new aeon
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Creating entire worlds to inhabit, linking our minds collectively, the ability to build all manor of bio-mechanical bodies and download our consciousness into them.
Nano-bots that can reshape anything according to our WILL.
Existing as a transient consciousness that is not tied down to this or that specific chunk of matter, in this short duration of space time. Being Immune to pain, disease, aging and death.
What is boring about this?
It sounds like the very definition of a secret chief.
Is not the highest goal and reason to study Magick at all the hope of ascending human form, to cross the abyss, and become a Secret chief who dwells in the city of pyramids eternally beyond the limits of physical manifestation, yet can WILL to manifest himself physically in any form he WILL to accomplish collective aims of the brotherhood?
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@Froclown said
"Creating entire worlds to inhabit, linking our minds collectively, the ability to build all manor of bio-mechanical bodies and download our consciousness into them.
Nano-bots that can reshape anything according to our WILL.
Existing as a transient consciousness that is not tied down to this or that specific chunk of matter, in this short duration of space time. Being Immune to pain, disease, aging and death.
What is boring about this?
It sounds like the very definition of a secret chief.
Is not the highest goal and reason to study Magick at all the hope of ascending human form, to cross the abyss, and become a Secret chief who dwells in the city of pyramids eternally beyond the limits of physical manifestation, yet can WILL to manifest himself physically in any form he WILL to accomplish collective aims of the brotherhood?"
How old are you, anyway? You sound about 14.
Dan
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@Froclown said
"Is not the highest goal and reason to study Magick at all the hope of ascending human form, to cross the abyss, and become a Secret chief who dwells in the city of pyramids eternally beyond the limits of physical manifestation, yet can WILL to manifest himself physically in any form he WILL to accomplish collective aims of the brotherhood?"
Well, no, not really.
One might argue that something like that is one of the higher goals of mysticism for some beings, but certainly not of magick.
The highest goal of magick is to intersect the incarnated Divine essence with the fully human to discover and fulfill the function for which it entered voluntarily into incarnaton.
BTW, it does seem you have the idea that we are incarnate against our wills. Nobody is here that didn't choose to be. There is no trap. This is what we are setting out to do in this part of the big amusement park tour.
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I find it difficult to believe that you do not joyfully celebrate the body when you are on a Thelemic website. The freedom you speak about comes from not feeling imprisoned by anything, since you are truly who you are, and where you should be.
I flee from anything because of fear and pain, and a sense of helplessness.
How much pain does it take to wish to obliterate the body? A lot.
In L.V.X.,
chrys333 -
It is not so much a fleeing from as an advancing towards.
Is it not so that we act to improve the world so as to have fit bodies to incarnate into in the future?
Well, I say the body is a liability, that we can not so much be rid of the body, as become something that survives the body, that can use and abandon bodies at WILL.
That has a body in the Cyber world as well as the physical, that if the physical is damaged or killed, the SELF can move on to a new one.
The astral plane is not real it is an imaginary version of what the cyberspace network would make a reality.
We did not choose to incarnate as we are not before we are born, we might imagine that we had some sort of other world pre-birth existence but that is again an imaginary belief.
The mystics may believe with all their might that meditation and ritual gives them power or ascends them beyond death. but it is a lie.
Only by combining those practices with real technology can we hope te actually achieve those goals.
(If Crowley really was a magus or an Ipssissimus, where is he now, in whom deos he incarnate, prove that he lives in the astral plane beyond the abyss? yau can not, because it is not so!)
If We down load our minds to a cyber network however, we can prove that though the body lies, the soul lives on, both in the transcendent ever-present wireless network, and in the physical forms in which that consciousness might manifest itself.
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@Froclown said
"Is it not so that we act to improve the world so as to have fit bodies to incarnate into in the future?"
That is certainly one of our responsibilities, yes.
@Froclown said
"...that we can not so much be rid of the body, as become something that survives the body, that can use and abandon bodies at WILL. "
We already do this quite adequately through reincarnation.
@Froclown said
"The astral plane is not real it is an imaginary version of what the cyberspace network would make a reality. "
There are many on this board with direct experience of the astral plane; something that contradicts this assertion.
