Are we all ONE person in the after-life?

Great Debates
1

Is it possible that all of us humans are ONE person? Put together, we are all one person. When we die our consciousness will come together to become one. Could it be that there is no God watching over us? We are part of that God and will become that God when we all die.

Knowing that God created human in his own image, if we were to cross the face of every human in the world, what would the face look like? God? Since God created men equal, it would make sense since that we are God if we combined. So, only our consciouness when come together in the after-life. God is the higher-being with limitless and complex consciousness (e.g. one eye see all). Since humans have limited consciousness combined, our consciousness would become powerful.

It seems reasonable since assuming that everyone getting to heaven will make it crowded soon, there is actually one person in heaven.

Just a theory.

2

This is not completely dissimilar to some Eastern ideas that the soul (atman) is identical with God (Brahman). Essentially, all living things are just God in disguise. It’s a non-dualistic paradigm vis-a-vis God and man, and it implies at least an eventual singularity with regards to individual souls. A good anlogy is that of individual drops of water being absorbed back into an ocean. I don’t know if this is what you were looking for, but it’s one construct that’s out there.

3

The metaphor that I use is –
*
God is a voracious reader in a library. You are a book. When God gets to the end of the book, God selects another book. *

Alan Watts comes right out and says that the big secret is that you are God in disguise. (And that separation is an illusion. Not that discrete individuals do not exist, but that they exist only and also as a whole, in the same way that a piece of music consists of separate notes and yet doesn’t; it consists of the whole composition, yet you cannot have a composition except that it be composed of something and that something is individual notes).

So, yeah. Such is my spiritual belief, and you’ve said it well yourself. Does it ring true for you too or are you just surmising?

4

What makes you think there’s an afterlife?

5

It doesn’t have to be an afterlife. It is true for the regular ordinary during-life.

Everyone is you having a different set of experiences.

6

Offered in the interest of advancing discussion, from a letter of October 21, 1960, by author Robert A. Heinlein to his agent Lurton Blasingame, in discussing why a publisher’s proposed cuts to Stranger in a Strange Land would not work:

7

Every living thing has a soul. All souls existence both within space-time and without space-time in a place of ultimate love that we call Heaven. God is the sum of all of these soul consciousnesses in Heaven.

Something to smoke with…:wink:

8

for a different, if wierd, version check:

THE ULTIMATE FRONTIER by Eklal Kueshana

it claims the system works on reincarnation. if an individual becomes a master by the end of the universe he gets promoted to angel. all of the angels get promoted to archangel. the archangels become one with god. so in the LONG RUN what you are saying would be correct. if Kueshana isn’t talking BS of course.

Dal Timgar

9

Extrovertive you may be interested in reading Emanuel Swedenborg’s book Heaven and Hell published in 1758. In it he describes heaven as one “Grand Man” made up of all our souls.

10

The theory you put forward has its precursors. It sounds quite a lot like neo-Platonism and its ilk: especially in the form espoused by Plotinus, Meister Eckhart and (with a few caveats) Spinoza.

(I’m doing this off the top of my head, there may be slight mistakes in terminology)

Plotinus’ theory is that the world ‘emanates’ (do not ask me how) from the One. I recall the reason being that it was ‘overflowing’. All perceivable reality is in fact an illusion that we have to get past to return to our one true nature, that is being part of the One. Now if we say One=God, this theory is quite like yours.

Meister Eckhart did in fact make the latter equation. In our mortal life we are lost from God. We have to strive for knowledge of our true selves which will bring us closer to God, until we realize that we are God. (this latter bit brought the Meister quite close to the bonfire) You may remember the characteristic Eckhart-quote in Jacob’s Ladder: we’re afraid of devils, but when we give up our resistance we may in fact find out that they are angels, helping us. Meaning that we should not hold on to our mortal coil but become enlightened.

Spinoza had a more rationalistic, dualistic and Pantheistic theory, in which we all strive for more power=knowledge. Our physical world is the mirror-image of the mental world. By (mentally) knowing more we are becoming more powerful in the physical world, but since knowing amounts to mentally integrating other parts of (mental) reality, knowing all would amount to being everything and being omnipotent en omniscient: it would be the same as being God=All.

Sorry if these theories may sound strange or even idiotic, that’s due to the abbreviated presentation. In fact they are quite close to (as was remarked bij Diogenes the Cynic, the poster, not the actual philosopher) Eastern religions like Buddhism.

In all these theories there is, however, one feature that answers your original question. Although we are ultimately aspects of One Being, we can only realize that by leaving behind our limiting physical existence. The whole ‘image of God’ thing is specifically Christian and should probably not be taken too literal. The nice thing about the aforementioned theories is that they manage to solve quite a number of the problems you pointed out (heaven getting full etcetera). The problem for most ‘common’ believers is that this version of heaven is quite remote from the rewards they in their ignorance expect to receive for their toils.

Hope this helps.

11

Im glad that this this thread caught my eye!!!

I share this same belief of spirituality that we are all “god”. I was raised as a catholic, went to catholic school, went to church and all that stuff. Then i got older and i noticed that there were just WAY too many things about my faith that didnt add up. In high school i studied some other religions and noticed that they all claimed to be THE religion. To make a long story short, i spent a couple years thinking about this and really questioning wether a god existed and i came to the conlusion that a single god which ruled everything did not exist. I was an atheist.

