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sandman_130
Neo-Classical Spiritualist
Registered: 08/17/04
Posts: 1,443
Loc: Canada
Last seen: 14 years, 3 months
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Concept of Heaven
#6398354 - 12/22/06 10:47 PM (17 years, 3 months ago) |
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Have you ever wondered what Heaven is like?
If their really is one?
What if this is Heaven, and in the next life we have to go back to the front lines of a never ending spiritual war?
Are we so spoiled that it is impossible to fathom this life as heaven?
What about Hell? What if this is Hell
I believe many places in this world are a form of Heaven or Hell for spirits to come back either by choice, or not by choice. Sure the majority of us could be first life souls, but their is many old ones. If you have the ability to wager on how many evil spirits have returned opposed to Holy ones, what would you put your money on? I would say it is probably 10 bad for every 1 good, each with their own purpose to influence the 1st born souls on choosing the path into the right family, Darkness or Light.
Although there are infinite Heavens and Hell. I believe earth to be the starting and ending point to all connections with the God of creation.
-------------------- "There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand." Maria Sabina
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DNKYD
Turtle!
Registered: 09/23/04
Posts: 12,326
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Heaven is a state of mind created by those too weak to accept our current reality. Humans for thousands of years have thought we are not worthy of what we have and there must be something better. This is all there ever was, ever is, and ever will be.
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dblaney
Human Being
Registered: 10/03/04
Posts: 7,894
Loc: Here & Now
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Heaven and hell are both merely concepts that reflect states of mind. They are actualized here and now. Whether there are some fantastical after-life worlds that either fulfill your every egotistical desire or deny them remains to be seen, but I suspect that they're just wishful thinking.
-------------------- "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" "Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword" - John Mayer Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln
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Disco Cat
iS A PoiNdexteR
Registered: 09/15/00
Posts: 2,601
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Re: Concept of Heaven [Re: DNKYD]
#6398580 - 12/23/06 01:42 AM (17 years, 3 months ago) |
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Huh? Apparently you aren't aware of scriptural and Jesus' actual teachings on heaven and hell. He claimed these were states within a person and to describe them he borrowed terminology from many cultures. Jesus simultaneously taught of eternal life, in addition to directly teaching that the "kingdom of heaven is within you."
The "it's a myth created for the weak minded" stuff is itself weak, shows a lot of ignorance. If you don't have a valid answer to the question "why" then I guess just please don't assume something such as it's for the weak minded.
I don't understand how someone who believes in the spiritual can find problems with a concept of an "afterlife" or heaven, because I'd assume that they already believe that their energy is eternal, thus they'd already believe in an eternal life. Yet they simultaneously discredit it? I don't get it.
What's immensely ironic is: the accusation, that belief in something called "heaven" is a crutch for the weak minded, is itself a crutch for those who are too "weak minded" (maybe, more appropriately, too weak spirited) to cope with reality, which is that they themselves do not yet understand something that so many others, who they look down on, do, and so attack their imagined personal interpretation in place of discovering the real thing.
I presume the same people who might make such mistakes in understanding what heaven and hell have been taught to actually be also would believe that satan is scripturally taught to be a demonic creature in some other dimension.
Edited by Disco Cat (12/23/06 04:31 AM)
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Deviate
newbie
Registered: 04/20/03
Posts: 4,497
Last seen: 8 years, 6 months
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Re: Concept of Heaven [Re: Disco Cat]
#6398680 - 12/23/06 04:23 AM (17 years, 3 months ago) |
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Jesus taught heaven or the "Kingdom of God" can be found within us, however this should not be interpreted secularly to mean a happy state of mind, for the kingdom Jesus spoke of consists of a transcedent consciousness that continues on after death, into perhaps different spiritual worlds and eventually all the way back to God.
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Disco Cat
iS A PoiNdexteR
Registered: 09/15/00
Posts: 2,601
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Re: Concept of Heaven [Re: Deviate]
#6398684 - 12/23/06 04:26 AM (17 years, 3 months ago) |
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Yes, still, true happiness is dependant on a spiritual wellbeing. I would suggest that what people might be doing during meditation is discovering the "kingdom of God." I also believe that God is that vibrant energy that produces that spiritual wellbeing which can be found in meditation.
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Deviate
newbie
Registered: 04/20/03
Posts: 4,497
Last seen: 8 years, 6 months
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Re: Concept of Heaven [Re: Disco Cat]
#6398685 - 12/23/06 04:29 AM (17 years, 3 months ago) |
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I dont dissagree, the only point I was making was that the heaven Jesus spoke of extends beyond one lifetime.
