Some Woo Shit

 I've been reading a lot of near death experiences and death bed visions and I'm trying to put together what  the common elements might imply. It's more of a thought experiment than an earnest belief for me, but given that there ARE common elements, I'm curious as to what cohesive picture they might paint, if any. This kind of thing may not be your jam, I understand.

some of the common elements to near death experiences are:

• someone familiar on hand to greet you
• a sense of floating outside the body, then into a tunnel, then into a light
• 360 vision
• the sense that the spirit body is a "bubble" of some sort, but can change shape
• the ability to travel to a place instantly just by thinking
• a non-judgemental life review where actions and impacts are discussed and acknowledged
• meeting a higher being who is in a sense the personification of everything, "the light" (god or something like them)
• instant transmissions of knowledge
• the implication that souls reincarnate over and over to learn how to be better, kinder
• some kind of eternal elsewhere where all souls from all places (including other than earth) spend time relaxing in between incarnations. A Good Place, if you will.
• the specific claims that ALL souls eventually rejoin the light, no matter how evil on earth, it's just the life review for them is a longer, more painful process. but ultimately all souls acknowledge and regret negative behaviors and rejoin the light.
• being given a choice as to stay or go back
• a lot of the NDE experiencers report being told to go back and relay this information to kind of help people chill out (possibly the most interesting element to me).
• many years later the experience is vividly remembered and felt "realer than real"

While, there are frequently discrepancies on how these details are presented, usually seem to match cultural expectations, the broad strokes are remarkably common. Let's assume for the sake of argument that those discrepancies are more just user-specific skins to ease the newly departed back into their spirit forms and that these are to some degree real experiences that give some hints to the structure of the afterlife or a bigger context for the sould. That said, the first things that always jump out at me are

1) Gosh, the afterlife bureaucracy sure makes a lot of mistakes. Why do people keep showing up before their time? Perhaps it is less a screw-up and more that being that close to death thins the walls between world?. Or that being that when your immediate survival is unclear, it can provide the opportunity for the spirit to wander until the matter is decided. idk, but I find it amusing there are so many apparent clerical errors.

2) If the whole point is to forget the spirit world during your time on Earth so you can evolve, why are they sending people back telling them to tell everyone about the afterlife?  Doesn't it defeat the purpose to some degree? the entire point of any of it still seems unclear, so maybe the knowledge that there might be some greater context here is just meant to take the edge off of mortal life, so to speak. Idk, but it strikes me as strange.

I guess it just overall leaves me thinking, to what end? What does it matter that souls incarnate and experience and evolve over an eternity? Perhaps we are bits of a larger consciousness sent out to explore and report back, for the simple joy of exploration or purposes unknown. 

And also, do I find this idea more or less appealing than your traditional Judeo-Christian heaven/hell or the more materialist emergent consciousness that only exists so long as this body does? I don't mind the materialist version, although I don't find it inspiring. If there's truly nothing after we die, it won't bother me much because I won't be around to feel anything about not being around to feel anything. I have long since abandoned the adventist/christian idea of heaven and hell just because it's both too contradictory and too punitive and far too obviously a means of controlling behavior via fear.

I will say the idea that the idea that all souls are eventually reformed and forgiven and return to the whole, if only because that was the only version of god I could see being worth following when I was growing up. In adventism there was this idea of pure grace wrapped up in contradictory thorns, and I always thought some part of the idea of grace made sense to me, at the very least as an aspirational way to try to live. It was just all the other bunk about how a person had to be based on the body they were born with that they kept trying to staple on to it that turned me off.

I guess my worry is that this would all be too boring? Maybe eternity even from this point of view would eventually lose its charms. Maybe the challenge of adversity is why souls choose to incarnate over and over?

What I kind of like about the idea is if it were true, there would not be an extraordinary impact on day to day life. Okay, so there's an afterlife, where we'll get a hug and cleaned up and some time in the rec room before we're sent back again. What of it? True, there's little incentive to be "good" per se in that story but there's also little incentive to be bad. Being bad increases our own suffering for no good reason and being good is its own reward. Weirdly, I find it more motivational than any afterlife structure I've seen so far. It answer the existential Purpose question: learn, grow, be kind. And also the mortality fear: don't worry too much about dying, this ain't your first rodeo and it won't be your last. 

Maybe the particular purpose where humanity is concerned is that it is simply to see how long it takes a species of excitable primates with some modest reasoning skills to figure out how to chill the fuck out and not trash their own ecosystem. And some higher entity will simply rate and sort us appropriately ("figured it out faster than the giant slugs of the delphic expanse, but slower than the cetaceans of Zebulon 3. B-.")

