[freddie]

Originally Posted by marina

We have to die. That’s clear. And Earth will die , as a separate planet , when the sun becomes a red giant . In five billion years or so. It will swallow the Earth , with Mercury and Venus , and throw them out in a halo of gas , and the gas may condense into stars again……..but all the time , we’ll be losing energy .
In the end , the whole universe will run down.... It will expand too far, it will thin to nothing , nothing but endless dark and cold.
But there’s another possibility. Astronomers say so , and we can hope…....At some point of expansion , the universe will rush together again . Over billion of years , time will run backwards , until all matter shrinks to a singularity . And then the Big Bang will happen again and everything will emerge again , utterly different but still in motion . And in some sense we shall still be there ( forre , and nath , and Amber , and freddie , Killa ,and Rachel and fudge…..) and I , as energy , completely transformed.
We were stardust once. We could be stars again.
Somehow we shall shine for other living things . Others will look for a meaning in us.

Shameless rip-off from wonderful Maggie Gee *Light Years*

There are still those 2 theories about our universe, yes. Endless expanssion untill there's nothing left but fundamental bits and radiation floating around empty space, or a reversal of the expanssion we're been experiencing for the last 15 bilion years and merger of all the material of the Universe into one single point in time and space. This second idea could be named the theory of a self-maintained universe. I'd mean the energy in THIS universe is ever present and works in constant cycles.
But we can't forget one fact, when we're talking about these two theories: they limit themselves on this universe and this dimension inside this one particular universe. There are no reasons currently that would deny existence of countless other universes and countless dimensions within them. Our particular universe, along with it's 4 fundamental forces and defined (linear) time and space is just one layer of reality. The only one we can comprehend as mortal creatures.

Originally Posted by spyretto

[i] Why just Earth? If there are other species in other populated planets our souls can reincarnate into I don't see why I should limit ourselves. I could be an orc, an elf or a dwarf, extraterrestrial in any case!

Of course. I only mentioned Earth as an example. As I said IMO, souls move from solar system to solar system, but only in cluster, with mutual agreement of every individual within a cluster.


In response to Nath and all of you who say that life after death is not really LIFE as we know it anymore and you'd miss the touching, kissing, holding people you love etc. I completely understand you. It's not a very appealing thought to me either - I'd never want to lose my earhly self, if it was on me to decide. But at the same instance I recognize a possibility of something grander out there. Something beyond my comprehension, yet just as satisfying as hugging someone we love. We don't really like change - at least not up to an extent of our physical body being gone. We can't imagine interaction without touching and feeling with our physical selves. I'd say our view-point is limited to what we know and feel comfortable with. Like caged animals, who've never experienced the wild... or rather in our case - have experienced it but have since forgotten temporarily.
The way I figure things: all the emotions we feel here on earth, that manifest themselves through our central nervous system are a manifestation of our REAL emotions, we feel as a soul - the nervous system and the brain is mimicking and trying to convey what the soul feels in it's pure form - when not trapped inside a body in one of the reincarnation cycles. But the problem is - what we feel through our physical bodies is just a good proximity of feelings in their pure original form. I'd imagine that what a soul feels is basically the same, yet thousand times more intense. Some people who narrowly escaped death reported experiencing emotions like that in their pure form - reports like that are imo the most interestin of all NDEs. These people said they only realized how true love feels when they were completely submerged and bathed with love of all it's soul peers, who they're close to in the astral world and only learned about the true horror of sorrow and regret when they actually felt everything they've done wrong to people in their life-times. On this point I actually agree with the article that the bad part of death is actually us self-evaluating ourselves in agony of guilt and pain that can last for quite a while. If anyone read Jean Paul Sartre's Behind Closed Doors - there's an interesting thought expressed in that novel - Hell doesn't consist of chains, eternal fires, sulphur lakes and Lucifer trying to stick a hot chilly pepper inside your orifice of choice. Every person creates a hell of its own. Hell is people we hurt, fears we never overcame and short-comings we have as human beings.