You just are, a point of awareness, coextensive with time and space, deathless.
This feels like a sleight of hand. I am a part of a universe, with somewhat arbitrary boundaries. The universe is deathless (if we ignore the possible heat death for a moment). I am definitely not.
I might be deathless in the sense that some parts that I might choose to include in my boundary will continue to exist after my brain stops working. Though they will no longer be under the active control of my brain. And even the effects that persist for some moment after my death—trivial example: I put a bottle on the table, then I die; the bottle still stands on the table; more complex example: people keep remembering me, my children keep doing what I taught them, people in future can find my blog articles and learn from them—will gradually dissolve in noise.
Unless I choose to include the noise itself in my definition of self. But that’s a kind of “you can eat chocolate, as long as you agree to call your broccoli ‘chocolate’.”
I suppose the religions do it by believing that there is some divine power that drives the noise; that instead of simply increasing entropy, it is some kind of funny game played by Brahma, and as long as you include Brahma in your extended self, you can keep having fun literally forever. From my perspective, noise is just noise, and mystical insights that suggest something different are likely to simply be factually wrong.
So I still haven’t really figured out how to talk about these things properly as it is more of a vibe than it is an intellectual truth?
Let’s say that you don’t feel a strong sense of self but that you’re instead identified with nothing, there is no self, if you see this then you can see the “deathless”.
It’s pointing out a different metaphysical viewpoint that can be experienced. I agree with you that from a rational point of view this is strictly not true yet it isn’t to be understood, it is to be experienced? You can’t or at least I can’t think my way to it.
This feels like a sleight of hand. I am a part of a universe, with somewhat arbitrary boundaries. The universe is deathless (if we ignore the possible heat death for a moment). I am definitely not.
I might be deathless in the sense that some parts that I might choose to include in my boundary will continue to exist after my brain stops working. Though they will no longer be under the active control of my brain. And even the effects that persist for some moment after my death—trivial example: I put a bottle on the table, then I die; the bottle still stands on the table; more complex example: people keep remembering me, my children keep doing what I taught them, people in future can find my blog articles and learn from them—will gradually dissolve in noise.
Unless I choose to include the noise itself in my definition of self. But that’s a kind of “you can eat chocolate, as long as you agree to call your broccoli ‘chocolate’.”
I suppose the religions do it by believing that there is some divine power that drives the noise; that instead of simply increasing entropy, it is some kind of funny game played by Brahma, and as long as you include Brahma in your extended self, you can keep having fun literally forever. From my perspective, noise is just noise, and mystical insights that suggest something different are likely to simply be factually wrong.
So I still haven’t really figured out how to talk about these things properly as it is more of a vibe than it is an intellectual truth?
Let’s say that you don’t feel a strong sense of self but that you’re instead identified with nothing, there is no self, if you see this then you can see the “deathless”.
It’s pointing out a different metaphysical viewpoint that can be experienced. I agree with you that from a rational point of view this is strictly not true yet it isn’t to be understood, it is to be experienced? You can’t or at least I can’t think my way to it.