I left the subject alone for a while assuming that when i died i would just completely disappear from all form of existance. Sure this was a little uncomfortable to think especially after being raised to think that when i died, i would live eternally, but my mind was strictly scientific now. I felt almost betrayed by spirituality and i left it behind.

My scientific frame of mind was actually what led me back to the spiritual path. As i learned more about science and the universe, I was amazed by the complexities and the possibilities and things that are still a mystery. I was in awe of the fact that ANYTHING even exists at all!!! It seemed to me that there is some driving force keeping all things in harmony and that everything fit together neatly in a sort of puzzle despite seemingly chaotic events. I now believe that every person, animal, tree, rock, idea, tool, machine, system, cycle, synthesis, etc. is part of “god”. But not “god” in the normal undersanding, just a word to call the collection of all things and thier interconnected nature. No supreme being…

Thought excercise: try to imagine the absence of everything… it will truly blow your mind if you focus hard enough on it. Imagine no earth, no planets, no stars, no light, no energy or matter, no forces such as gravity, not even an empty space in which to imagine it, its impossible to comprehend… And it helps ME realize how amazing this existence really is, i hope it helps someone else…

So i still dont have it figured out and probably never will but i am more content in the fact that life has some meaning and that life evolves. I feel lucky to be human because i think humans play a special role in this evolution of nature and “god”. I think there is some form of afterlife but i speculate that it is completely out of range with our ability to understand it. But I do think we kind of dissolve into the universe in some way to become more connected to everything else…

12

I agree with Purplefloyd’s idea that the afterlife is completely out of range with our ability to understand it, like our inability to comprehend what happened before the Big Bang… there will be no spacetime in the afterlife.

However, studying computers for the past decade (and their similarties to the human brain) I’ve come to the conclusion that humans are just self-aware programs running on a meat-computer. When we fall asleep at night it’s just the same as death… our programs aren’t running any more. We wake up and we’re back in the mortal world again. I really like the Christian idea that God in the afterlife will install our souls in a new perfect human body, since I know my programming won’t work on a different system. It seems like if we all tried to merge our programming together we’d be a different entity, and we are truly dead.

I’m kinda worried about all of this, and I’d like some more opinions please. :slight_smile:

-k

13

We are all one being right now. The being consciousness, which since it does not fit any category of an existent can’t be said to exist.

Consciousness or emptiness is no-thing and when nothing observes something it becomes that thing, for it has nothing else to be.

We as body/thoughts think we are the experiencer but we are the experience.

14

My apologies, AHunter3. My question wasn’t directed specifically at you. The OP asked the question of our nature as beings in the afterlife. My question is, before you consider that, how do you know there is an afterlife at all?

15

Extrovertive, I haven’t a clue how you come up with this hypothesis, but it sounds very close to one that I’ve been developing as a result of scriptural study and tying together concepts from memory that supposedly are scriptural but that I have yet to confirm.Let me start with these verses

I think that when God created the universe, He had to have created it from something (conservation of mass-energy), and I surmise that He created it with his own being.He disassociated Himself, creating his firstborn Christ, the angels, Satan, the Holy Spirit, us and all the rest of creation as we know it. This process can well have taken billions of years.

Today we have a small sense of the Godhead by allocating the three persons into the one God perplexing everyone with the concept of trinity .But once Christ is finished with his reign aided by those people that are His at his coming, we including Satan himself and the rest of creation will be reconciled back into the one God (all in all) although we will retain our personhood as Christ does. Then God will no longer be a trinity but a university :slight_smile:

So today when I interact with others and utilize resources that have been given to me, its worth considering where these resources come from and the inherent value of human and all other life.

16

Thank you grienspace. I’ve been thinking along those lines for many years with the possibility of reincarnation added to the picture.

And thank you to Purplefloyd, for sharing your journey. I think science is a wonderful tool to help us look into the complexity of creation, but nothing more.

Extrovertive

I still don’t know the answer to the question that I asked my dad when I was five years old, but I remember it clearly (standing up in the back seat of our car returning home from the store) with the same thought of how crowded heaven would be if it contained the souls of all who have already lived, those who are living now and those who have yet been born. With that in mind, I asked him if souls could just come back and live another life.

Whether or not that’s true, it’s our spirit that returns to God and I don’t envision that as taking up much “space”. But even if consideration to space was necessary, I’m sure God, the Creator of All Things, could handle that, too. :slight_smile:

17

I’ve thought about the concept. Are we all one and the same conscience sharing the universal experience?
When we fall asleep, and dream, most of the times we don’t remember a thing. So, by analogy, I could have lived, (or could be living), a zillion different existences. This is completely beyond proof. So people can tell me that it doesn’t matter because it really is the same thing anyway. But, is it? If I have a nightmare, and can’t remember it, it still means I had a lousy night.

18

When you atone for your sins, it means that you are at-one with God. That is what we should all strive for, so it seems reasonable that if there is an afterlife the goal will be for all souls to become at-one with God.