall. It'll always be like this. But we're not doomed. You're very fascinated with the asshole of modern humanity where all the shit is. But if you zoom out a bit, you can see the brain and the heart of humanity as well. Look at it as a whole. Look at the energy sector, we're becoming more and more sustainable. Look at the food sector, there's more possibility than ever to eat vegetables instead of meat. More and more people realize that enslaving animals for their meat will be considered by future generations as brutal as enslaving people. There's a very progressive part of humanity that's becoming more and more loving, not just to humans, but to the whole planet. Our bubble of care is extended more than ever. The most important progress is the progress towards love. That's God's game. God forgot everything to become human, and to learn to love from scratch. And we're learning to love collectively as well. The more we learn the faster we learn, and this manifests itself as ever-accelerating progress all around us. Nothing is artificial around us. Humanity is part of nature, and tech is part of our nature. It's all just an ever-accelerating evolution of love. And I agree with you, that if we just look at the world from the perspective of progress then we tend to forget about decay and death. But counterintuitively, the more the individual progresses in the spiritual domain, the more he becomes friends with death. People, who are sincere with their spiritual practice, recognize the importance of letting go. They recognize the importance of taking psychedelics to explore death-like experiences. Death is not the opposite of spiritual progress, death is the accelerator of progress in this domain. You suggest that the integral model doesn't include the domain of decay and death. For that I recommend you to read for example The Religion of Tomorrow by Ken Wilber. It's a very detailed book, and it explains over and over again that spiritual progress is based on letting go of more and more of our identity. Every step on the ladder requires a deeper and deeper death of the self. Progress and death walk hand in hand on the spiritual path.

Every century has its own difficulties. Getting what you want out of it is a test of your intelligence. In my opinion, if you can't get what you want today, then you wouldn't be able to get that at any other time in history.

You can do so. You can choose any kind of life you want, that's the beauty of this century. You can be offline, off the grid, away from everything. You can live like a monk and no one will raid your village. But don't expect anyone to follow you. Enlightenment is not for the masses. Most people just want to explore happiness on their own terms.

Imagine that you're a carpenter a thousand years ago. Once you finish your work, it starts to decay. Imagine that you're a leatherman a thousand years ago. Once you finish your work, it starts to decay. Imagine that you're anyone a thousand years ago. How can you even think in terms of progress, if you don't have technologies, nothing really improves, and every work you make always decays? It was a different culture simply because it had different ways of living. A hundred years ago women were still not allowed to drive or vote. A few hundred years ago most rich men had slaves. That's how ethical their culture was. A thousand years ago people were carrying swords with them everywhere. That's how "safe" a city was. That's how "developed" the average person was. Imagine how would you look today at a person who's carrying a gun in Walmart. A thousand years ago that was everyday life. Why do you want to believe so badly that the ancients were such wise people?

If you disregard data then you have to disregard science as well, because science is based on data. If you disregard science, then what kind of a tool do you use to assess the current state of society? Is it based on just the opinion of a few wise men who lived hundreds of years ago? You're suggesting that the world (or the average person) has degraded in the aspects that you're mentioning. But please, prove it to me that it has really degraded in those aspects. I'm curious. If you can't prove it, then you have to be open to the possibility that it might not be true. And then I have a question for you: why do you choose to have a pessimistic worldview? Is it useful for you in any way? Do you feel superior to the rest of humanity? Or why do you choose to believe it?

Today's style of living isn't worse or more unethical than any time in the past. The wise people of ancient times were not any bit wiser than today's wisest people. Just look at the data: the average lifespan is longer than ever, famine is lower than ever, opportunities (even in the poorest parts of the world) are broader than ever. Today a child in poverty can learn to code, get a remote job and pull his whole family into the middle class. When has this been ever a possibility in the past? If your life is miserable then you'll think that the whole world is doomed. Get your life together, and you'll see a completely different world.

What is it exactly that you want to accept? If you were a flame, would you want to accept your shape, even though it changes in every split second? What makes sense, is to acknowledge where you are right now, find the direction in which you want to evolve, start going in that direction and love yourself unconditionally on the way. So the most important thing is that you don't have to accept your weaknesses. If you accept these, then the ego can identify with them, and then you won't grow them out. It also doesn't make sense to deny your weaknesses, because then you will never address them. You need to acknowledge your weaknesses so that you can heal them.

To answer your question from a more metaphysical perspective: "other" means "not I". To understand other, you have to include them into the I. But then they are not other anymore, they become I. So the nature of the other is that it's fundamentally unknowable for the I. I can know only I.

Because most humans (including you) chose to play the physical game. This means that your conscious experience is bound to physics, biology, and so on. You can't experience what other people experience because that's simply not how your brain works. I think this is only a transitory phase in human development. A few hundred years ago, before the telephone, lovers had to choose a star in the sky. At nights, when they were at separate locations, they could look up on the chosen star and try to get a glimpse of how the other one is feeling who's also looking at the same star. But after the telephone, we didn't need this kind of a telepathy anymore because we could call each other anytime to ask "Yo, how are you today?". So our relationships became very concept-based because we use mostly words to connect. The next chapter of human connections will start when most people will have brain implants and we can finally feel again other people's feelings. Right now your best way to feel into someone else's experience is simply to look at their face. Our brain is actually miraculously good at interpreting emotions from faces and reproducing them in ourselves.

You're confusing different things. A child has a magic/mythic worldview, they later become adults with a higher perspective that integrates the child's worldview. But integrating the child's worldview doesn't mean that the adult still believes in Santa Claus. So the adult reads the prophecies, appreciates the moral of the stories, and understands the type of worldview that created the stories and why they were necessary at that time of human development. And the adult understands that these stories convey relative truths, and relative truths quickly change because our way of living changes generation by generation and tech by tech.

I'm glad I could help