@Froclown said
"We did not choose to incarnate as we are not before we are born, we might imagine that we had some sort of other world pre-birth existence but that is again an imaginary belief. "
You are entitled to this belief, of course but, again, there are others on this board who know different.
@Froclown said
"The mystics may believe with all their might that meditation and ritual gives them power or ascends them beyond death. but it is a lie. "
Again, I'm curious how you can claim to know this (as opposed to merely believing it).
@Froclown said
"If We down load our minds to a cyber network however, we can prove that though the body lies, the soul lives on, both in the transcendent ever-present wireless network, and in the physical forms in which that consciousness might manifest itself."
Just a nit pick. It should be up load, not down load. If fact the process you are describing is called up loading.
Dan
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@ar said
"
Just a nit pick. It should be up load, not down load. If fact the process you are describing is called up loading."Well, actually, wouldn't it be relative? Whichever you believe to be the greater expanse would be downloading to the smaller and vice versa. If I was god, I would be downloading to cyberspace
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@kuniggety said
"Well, actually, wouldn't it be relative? Whichever you believe to be the greater expanse would be downloading to the smaller and vice versa. If I was god, I would be downloading to cyberspace
"Downloading is copying stuff to your machine. Uploading is copy to another machine. If your consciousness is copied/moved somewhere else that is, by definition, uploading, not downloading. Becoming possessed of another consciousness in you brain might be considered downloading, though
Dan
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@Chris Hanlon said
"I find it difficult to believe that you do not joyfully celebrate the body when you are on a Thelemic website."
Though I disagree with Froclown on some other issues, I think that Thelema can certainly be extended to this kind of "transhumanism." What is the body, after all? What would a computerized "form" be but just a different form?
Presuming they can work out all the bugs, of course...
Steve
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Yes I know upload to the network, but them download back into a body.
But really You are the software not the hardware, so really every time you transition it would be downloading, the net is just one sort of vessel to house your mind.
As far as people who claim they have direct experience or reincarnation, let them present their evidence. The human nervous system, and that includes the wet ware of the brain, is not geared to experience things correctly, it is constantly fooled into thinking it perceives what is not so. Thus when you say but I heard the voice of the spirit clearly, I fail to see how your self induced delusion and audio hallucinations prove their content is an aspect of the world, not just a misfire in your brain.
Sure Magick works, when I do the same rituals in the same way, I will most assuredly cross the same wires in my brain as others did, my brain will misfire in the same way, I will see similar hallucinations, have similar emotional responses, and meet with the same sort of "spirit". These are all neurological effects of engaging in symbolic acts in an artificial context, which are processed by the brain in unusual ways.
There is no need to postulate that the events I experience of the beings I may meet are actual, no matter how real it may seem to me at the time.
So if you show me under rigorous scientific examination that you can say catch a spirit on film, or measure its presence with some sort of device I will believe it is there. If you can open a portal to the astral plane and download an image from it, not from your brain, but via a machine directly from that plane, then we are on to something.
If can kill some one under laboratory controls, and have that soul transmigrate to a prepared body, and can show that this actually happened with some sort of test, then shall I have evidence of reincarnation.
But that people believe to have seen things, or have deep inner feelings that a thing they experienced possibly while high on drugs of under the influence as mystical trance states, or fatigue from long hours of Kabbalah application and study. No these accounts can not be trusted, the brain is easily confused and made to jump to conclusions, fabricate sensory data, and become fixated an notions it picks up twisting all information and perception to justify its fixation.
The method of Science is objective testing and doubt of the nervous systems conclusions.
The Aim of religion is to become more that human and released from the finality of bodily death.
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It's like Jim said. You signed up to reincarnate in a body, and nobody made you do it. You chose to do it to evolve. For whatever reason you have a body - you have a body. If you want to leave your body, you can do that at any time, but, obviously, you choose to keep it alive right now.
Malkuth is the flower of the tree. The roots rejoice in the flower and the flower venerates the roots (Kether). One does not live independently from the other. They live for one another as they are really one.
