Dualism or idealist monism as the best model for survival after death data

[Ninshub]

Would it help to think of it as different dimensions? Or co-existing perspectives or realities or truths?

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NinshubWould it help to think of it as different dimensions? Or co-existing perspectives or realities or truths?
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If the One and the Many are co-equal in the sense of being extant at the Ground level, sure! :-)

I do get that the Non-Dual Idealism doesn't have to erase the individual completely:

"The Infinite defines itself in the finite, the finite conceives itself in the Infinite. Each is necessary to the other's complete joy of being. The Infinite pauses always in the finite; the finite arrives always in the Infinite. This is the wheel that circles forever through Time and Eternity."
 -Sri Aurobindo

"The other tetralemmic polarity is that between the Absolute and the contingent, specifically between God and individual human beings. The reason it is not just a renaming of formlessness and form is that the formlessness/form polarity exists both in God and in the individual. The individual is not just a form, but itself a creator of form, and so must itself have the creative power, which is formless. Since there is only one formlessness, we are, then, God. However, we are restricted in our ability to create. What restricts our power are the forms within which our thinking is constrained. At present those are highly constrictive. One can imagine, though, that full autonomy might mean that we can choose our constraints, perhaps design our own, and in so doing create our own universe. What makes it tetralemmic? Well, one can't just say we are God, nor that we are not God, nor that we and God are separate, nor that there is some prior reality to both God and us."
  -Scott Roberts, Tetralemmic Polarity

"Therefore, the source of my freedom – in being unconditioned – cannot be a thing: it must be no-thing, the indefinable void out of which all my free thoughts and actions emerge (and to which they return once they have run their course). But this unconditioned at the centre of my being, isn’t it the same as the unconditioned source of all that exists, of the entire universe?

After all, the unconditioned must be no-thing. But how can the nothing in me differ in any way from the nothing out of which the universe emerged? (And into which it will dissolve again once it has run its course.) Obviously, there cannot be multiple nothings, since they have no distinguishing characteristics – indeed, what is nothing has no characteristics at all! So, the nothing in me, the unconditioned source of my freedom, must be the same nothing that is the unconditioned source of reality-as-a-whole. I guess that’s what those ancient Indian philosophers meant when they said that “Atman is Brahman”, i.e. that the Self is the Ultimate Reality."
   -Peter Sas, the Ogre, the Onion, and the Atman

Going by paranormal data, it seems possible that one can make a case for this sort of relation between the One (God?) and the Many (Us and everyone else).

[Ninshub]

However, I would demur that whatever the origin of a metaphysical claim it shouldn't invalidate the claim itself which should be judged on its own merits. But mysticism of the kind that seems to inspire Vedanta, since it involves a person claiming to see something with little to no paranormal data, seems more suspect to me than a clear communication from the dead to the living. Just as some NDEs can be rendered suspect because they seem to closely align with proselytizing a religion (see some of the Pure Land Buddhist NDEs) there's just a...suspicious oddity to the historical context of certain Monist traditions...

OTOH, we do have NDEs that contradict each other as well, and some in-between life memories don't seem like they are literally real such as children's souls trying to hide in a grain of rice to be consumed by the mother. So the true nature of reality may not be discernible from paranormal data, though I would contend at least the communications that produce verified information have to be held higher than mystic visions.

(...)

We can also look at mediumship cases, such as this one which has evidential aspects, where the dead child seeks to alleviate the grieving parents. She tells them it's okay because she is with grandma, not "Oh silly mom & dad we as individuals don't actually exist and there is nothing but the One Mind".

If we're going by paranormal data, it seems to me there is much less going for the idea that the One subsumes the Many. Rather they co-exist, perhaps in such a way that our ideas of distinct individuals divorced from their Origin is untrue in a non-dual way...but then the erasure of the Many strikes me as a violation of Non-Dualism as well...

Wow that's such a large issue to contemplate, I don't know if I have my feet on solid ground here.  

I agree with your second sentence ("But mysticism of the kind..."). But then I'm examining certain models or religious philosophies (like AV) to the extent that they share what I understand coming through paranormal phenomena, including NDEs. In his book Lessons from the Light, NDE researcher Kenneth Ring has a penultimate chapter called "Journeys to the Source: The Ultimate Lessons from the Light", which goes over themes that come across from certain NDErs' testimonies, subjects who seem to have during their NDE progressed further "into" the Light, into what Ring calls a "second" and "ultimate Light' - and I can't help but equate that knowledge as very similar to what usually comes across in perennial "mystic visions". And I will personally hold that higher (if the themes are consistent, which I find to be) than veridically-verified communications that most likely are saying something true and empirical about one dimension of reality, closer to where we are and can relate to as incarnate finite minds. (But that's just me).

So, for example, I wouldn't assume that the mediumship case about the dead child reassuring her grieving parents is the be-all and end-all of what that reality is. It's certainly one level or dimension, but who knows if there are larger truths or other dimensions? I tend to assume there are others, given what I've digested over the years as information. My 2 cents of course!

[Ninshub]

Always fun spending a bit of time debating over the ground of reality on a nice August Sunday afternoon!