Ultimately, as with all thoughts about the afterlife, I always come back to this: it kind of doesn't matter! Not that life is without meaning, but the afterlife will take care of itself. If we go into the light, that's what happens, and we're on to our next adventure. If there's nothing, I won't care! I'll be nothing! All that I really know is, afterlives aside, I'll only be in this body in this place in this time this once, so I should make use of what time I have while I am here.

So, do what exactly? I can think of worse starting points than: learn, grow, be kind, and worry less about dying than making sure I have as few regrets as possible when I do. Don't spend too much time worrying over the afterlife, when you have other things to work on. The afterlife will take care of itself one way or another. 

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

The Goodish Place

 I finally managed to finish the Good Place, rewatching the entire series up to where I stopped in season 4. the first two seasons are great, but it goes downhill after that and the last couple episodes were actively annoying to the point where it knocks an entire point off the star rating for me. I love the cast, I love the premise, I love the production values and set design, I just wish they had stuck the landing.

What made the show so exciting was this sense that it had something to say, that it was exploring all these philosophical ideas and was eventually going to land somewhere cohesive and interesting. I'm not sure why I expected a TV show to do what no living philosopher has ever been able to do (answer their own questions satisfactorily), but I am not a philosophy guy, so what do I know?

The culmination of all this talk about ethics and meaning was, frankly, distressing to me. The most perfect afterlife they can think of is one where you get to do everything you've ever wanted and then kill yourself once you're bored. that for a human being, suicide is the answer to eternity. It would be one thing if the show had been largely focused on eastern philosophy for the duration and this was what it built to, but it was very much focused on western and judeo-christian concepts of sin and punishment/reward which it then kind of awkwardly sidles away from, or at the very least coyly refuses to elaborate on. What I'm trying to say is they built a playful and fun but woefully shallow concept of the soul and the afterlife and it was a shaky platform to launch into discussions of meaning and purpose from.

Ultimately, I think they looked at eternity and blinked and chickened out. One question they probably should have answered to provide some context and foundation for any thoughts about meaning they were trying to convey, was why any of it was happening. Why was there an afterlife at all? Who made all the janets? Why were the demons/angels/functionaries of the afterlife at all concerned about whether humans were good or bad? Why are demons suited to eternity but a human being isn't?  Why not have human souls expand and grow in complexity much like Derek in this eternity? maybe they become afterlife functionaries too? the show was so desperate to avoid any hint of religion that they failed to define some important terms to put the events of the show in any sort of context, even though something like a higher power that IS concerned about all these things is frequently implied. But the show frustratingly never answers the question of what its all for. Obviously the writers of a TV show can't solve the meaning of life for us, but in the context of the show, it probably would have helped if the writers would have actually committed to the setting by eventually adding some crucial details. So in a sense, I understand the ending. If I were in an afterlife that poorly thought out, I can understand why people would want a way out. 

Personally, I think it would have all worked better if they'd worked reincarnation into it somehow. The idea that you die and your soul just lingers for not real reason is not too appealing, instead of the tests in the middle place, why not have them reincarnate over and over with some vague sense of previous lives and lessons learned and frame it around that? Instead of an eternity of perfect ease, a long series of lives on earth, with all the ups and downs that come with that? Remembering everything only in between incarnations? I guess my point is, they had a lot of options, and they chose a shrug, and  yet another meditation on mortality that boils down to "death is the only thing that gives life meaning."

Even that strikes me as posturing though. "death is the only thing that gives life meaning" is more something we say to ourselves to cope with knowledge of our own mortality. I don't see how mortality imparts meaning, although I do see how it imparts urgency to the proceedings. We are not living in forever so we'd best get to it. I think if we had the capacity to live to 400 years old in good health and vitality we wouldn't be thinking, "ah, if only I had died 300 years ago to give this all some meaning." Meaning comes from all kinds of things. It may be true that for creatures with our brains and our bodies as they are now that we would handle certain kinds of eternities poorly, but I'm not sure it stands to reason that any long-term extension of consciousness would lead to boredom and madness. I can imagine an enduring body and an infinite universe providing quite a bit of entertainment, frankly. Which brings up another question, why in all of eternity did they never leave earth? Again, the vision here is weirdly limited.

Beyond that, we should probably also be careful to distinguish between the natural ennui of age and the value-added ennui of stressful world we've created for each other. We're all very tired, I understand, but we've also created a very narrow and stressful range of options for living that are difficult to cope with (in the name of religion or economics or good old fashioned bigotry). We might think more kindly of eternity if we didn't exhaust each other so much as a matter of principle.

But I do go on. Suffice to say, while I thought the first two seasons were really good, ultimately the show kind of chickens out and goes up its own navel into nothing in the grand tradition of philosophy. Glad I watched it, but ultimately disappointing. Alas.