So, are you doing Thelemic rites? Or are you just on line to discuss what you want to discuss?chrys333
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@Froclown said
"Is it not so that we act to improve the world so as to have fit bodies to incarnate into in the future? "
I agree with you completely. But those will be biological bodies. That's what's necessary for us to do the particular evolution of which you speak.
"Well, I say the body is a liability, that we can not so much be rid of the body, as become something that survives the body, that can use and abandon bodies at WILL. "
I agree. But I think you're being short-sighted. I think you're trying to look at this in the microscopic time-frame of a single lifetime. For the whole of its existence, the human race has been departing old bodies more or less at will and assuming new ones through the process of birth. I agree that, as a species, we could refine that process quite a bit, but the basics are solidly in place.
"The astral plane is not real it is an imaginary version of what the cyberspace network would make a reality."
I disagree completely. The astral plane is not "imaginary" in the sense you appear to mean it (i.e., fictional or inauthentic). It's the World of Yetzirah, and quite genuine. Cyberspace in a tiny subset of the World of Yetzirah.
"We did not choose to incarnate as we are not before we are born, we might imagine that we had some sort of other world pre-birth existence but that is again an imaginary belief. "
I disagree completely. I have no doubt at all that this particular position of yours is simply based on your lack of lack of spiritual maturity and experience. If you apply yourself in the years to come, you likely will have the opportunity to confirm what I'm saying for yourself.
"The mystics may believe with all their might that meditation and ritual gives them power or ascends them beyond death. but it is a lie. "
I've died while in this present body, and reentered it. I've died many times that I remember roughly as clearly and reliably as I remember major events at work last week. (And there are countless occassions before that which I don't remember, just as there are thousands of days in my present incarnation that I don't particularly remember.) You aren't competent to say this is a lie: You're only competent to say that there is nothing in your experience which leads you to believe my experience can be true.
"If Crowley really was a magus or an Ipssissimus, where is he now, in whom deos he incarnate, prove that he lives in the astral plane beyond the abyss? yau can not, because it is not so!"
Not my place to prove it to you, and I don't think it's on the astral plane. I have a pretty clear idea, but technically it remains a theory.
"If We down load our minds to a cyber network however, we can prove that though the body lies, the soul lives on, both in the transcendent ever-present wireless network, and in the physical forms in which that consciousness might manifest itself."
Actually, it wouldn't prove any such thing. It would only prove that data can be digitized, and that digitized data can be played with a sufficiently sophisticated player. Your experient doesn't communicate a thing about the soul.
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@ar said
"
@Froclown said
"If We down load our minds to a cyber network however, we can prove that though the body lies, the soul lives on, both in the transcendent ever-present wireless network, and in the physical forms in which that consciousness might manifest itself."Just a nit pick. It should be up load, not down load. If fact the process you are describing is called up loading."
Hmm... I suppose there is room for uncertainty on usage here but FWIW I think you got it backwards, Dan.
The determining factor in upload/download is scaling and hierarchy, i.e., which of the devices is of greater capacity or higher on the networking hierarchical scale. Upload from local machine to server. Upload from PC to mainframe. Download from PC to handheld portable device or removable storage. Etc.
I'd consider the human body and (especially) psyche to have greater capacity and be higher on the hierarchical scale than any machine, so I'd say we would be downloading from wetware to hardware.
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@Froclown said
""It is not so much a fleeing from as an advancing towards"...
"But really You are the software not the hardware"..."
Just a quick note on what I think part of the problem lies. It seems that you think that you have to "abandon" this body, "advance towards" a place in the City of the Pyramids, etc. You don't really go anywhere, and you don't have to abandon anything. I think that it is more like your consciousness expands and realize that the City of the Pyramids is here right now.
This reminds me of this:
0. All the Power that ever was or will be is here now.
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I am a center of expression for the Primal Will-to-Good which eternally creates and sustains the Universe.
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Through me its unfailing Wisdom takes form in thought and word.
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Filled with Understanding of its perfect law, I am guided, moment by moment, along the path of liberation.
4. From the exhaustless riches of its Limitless Substance, I draw all things needful, both spiritual and material.
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I recognize the manifestation of the Undeviating Justice in all the circumstances of my life.