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Gomp
¡(Bound to·(O))be free!
Registered: 09/11/04
Posts: 10,888
Loc: I re·side [primarily] in...
Last seen: 1 year, 28 days
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Where the air, meet the ground, there is ... (what?) ..on our earth!
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dblaney
Human Being
Registered: 10/03/04
Posts: 7,894
Loc: Here & Now
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Re: Concept of Heaven [Re: Deviate]
#6398931 - 12/23/06 09:31 AM (17 years, 3 months ago) |
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I don't understand all this talk of eternalism. That there is some eternal, undying 'soul' or 'self' or 'essence' or 'consciousness' or whatever.
If you're going to argue from authority (such as "Jesus taught this" or "X said this, therefore it is so"), then you're missing something. Furthermore, what about those who taught that this view of eternalism was false? The great Zen master Dogen, for instance, taught that "just as ash does not become firewood, death does not again become life". The fifth patriarch also taught that there was, in truth, no 'mind'. No perceiver that exists separately from the perceived.
Perceiver, that which does the perceiving, and what is perceived are one. So independently of that which is perceived, there can exist no separate consciousness which can continue on after death.
That being said, I personally don't know about reincarnation. I have sincere doubts about it, but nonetheless I cannot outright dismiss it as impossible, only improbable.
What do you, yourself, think about it?
-------------------- "What is in us that turns a deaf ear to the cries of human suffering?" "Belief is a beautiful armor But makes for the heaviest sword" - John Mayer Making the noise "penicillin" is no substitute for actually taking penicillin. "This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -Abraham Lincoln
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AlteredAgain
Visual Alchemist
Registered: 04/27/06
Posts: 11,181
Loc: Solar Circuit
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Re: Concept of Heaven [Re: dblaney]
#6399107 - 12/23/06 11:32 AM (17 years, 3 months ago) |
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Out of thousands of seeds only one tree is born. Out of millions of sperm only one flips the ovarian switch to turn on an infant's life. Though the potentials for life are abundant, the critical mass of fulfillment of those potentials is atomically small.
I like to entertain the possibility that the same goes for dying.
Surely we all meet the same fate on Earth eventually, but to assume that everyone will "live on" after the lights are turned off seems to me like expecting a life-time guarantee to life.
Though one must admit that we feel comfortable telling each other that our existence does not end here in this body. Every religion holds its own form of eternalism. The west generally awaits heaven/or hell whereas the East rests with reincarnation.
But no matter what belief is held, the truth is nobody knows for sure.
It's possible that when we do die, we return to 'the source' and then choose/or are chosen to enter a new world in a new body at whatever variable frequency of existence. Who says we must come back to Earth, we could just as well return on the etheric planet of a two sun solar system in an alternate universe.
Or it's possible that we simply might just never come back again, and that this life is all we got.
Well either way one sees it, there is one thing in common with the two.
And that is live your life to the fullest while you are alive. This moment is real, even if it is only real to you, and it is meant to be lived here and now.
I can rest with that.
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QbanMoJo
Mr. Brightside
Registered: 09/08/04
Posts: 361
Loc: OutSide
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Quote:
sandman_130 said: Have you ever wondered what Heaven is like?
If their really is one?
What if this is Heaven, and in the next life we have to go back to the front lines of a never ending spiritual war?
Are we so spoiled that it is impossible to fathom this life as heaven?
What about Hell? What if this is Hell
I believe many places in this world are a form of Heaven or Hell for spirits to come back either by choice, or not by choice. Sure the majority of us could be first life souls, but their is many old ones. If you have the ability to wager on how many evil spirits have returned opposed to Holy ones, what would you put your money on? I would say it is probably 10 bad for every 1 good, each with their own purpose to influence the 1st born souls on choosing the path into the right family, Darkness or Light.
Although there are infinite Heavens and Hell. I believe earth to be the starting and ending point to all connections with the God of creation.
Pretty good thinking, I must say. It sounds sensible, to me at least and I know the same is for you.
Although, take what you think like you would of someone else's thoughts, lightly. Not because it is, "too far out there", but because we truly do not know.
Either way, your thought is pure because you are not interpreting those thoughts as truth but as what may be. Which, may be, truth.
Now, if I may add, for your benefit and as well as others, if they choose. How about if instead of Earth being either Heaven or Hell, it is truly both? It is the medium, the battleground, like you said in a way, for this "war" between Good and evil?
What do you think? Does it spark any thoughts in you? Im asking sincerely, I know to some it may sound differently cause it is writing, but honestly I would like to discuss this further with whomever is interested, with you, if at least.
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