Wow that's such a large issue to contemplate, I don't know if I have my feet on solid ground here.  

I agree with your second sentence ("But mysticism of the kind..."). But then I'm examining certain models or religious philosophies (like AV) to the extent that they share what I understand coming through paranormal phenomena, including NDEs. In his book Lessons from the Light, NDE researcher Kenneth Ring has a penultimate chapter called "Journeys to the Source: The Ultimate Lessons from the Light", which goes over themes that come across from certain NDErs' testimonies, subjects who seem to have during their NDE progressed further "into" the Light, into what Ring calls a "second" and "ultimate Light' - and I can't help but equate that knowledge as very similar to what usually comes across in perennial "mystic visions". And I will personally hold that higher (if the themes are consistent, which I find to be) than veridically-verified communications that most likely are saying something true and empirical about one dimension of reality, closer to where we are and can relate to as incarnate finite minds. (But that's just me).

So, for example, I wouldn't assume that the mediumship case about the dead child reassuring her grieving parents is the be-all and end-all of what that reality is. It's certainly one level or dimension, but who knows if there are larger truths or other dimensions? I tend to assume there are others, given what I've digested over the years as information. My 2 cents of course!

I need to go through Shushan's examination of NDEs across human history but my current thinking is there seems to be varied realities where people can go.

This world (universe) seems like something of an intersection point used by varied groups with different paths, why we get transcendent experiences along with afterlives that seem as mundane as this one. And of course, the spirit journeys of shamans and other figures...I am wary of assuming it's all harmoniously ordered though as that seems a bit too neat when compared to the disorder of this reality...

Always fun spending a bit of time debating over the ground of reality on a nice August Sunday afternoon!

I'm sure we'll have it all wrapped up even if the debate extends across human history....just....one...more...post...

I guess I have to admit confusion here, because I'm not sure what this means:

If we go to Sankara's model of Advaita Vedanta, for example, and go to the topic of painful emotional experiences in general (grieving, suffering in general), the empirical level of reality is real. Those experiences occur. If at an underlying, more deeper ontological level, it is all Brahman and there is no differentiation, does this mean the empirical level is a "farce"? Wouldn't it be more accurate to describe it as tremendously real, but not absolutely real? (So that not-absolute does not mean unreal, but just less-real-than-absolutely-real).

To me this is like "proto-consciousness" invoked by some panpsychists and even materialists...but this seems to try and add gradations to something that seems either-or? Similarly what does it mean for an aspect of reality to be "less-real-than-absolutely-real"?

I think there might be a very rough analogy from physics, where it is recognized that the "empirical" physical world experienced by humans is absolutely real, but from a very much deeper perspective this empirical physical world is actually vast numbers of quantum mechanically interacting subatomic particles in a void (with there being even deeper physics visualisations). Both realms are real, but actually are "one", and aspects of each other. The realm of quantum mechanically interacting subatomic particles is "realer than real" from the empirical physical perspective of humans, but is certainly physically invisible to humans .

To continue the analogy, as "all is Brahman and there is no differentiation", so (according to materialist physics) all consists of vast numbers of quantum mechanically interacting subatomic particles, and all macroscopic physical objects are qualitatively the same types of subatomic particles, just arranged differently, the same basic "substance".

"The materialist theory is a logical blunder, because it is based on a confusion between the object and subject. It asserts that matter is objective, but at the same time it tries to show that it is also the cause of the subject, which it can never be. “A” can never become “non-A.” Materialism begins with the idea that matter is objective, and ends in attempting to prove that this objective something has become the subjective mind, spirit or ego. It first takes for granted that matter is that which is perceived, or the cause of sensations, then it gradually claims to show that it produces that which feels the sensations, which is contradictory and absurd.

As materialism is onesided and imperfect, so is the spiritualistic or idealistic theory of the world, which denies the existence of matter or object, and says that everything is mind . . . that all is mind and that there is no matter, is as erroneous as the materialistic theory. Spirit or mind or ego, which is always the subject, can exist as perceiver or knower so long as there is an object of perception or knowledge. If we admit the existence of one, that of the other is implied. Therefore, Goethe was correct in saying: “Matter cannot exist and be operative without spirit or spirit without matter.”

The universal substance appears as possessing these two attributes of subject and object, of spirit, mind or ego and matter or non-ego. They are like the two modes of the one eternal substance, which is unknown and unknowable existence. . . . This substance is not many but one. All varieties of phenomena have come out of this one source, Brahman, and into it they will be reduced at the time of dissolution. It is the universal energy, the mother or producer of all forces. We know that all forces are related to one another and that they are, as modern science explains, the manifestations of the same eternal energy or the infinite substance. From this one source all mental and material forces have come into existence, and have evolved into various forms and shapes.

This is monism."

-Swami Abhedananda

So rather than dualism or idealism (or materialism), this would be something more along the lines of a "dual-aspect" theory? This might fit the paranormal data best?

[Ninshub]

Abhedananda was an Advaita Vedantin, it should be noted, follower of Ramakrishna.