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In all things, great and small, I see the Beauty of the Divine Expression.
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Living from that Will, supported by its unfailing Wisdom and Understanding, mine is the Victorious Life.
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I look forward with confidence to the perfect realization of the Eternal Splendor of the Limitless Light.
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In thought and word and deed, I rest my life, from day to day, upon the sure Foundation of Eternal Being.
**10. The Kingdom of Spirit is embodied in my flesh. **
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"Quote:
If Crowley really was a magus or an Ipssissimus, where is he now, in whom deos he incarnate, prove that he lives in the astral plane beyond the abyss? yau can not, because it is not so!Not my place to prove it to you, and I don't think it's on the astral plane. I have a pretty clear idea, but technically it remains a theory. "
Could you share this theory? For purely encyclopaedic purposes.
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You can have the subjective impression of anything You can have death and rebirth hallucinations, and no matter how clearly you experienced those hallucinations, no matter how stuck into position the switch it your brain that keeps you from doubting those experiences, it still remains an hallucination.
I have a poster of an image that looks like the colored wheels are rotating, and it looks very clearly like they actually rotate, no matter how hard I stare, still the keep swirling. They only reason I know the image is still is that it is printed on paper. My eyes can not still it, in fact the why my eyes work is what makes it seem to move.
I have done rituals, I have experienced revelations, out of body experiences, astral travels, communication with spirits, Identity dissociations, and many strange psychological phenomena. And I clearly can discern the cause of these phenomena in my mind and how the brain processes certain information, and how the ritual elements are the cause of this unusual processing of information.
Thus I study magick not because I believe the content of the dreams, hallucinations and other effects, but to understand the link between ritual and alterations in brain function. Why does meditation cause the part of the brain that processes identity to stop functioning. How exactly does evocation project an aspect of identity on a pattern or smoke on a black mirror under candle flicker.
And can we model these effects in computer systems, can we trigger them with direct stimulation of the cortex, and other important questions in developing a complete understanding of brain function and the technology to replicate it.
You also assume a computer must be mechanical, we can clone biological parts, even create whole new DNA sequences to produce the wet ware we need and conjoin that biological material with mechanical systems and silicon integrated circuits.
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I delayed answering this one until I had a little more time, because you raise a number of topics worth addressing. It's quite an excellent list of things people misunderstand, and provides an excellent chance to correct wrong views.
I want to start with a sentence near the end of your post. It needs to be addressed at the beginning to avoid repetition:
"The method of Science is objective testing and doubt of the nervous systems conclusions."
I agree with the first half of this sentence, but not the second. You've imposed your own standard. I would agree with that as a desirable condition in some specific experiments in some particular fields of science, but certainly not as a generalization. For example, in most conditions of cognitive sciences (of which magick and mysticism are two examples), it is precisely the data as passing through and interpreted by the human nervous system that we want. You can't generalize that scientific method necessarily excludes "conclusions" of the human nervous system.
A second point I want to make at the beginning is that you are turning out to be a spokesman for materialism - that is, for adopting the unfortunate "matter vs. spirit" exclusive duality of the Medieval Roman Catholic Church which became the foundation of the materialism movement in conventional Western science through most of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries.
This is neither a very scientific view, nor the position of much of modern physics. For example, we have the same basis for postulating that spiritual (i.e., non-material) things exist as we have for postulating that material things exist. In both cases, the evidence is of the human senses and the interpretation of sensory impressions in the brain. This doesn't give any a priori leverage to one over the other.
One could, for example, just as easily argue that there is no such thing as matter in the normal way we understand it, and that only spirit, i.e., consciousness, exists, which merely registers an impression of matter as a convenient way of organizing and managing various experiences. I'm not asserting that this is true any more than I'm asserting that the other is true - they're both useful models for interpreting phenomena in certain situations. I'm saying that the root bases for presuming matter exists and presuming spirit exists are the same.
Besides, physical science deals all the time with entirely unseen things that can't be measured in any direct way but only by the consequences of their presumed existence.
