Who/What is the garden?
Who/What is the fountain?
What are the requirements for entering the garden?
Which of the adherents of the major religions (specifically Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judism, Islam and the followers of the ancient Greek Gods) will enter this garden?
Where do the people that do not meet the requirements for entry go after they die (the physical body that is)?
That which exists necessarily, eternally, and essentially. (Using the philosophical senses of those words.)
None. All who enter it do so voluntarily and volitionally because they find it to be aesthetically valuable.
It has nothing to do with religion, at least not in that sense.
Wherever they find aesthetic value. But irrespective of biological life or death, they are already there. Questions of religious affiliation or lack thereof aside, we all are already where we find aesthetic value. Or as Jesus put it, where our treasure is, there our hearts are also.
Any chance you might try answering the question again…only this time making a the slightest bit of sense?
Just because I’d find “aesthetic value” in meeting oodles of nubile young women after death means exactly squat w/regards to the odds of it actually happening. Unless of course, I deluded myself into believing my fantasy (aesthetic value).
What qualities of the garden could possibly give aesthetic value. Might it also have qualities that garden-goers would not find aesthetically valuable.
Those who find no aesthetic value in it wouldn’t care to enter. They have gardens of their own — differently perceived metaphysical realities that they find aesthetically appealing. As Schopenhauer pretty much concluded, all of life is a struggle to find the aesthetic that we value most. A man is constantly in pursuit of that which he treasures.
Well, I… That’s not even how I think of it at all. I mean, it isn’t a matter of take it or leave it because my garden is designed to my exact specifications. Normally, I think of “take it or leave it” with respect to what someone else has made for me to specifications of their own. I will certainly take it, because it is what I seek. Same same for every garden. It is you who spec your own. It is made of all that you treasure. If a man says flatly, I want no garden, I want nothing at all, than that is exactly what he will have. No one is forced to have a garden.
There are as many gardens as there are free moral agents, but keep in mind that we are talking about things metaphysical here. There is no cardinality or ablative separation. In other words, they aren’t all the same in the sense of having identical specs; they are all the same in the sense of being metaphysically real. (As opposed to physically “real”, which isn’t real at all.) It makes no difference whether we say that you have a rose garden and I have a vine garden, or whether we say that your section of the whole garden is roses and mine is vines. The fountain is accessible to all gardens and all gardens to the fountain no matter what.
If I choose to have no garden what do you think happens to me/Where do I go?
In other words our garden is tailored to each person to be the most beautiful thing they have ever seen? In other words are we just going to sort of ‘chill’ in this stunningly beautiful place forever?
The choice and the destination are the same. Perhaps your choice is always to search. If so, you search. Perhaps your choice is to disappear into nothingness. If so, you disappear into nothingness. Perhaps your choice is A. If so you A.
It that is what you value, yes. You impress me as a man who treasures learning. I think you would find learning to have value. But I don’t know you that well, so you tell me. What aesthetic do you value most?
Props to Mr. Emerson for producing a quotable phrase with an obvious truism within. However, WTF does it have to do with afterlife gardens?
Again, to rephrase my original query, does imagining something to the point of delusion make that something more likely to be real? Please, no “brain in a jar replies.”
