#1 Biological robots in a meaningless universe
We are not biological robots, there is a huge amount of evidence that
the afterlife is real and
consciousness is non-physical. but I don't understand what "free will" means so I can't say if we are spiritual robots or not. I tend to believe that everything, including behavior, thoughts, emotions, and impulses has a cause.
I don't know if the physical universe has meaning. How can a universe have meaning? A word or a symbol can have meaning. The universe as far as I know is not a symbol in that sense. I believe
life and the universe were created for a
purpose: To provide spiritual beings with a place to have experiences that cannot be had in the spiritual realms.
#2 Discontentment
I think discontentment is built into us biologically because it helps species to maintain themselves, and also because the physical world is not meant to be perfect. It is meant to be imperfect to provide us with problems to experience - people learn best by solving problems - by learning from experience. We are here to learn.
Discontentment is like a koan. A koan is a question a Zen master ask a student to teach them something. There are various types of koans. One type is a trick question that leads the student to think incorrectly about a problem. When the student becomes advanced enough he sees through the trick and is not fooled by it. Life and the universe is a koan like this and are full of many many such koans. The next time you feel anger (discontentment), remind yourself that you have been fooled by a koan. But also remember: how could you learn that if you didn't feel anger?
For practical purposes, for most people, there is no alternative to discontentment. If Dr. Martin wants to convince folks otherwise, he should publish
controlled studies demonstrating it. Even if it is
possible, most people don't want "enlightenment". They want
a hit of dopamine, they want to get things, they want status. Who is to say that is wrong? Some people want to
see through illusion and that's okay too. We are all here for different reasons. But
no one ever came back from an NDE and said we all have to meditate and get enlightenment. One of the things they often say is that in the afterlife, existence is much nicer than it is in the physical world.
Meditation can reduce discontentment, but even those who claim to have attained some stage of Buddhist awakening admit that almost no one throughout history has ever perfected it. The most important step in reducing discontentment, in my opinion, is to stop being discontent about being discontent. You can't start with perfection, you have to start by accepting discontentment and not strive to end it - because striving only reinforces discontentment.
(Alex, you seem to be supportive Dr. Martin's research. One of his finding is that meditation produces a reduced sense of agency. Does that affect your view of free will? )
#3 Realms of existence
There are non-physical realms. Most humans experience the physical world while alive and the non-physical realms before birth and after death. Above I mentioned
life and the universe were created for the purpose of providing a place where we can learn from experiences that cannot be had in the spiritual realms.
Some ET life forms are like humans and are mostly only aware of and function in the physical world, but some ET life forms are aware of and can function in both physical and spiritual realms.
My opinion is that unless a practitioner can routinely bring back verifiable information from out of the body experiences,
most induced OBE's are lucid dreams, And spontaneous OBE's are more likely to be real.
I don't know about psychedelic realms but I am skeptical that a drug that is known to produce hallucinations would produce an accurate perception of an alternate reality. I am not against experimenting with drugs for medical and scientific purposes but I am against financially supporting organized crime gangs who sell illegal drugs because the gangs are involved in many harmful crimes that ruin lives and countries.
#4 Deception and Evil
The biggest deception that occurs is when we deceive ourselves. We try to understand what we perceive with our senses and we make up stories to explain it, usually not by using logic, but by contriving scenarios that minimize cognitive dissonance. Sometimes the stories are true, sometimes they are fiction. One consequence of this is that when spiritual beings communicate with us, they have to use a language and conceptual framework that ignorant, confused, and deluded beings like us can understand, and if they cause too much cognitive dissonance we will ignore them, disbelieve them, or suspect them of being evil - so they are constrained in what they can tell us, and how they explain it, and in what techniques they can use to teach us.
There is evil because evil is produced by ignorance. Good actions have pleasant consequences. Bad actions have unpleasant consequences. Eventually everyone figures that out. It is one of the things we are here to learn through experience.
Based on reports by NDErs, what evidential mediums have said, and
my own experiences communicating with spirits, I believe there are different areas of the afterlife and after death people go to areas where they will be with like minded people. This happens through a process that is more like a natural law such as gravity, than by a law where you are judged by someone else. People who like harming others have their areas and those areas are not pleasant to be in. Eventually those people get a clue and figure out there is a better way to be and they get help to raise their level. So there are hellish regions but no one is condemned to spend an eternity in them.
People may visit these areas during NDEs in order to come back and tell the rest of us about them or because they will benefit from a glimpse of what is in store for them if they continue on their current path.
What is it like in the aftelife?
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