A third point I want to make is that, to be "scientific," there is no reason for limiting that word to the current institutionalized bastions of science. I'm sure you know fully well that institutional science's interpretations constantly evolve (albeit slowly most of the time) as new data and new points of view are incorporated. Today's scientific certainty is tomorrow's "crazy old idea." That's the way science is supposed to work, and the way it actually works.
Spiritual practice - if approached correctly - is every bit as much science as the institutionalized bastions of academic and industrial science. Tibetan Buddhism has been exceedingly scientific for nearly its entire history. And when Crowley spoke of "the method of science" it was actually a misnomer, because what he really meant (as demonstrated in the approaches taught in his system) was the method of empiricism. That is precisely what we employ.
@Froclown said
"As far as people who claim they have direct experience or reincarnation, let them present their evidence."
I'm very pleased that you correctly used the word "evidence." Most people don't know the difference between "evidence" and "proof," but this sentence suggests that you do know the difference.
There are many kinds of evidence. In most situations, the very best is first person witness testimony. This isn't the whole picture, but often is the best place to start regardless of all the problems inherent in it.
It's not just our legal system, but also some of the most respected sources in mysticism, which hold this view. Patanjali in Yoga Sutras I:6 describes the best kind of proof as pratyaksha (direct experience), the second best as anumana (correct inference from what you already know), and the third best as aptavakya (the direct perception of qualified witnesses).
So it is most definitely evidence of reincarnation that there are many who testify from their direct experience. Whether this evidence, combined with other pro and con evidence, constitutes proof is a separate matter. It is, nonetheless, evidence - and evidence of a very high quality. The only higher quality of evidence would be your own direct experience.
People who have witnessed something can, of course, be wrong about what they have seen. But they are far more likely to be right than somebody who wasn't there and hasn't bothered to gather any direct evidence on the matter.
"The human nervous system, and that includes the wet ware of the brain, is not geared to experience things correctly, it is constantly fooled into thinking it perceives what is not so."
You raise valid points that need to be taken into consideration. They are elements of the experiment, matters to regard in design, implementation, and interpretation.
But, in thinking about your remarks today I realized that your conclusions seem to come not only from the idea that the nervous system can distort things, but from some unstated idea that these distortions are random or otherwise unknowable. All sorts of scientific processes employ distorting elements and concurrently compensate for the distortion. For example, you might have also cited the fact that all human vision - everything perceived through the human eye - is seen through a lens, and lenses distort what is seen. However, the science of optics knows how to compensate for particular lens distortions, so that doesn't matter so much.
The M.M.P.I. - the most meticulously researched and documented and used psychiatric inventory - was originally normalized against Middle America mental patients in the 1950s. If you give the test to a Latin American native, two scales - 6 and 8 - will pretty much always be abnormally high, throwing the entire test into a "probably not valid" state by the normal way of reading it. But we know that this is due to specific cultural variants that do not infer psychopathology, and we know that the artificial elevation in both cases is about 10 points, so we can easily adjust how we look at the results. There is distortion, but it is predictable distortion.
So, for one thing, many of your points seem to presume that existing distortion is unknowable or unpredictable. Much of the distortion is quite predictable. Therefore, we can adjust for it.
There is another point to make on this. The only alternative to having people think for themselves and rely on their own experiences is to have some external authority tell them what the truth is. We take a particularly strong stand against this. It is far more useful to have people make the kind of errors that come from thinking for themselves and relying on their own experience, than to make the kind of mistakes that come from, say, the government issuing a Truth Manual. We can deal with the former problem much more easily, case-by-case, than we can with the latter.
"my brain will misfire in the same way"
I found it curious that you said "misfire" rather than just "fire." You are, a priori, assuming there is error. Your statement was quite good in most ways except for that one word choice. Consistent action under controlled conditions can cause the brain to fire in a particular way - agreed! But why presume it is a "misfire"? (If it were, then there is either organic brain disease, or the random misfire isn't consistent.) ... Just an observation.
"These are all neurological effects of engaging in symbolic acts in an artificial context, which are processed by the brain in unusual ways."
Why unusual? When the organ repeatedly responds to the same stimulus with the same response, it seems to be the usual way of doing so, no?
