Let us think we are on that last path in this world. We cannot lie to anyone because it is only us now, and we never really beguile ourselves.
Almost there, on the Other Side, we have a while to think. We know we are not going to make it back to life on Earth.
No playing up, around, or about: all we have is the sincerity and frankness with which the human mind communicates with itself, as Thomas Paine wrote.
On Earth
We knew we were not our hands or legs, that is, body parts. Personality could not be inserted, exported, or transferred; not in people.
We knew the soul or life future were not certain, but there was no ground at the same time to say they certainly did not exist.
All probing for the soul had been invasive, whereas for body parts already, we did not advocate walking on broken legs.
Things on Earth had beginnings. Everything had started at some time, or continued to begin. Spring came year after year, and then there was always some time before things would turn into winter.
There was no memory or proof anybody like a god or demiurge started it all up. There was no evidence there certainly was no one.
The soul
We fared and got by, with living experience and science in unison, saying it was only somehow — of no exact measurement — that our brains organized our neurons into networks of inner harmony, though no human brain would have an “ego area”, like those you had for your eyes or ears.
Memory was certain and attested of no singular brain locale. An ego, psyche, or soul — everyone would yet have by standard, with many happy returns.
An effect by the brain only, there would have been an area, like for those powers by the organ.
Religion
All religions claimed to be true. Each brought a story to put it on top of the possibility that a human being had a soul.
If you wanted to join a church, you had to follow their story. All stories were shaped by people.
Buddhism
The Buddhist story said, you died and returned to Earth as a mewling infant, in diapers clean if mama, papa, or anyone cared.
Infants could not walk, talk, and they had to start all afresh, inclusive of crayons. The story did not guarantee that boys would be boys or girls would remain girls throughout the incarnations.
In your next life on Earth you did not remember your previous, so in your current life you were kind of only temporarily so. You did not know who you had been or who you were going to be — the story said.
There being more and more people on Earth, even three people might become of one soul, each with own personality, in the next life. The Buddhist soul or mind would not be much of a person thing.
Imagine the patent office with emanations from ■Alexander Graham Bell rather than himself at the desk to register.
Without intellectual property also the USA would have been gone to nothings. Some Buddhist stories yet would say, there was no soul all in all. The mind was an effect by the brain — without that ego area.
Siddhartha’s rainbow
Is it religion, if it says there is no soul?
Islam
Islam would have had some incarnation too. Adam and Eve lived in a heavenly garden before their coming to Earth, said the story of Islam.
There was amnesia too. On the Day of Judgment, no human being might deny an original covenant from a time before life on Earth.
Nobody born on Earth was able to remember any time before life on the planet.
The story allowed, a woman could work hard, at being a good person as well — and be sent into an eternal harem. Nobody imagined a male having to run about a guy for all eternity.
Christianity
The story invoked a time before Earth, the same as with Islam, Adam and Eve in a heavenly garden. It had incarnation for the only Son of the only Creator. It had crucifixion for him, six hours by three nails.
The story explained, Adam and Eve stole an apple before they lived on Earth. The only Son of the only Creator came to die on the cross for it.
Known as fruit of season, also abstract and metaphoric apples would have been abstract and metaphoric fruit of season on Earth.
In the Middle Ages, Earth people stated, the only Son of the only Creator was one in a ■Trinity ■coeternal and ■consubstantial.
An Earth woman in an earthly animal shed would have given birth to the Almighty too, and Earth people would have crucified him as well, in the shape of the only Son, whom they arrested, the story has it, to present him to the executioners.
Is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator? — asked Thomas Paine on Earth in his Age of Reason, ■page 31.
The same story had it, Earth people all were considered guilty of stealing the apple in Paradise. It was the ■original sin. How could Earth people know if they were not all considered guilty of the crucifixion?
Deism
Acknowledging the attribute Almighty for God, Thomas Paine yet excluded God from natural language:
If we permit ourselves to conceive right ideas of things, we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honor with the name of the Word of God; and therefore the Word of God cannot exist in any written or human language — said Thomas Paine in his Age of Reason.
He wrote in circumstances of limited intellection. He was ill and his life was threatened.
To constitute a man
He was found by Monroe more dead than alive from semi-starvation, cold, and an abscess contracted in prison.
Where are we now?
We are at the end of the path; without a mortal body and yet living somehow, as we always could suspect that was possible, if there was afterlife at all.
It might be not too bad, if we had not been of religion. Benjamin Franklin was not a church member, but the matter cannot be in examples only, of course.
With Buddhism, we would have given up on own self. With Islam, we would have kept the self, yet only making ready to answer for a covenant we had no way to know. With Christianity, we might be at odds with the Creator: how could we even know about the Creator’s family, sons or daughters; the phrase is exactly “the only begotten son”, yet all offspring is begotten; and why offspring and fruit of season? With Deism we would have resigned of the ■Logos.
Would we walk into Paradise saying we believe God would die for us?
Many people did not decide to join religion, not only one Franklin.
The choice
It was all fog, but a fog such as I’ve never seen before or since. For a moment I thought my sight had gone, that, perhaps, in the afterlife everything was vague and misty — wrote ■Henry FitzGerald Heard in The Great Fog: And Other Weird Tales, 1944.
We people need shape to live. In something shapeless and without shape ourselves, we would suffer.
To become accepted anywhere there is shape for things and souls, it might be important that man
1. is own self, to be trusted on principles;
2. does not yield to suggestion; blaming us on a ground unknown, that it could not change predilection;
3. would not challenge the Creator or Creators, as we do not really know how Earth might have been created;
4. favors intellectual activity, for example Logos. Eternity is a long time.
The worst probable experience
It might be emotionally and intellectually the worst experience, to get into some Great After, see it is beautiful, wonderful, marvelous and full of fancy garb, and then to learn we cannot stay because we’re lacking an agreeable philosophy. Villains at least expect some hell, whereas for us everything would have gone smoothly, like people say, a wormhole or something similar opened, the soul had a guaranteed safe landing, simply impartible, the Great After felt really great, yet as Emily Dickinson indicated within her poetic license, we’ve been our own enemy.
The eagle of his nest
No easier divest
And gain the sky,
Than mayest thou;
Except thyself may be
Thine enemy;
Captivity is consciousness,
So’s liberty.
Emily Dickinson, ■Emancipation.
We have learned how to burn candles or participate in religious events; we have mastered disputes over issues abstract as transcendence — because most earthly churches had the idea; but we do not have this simple philosophy in us for living After, and there is no heavenly nanny.
Our alternative is dense mists where souls wander and lose themselves to shapelessness.
Poetry by Emily Dickinson
Notes
The correlative with Webster 1828, Latin and Greek inspiration, and Aristotelian things perpetual — these are not in time, but in eternity.
Resource
The epsilon, predicate structure, vowel contour, phonemics, person reference in abstract thought, and altogether stylistic coherence, piece-by-piece.
The principles
Where entities as human beings could exist without their mortal bodies, and you would not incarcerate souls or like, the most obvious principles would be two:
1. never to force yourself on anyone;
2. never to steal from anyone or rob.
People could get by pretty well with such principles on Earth already, and these would agree with the law and a nice dream about a paradise. Of course you would not be forcing yourself, having to give one a parking ticket.
It really could be that this planet is up to the people who live here, and well, things do not look good at times.
The end of the mortal world
It has been more or less predicted. Earth has some three billions of years, before the collision with Andromeda — maybe — happens. Things change also in the cosmos.
The end of life
It is only if there is absolutely no afterlife at all that no such moment might happen to us, almost on the Other Side. It is worth thinking, what then; not only what now and here on Earth.