Mind shift

Is there life after death?

1. Faith tells us that life after death must exist. Different religions have had different views about the afterlife.  However all religions agree that life after death must exist, in one form or another.
2. On the other hand logic tells us that this is impossible. After death all biological functions seize to operate, thus also the brain function which is responsible for consciousness.
3. The paradox here is that although we consider life after death improbable, or even impossible, it seems that there is something in us which tells us that something should exist after death- this is something more than a personal belief, or an egoistic desire to perpetuate ourselves forever. Furthermore most, if not all, of us have had one transcendental experience or the other, such as an out- of- body experience or a past-life memory.
4. Are such experiences an indication of some deeper, yet unconscious, knowledge related to some unknown state of existence, knowledge which have been passed down through myths and traditions, and which comes about through dreams, hypnosis, or other forms of, we might say, reduced consciousness? Or are those experiences mere illusions?
5. I personally believe that all transcendental experiences or ‘illusions’ are contents of some ‘unknown states of existence,’ which emerge in dreams or in a state of trance, but which become obscure when they are rationalized by awakeness.

What is quantum immortality?

6. Quantum immortality is an idea in which it is put forward that the consciousness stays alive even though the conscious being dies. For example, someone sets off a bomb beside the victim, that victim survives in an alternate universe by being injured but living, or by the bomb not blowing up. However, in the original universe, the victim ‘dies’ in the blast. The consciousness continues to exist in another, perhaps many alternate universes. [1]
7. Max Tegmark describes the ‘quantum suicide experiment’ as follows: “The apparatus is a ‘quantum gun’ which each time its trigger is pulled measures the spin of a particle. It is connected to a machine gun that fires a single bullet if the result is ‘down’ and merely makes an audible click if the result is ‘up.’ The experimenter first places a sandbag in front of the gun and tells her assistant to pull the trigger ten times. All quantum mechanics interpretations predict that she will hear a seemingly random sequence of shots and duds such as ‘bang-click-bang-bang-bang-click-click-bang-click-click.’ She now instructs her assistant to pull the trigger ten more times and places her head in front of the barrel. In the many worlds interpretation the prediction is that the experimenter will hear ‘click’ with 100% certainty. When her assistant has completed this unenviable assignment, she will have heard ten clicks, and concluded that the collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics (all but the many worlds interpretation) are ruled out. Note, however, that almost all instances will have her assistant perceiving that he has killed his boss.” [2]
8. The meaning of this thought experiment is that the experimenter always survives in a parallel universe, although in the universe of her assistant she may have been killed. Strangely enough, there is no logical inconsistency in the result: The experimenter can be either dead or alive in any of the parallel worlds.
9. Such an aspect of eternal indefiniteness, which also supports our belief in immortality at a scientific level, may be depicted in the previous picture, where a human body is hanging above its ‘planetary sphere’ ad infinitum. The human being could be in a state of dreaming (either dead or alive), while the sphere could represent consciousness. The endless repetition of this picture could imply quantum immortality.

Changing the state of consciousness

10. With each next step we take, the wavefunction of the universe collapses, according to an instantaneous decision we make, so that, at that moment, our self is manifested in the real world. But just a moment before, or inbetween two successive manifestations (or ‘collapses of the wavefunction’), we had existed in a ‘cosmic soup’ of probabilities, in an indefinite state of existence. While we are sure that right now we do exist, just a moment ago we had been unaware of what we were doing, either because we were sleeping, or just because we were not thinking about it.
11. Even if we are so strongly attached to reality, to the everyday life and to our own ego, we have always had the equally strong conviction that there must be something greater than ourselves in the universe, if not the universe itself. Such a conviction diminishes the importance of our own self and transfers us to another world which belongs to every one of us in general, but to none of us in particular.
12. Here I believe is the crucial point: The meaning of the afterlife is not the perpetuation of our own selfish ego, but the perseverance of the Being as a collective entity applying to all conditions and all species. When we die, the information concerning our own entity and all our past actions returns to the ‘Cosmic Records’ (or Akashic Records as they have been called) located in some place or another (a hyper- massive black hole at the center of the universe?), and it is recombined with all the rest of the information available, to reproduce a new living being.
13. The belief in reincarnation could be an interpretation of such a process. The many worlds interpretation could be an alternative description. The Christian belief in eternal afterlife could be seen as the ultimate achievement of a living entity: to become so knowledgeable and mentally powerful that the repetitive cycle of rebirth is broken and the entity becomes one with God.
14. This is what I call ‘mind, or consciousness, shift.’ As soon as we die, the sum of all information which constitutes our entity returns to the Singularity (the cosmic library or even the collective unconscious), to be recombined and come back in the form of a new living entity.
15. If this is true then there is no point talking about ‘past life memories’ or ‘afterlife experiences,’ because such memories or experiences do not belong to us, but instead they belong to the collective memory of the Universe. The point is not the reproduction of our selfish ego but the perpetuation of the Universal Being, with all Its manifestations. However, as far as we are concerned, the promising aspect is that when we contemplate on our state of mind, at the same time we rewrite the history the universe.

  

[1]: [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_immortality]

[2]: [https://thoughtexperiments.net/quantum-suicide/]

8/6/2018

Painting: Baby Boomers, Slawek Wojtowicz