"There is no need to postulate that the events I experience of the beings I may meet are actual, no matter how real it may seem to me at the time."
Agreed! Oh, heavens, definitely agreed! Don't postulate it. Investigate it.
The most common "screening test" for such results is to test them. Do the fruits (information provided, transformations that seem to occur, etc.) actually produce appropriate results in the practical world? Was information brought back that can be confirmed and that was not evidently available to the magician by any other likely conventional means?
"So if you show me under rigorous scientific examination that you can say catch a spirit on film, or measure its presence with some sort of device I will believe it is there."
You are asking that non-material things be registered by devices that were created to measure material things. That's an ill-conceived test.
The basic nature of "spirit" is that it isn't material in the day-to-day sense of the word "matter."
There actually have been a lot of experiments done that claim to have trapped physical traces of nonphysical beings on photo plates and the like. I have never felt competent to judge these studies and have filed them in my brain as encouraging curios. But the main point that has always appeared true to me is that "matter" (in the broadest, non workaday sense of the word) has impact on other matter on the same plane. You need to investigate Yetziratic phenomena with Yetziratic measuring instruments, of which the trained human mind is the best such device known to exist.
PS - Under the conditions you itemize, why would you then believe? Belief isn't necessary in the face of demonstrable fact. In fact, it would be silly to believe what was evident to your senses. Belief should be reserved for things that are not evident to your senses.
"If you can open a portal to the astral plane and download an image from it, not from your brain, but via a machine directly from that plane, then we are on to something."
See, you just don't even understand what the "astral plane" is. I was doing fine with your sentence until you put in your restrictions because the specific machine that serves as a portal to the astral plane and brings an image thence into physical form is the human mind. It does it all the time.
You might as well say that you want a machine which captures human thought on tape without involving a human mind.
"If can kill some one under laboratory controls, and have that soul transmigrate to a prepared body, and can show that this actually happened with some sort of test, then shall I have evidence of reincarnation. "
The Tibetans, for centuries, have done something similar to this. The aging Dalai Lama indicates generally where and when he will be reborn and provides specific tests of recognition. His senior dudes go to the right place to find a child born at the right time, apply the tests, and greet their returned leader.
The method for providing "a prepared body" is called sexual reproduction. That's how the soul reanchors into human experience. It happens all the time. (Most people practice their part in this manufacturing process every chance they get.)
"But that people believe to have seen things, or have deep inner feelings that a thing they experienced possibly while high on drugs of under the influence as mystical trance states, or fatigue from long hours of Kabbalah application and study."
I would agree that there are some states that make it less likely that someone is going to have and correctly interpret an objective experience. However, in lumping "mystical trance states" into this list, you seem to be showing that you don't know much about what "mystical trance states" really are. I would guess that you think they are states that take one further from the perception of physical reality. Many of them, though, take one deeper into the correct perception of physical reality.
One who is trained to identify and filter out the effects of emotions and thought on the brain, and then to filter out the impact of sensory impressions except for those to which attention is specifically being directed, are in a far better place to make objective observations than someone who has reactive emotion and rigid preconception dominating their filtering of physical impressions and drawing conclusions from that hodge-podge.
"The Aim of religion is to become more that human and released from the finality of bodily death."
No - not released from the finality of bodily death. Released from the illusion that the one inhabiting the body ever dies. It is highly desirable to change bodies after several decades in the same way that it is desirable to change one's socks every now and then.
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I think you fail to understand that the brain is a material devise that stores and processes patterns of semantic associations (information).
That what you call spirit is a process that occurs in the function of the brain matter as it is stimulated by material patterns, which the brain processes by way of innate and learned associations of information.
You propose that there is a world of software which has no material medium. That is that to stick with the computer analogy, you believe your hard drive is backed up is anther dimension the astral plane, and can manifest itself in another computer at the destruction of the current one.
It may comfort you to believe in the spirit world and that your Atman can travel through the ether and attach itself to an unborn child, but this does not happen.
However, With advanced technology we can make these dreams of an astral plane, afterlife and mind backed up in machines a Reality.