What Of Your Essence?

WendyDarling

That is profound questioning. I am not sure that I know either, but I will point a few things out.

There are destructive forces in the universe and there are constructive forces in the universe. If what is known was once unknown then it could be the case that some things that have become known(through a constructive force) may become unknown again(through a destructive force).

You could say from this that everything has its place including essences - but that would be saying that a place is only temporary . . .

. . . and that an essence can fade . . .

In the realm of the divine, I think that an essence would last forever - but as Arcturus Descending is known for saying - I could be wrong here.

Arcturus Descending

I could nearly guarantee that Shakespeare would be uttering those same words in ten thousand years time.

gib

If your essence is constant - that means it lasts forever.

As for the gib you’ve identified - you appear to be saying that he will have changed. Are you saying that the gib you’ve identified is different to the essence of gib? In other words - the gib that you are conscious of is different to the essence of gib. Am I perhaps misunderstanding what you are saying?

encode_ decode,

lol It’s nice that I can be known for saying something. :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s a good thing to remind ourselves that we do not have all the answers. The more we learn, the more we realize that we knew even less.

Arcturus Descending

Still there is a forever and it is the place where the constant is . . .

I am sure you are known for saying a few things. People with character usually are.

But why do we not have all the answers? Just kidding. It does seem like the more we realize the less we know.

Still I am on this essence thing - I feel there is a part of us which is permanent.

Exactly and that permanent is eternal…life after death.

WendyDarling

Like reincarnation?

I always think to myself - OK we are here now - so there is no reason to believe that we have not been here before or we wont be here again.

Like a rebirth.

Further thoughts

I have been thinking about this more - actually I have been thinking about this for years - since I was a child.

I don’t know whether it is my imagination but I have sensed over time that some people are offended by the word reincarnation, so I tend to not typically use it. If I have offended anyone then all I can do is offer an apology to each who were offended. This I have noticed for many years.

I want to expand what I mean here - and keep in mind that this is just what I think.

I always think to myself - OK we are here now - so there is no reason to believe that we have not been here before or we wont be here again.

Like a rebirth. Well not exactly a rebirth or maybe that is what I mean.

I mean that there is a part of us which stays the same forever. It is a part that helps us to reference ourselves after our awareness emerges. This part does not need our physical body to exist. It is timeless. After our physical body dies and we fall into the sleep of death - our final sleep for this life - this eternal part of us goes on.

Not wanting to sound all spooky but eventually this eternal part finds a new host and we are born again - into the same universe? I am not certain - Into the same dimension? This I am also not certain of - after we die, we live again? I can feel it - hopefully I am right about it.

And this what I feel - well - maybe that is my essence.

Well I for one am not offended. :mrgreen:

You are right but the how this rebirth occurs is maddening in its shroud of mystery. Part of me believes that we live one life over and over until we get it right, another part says we live many lives in different host bodies, and the last part says both many repeated lives in many bodies, but why?

Were we an alien race without any typically physical components? Did we invade Earth, homo sapient and overrun it by sheer force of our wills, our mental prowess?

Evolution does not connect all the dots or make any sense regarding cognitive development, the great sudden advances in cognitive abilities nor does it look as if that will ever be rectified. We could be like the alien race in the movie, The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, and that doesn’t sit well with me.

Why are our memories erased, kept Earth-bound? I have astral projected three times while fully awake and this realm is the only physical realm so far, but there are more realms, near a dozen in all that I am aware of. I would like to astral travel more but my psych. medications keep me too drugged up.

Oh, it seems I forgot to take into account…time. How could you be you multiple times? How are you able to enter the time differentials of different realms? Yah, there’s that mystery too.

encode_decode

But can we in actuality say that THERE IS A FOREVER?
How can we know this?
So, if there is not, then our constant what we refer to as essence survives until Death.

Why would anyone be offended that others believe or see reincarnation? Anything that can appear, rationally speaking, to be plausible or possible can be both plausible and possible.
Those who ARE offended by the concept perhaps are/may be just too steeped in their own beliefs to allow for other possibilities and openness.

It’s not as though those who see the Possibility of R. are also saying that they can see witches flying on brooms in the sky.

Why? I think that it is because our brains are much too puny (have not evolved), despite the brilliance of some, to take it all in at one time ~~ and to understand it. Besides, I intuit that the Universe is also a process like humanity is.
Anyway, perhaps an Intelligent Universe realized how some would love and be amazed at the mysteries of life.

Is every experience which we have ~~~ based on “reality” I mean real reality? lol
I also feel that way at times especially when I am experiencing only being and stillness?

Is that based on religious/spiritual belief or actual knowing (can there be such a thing?)

What I’m saying is that the identification of an object is not the same as the object itself. The object can go through change while you still identify it as the same object (which isn’t necessarily wrong). Identifications are like labels. If you have a ship and you identify it as “the ship of Theseus,” and the ship has a plank replaced, you still identify it as the ship of Theseus. The label remains the same even though the object has changed. But this doesn’t mean the label is wrong. We decide whether the object is the same object (has the same essence) by applying these labels. Sameness of essence doesn’t have to depend on sameness of form or structure. It might depend on continuity, or appearance, or function, or any number of other things.

Furthermore, the label itself might change over time in a way I’m not aware of. When I say “Yep, still gib,” 10 years after the last time I looked in the mirror (that’s a long time to go without looking in a mirror), I may have a different concept in mind of “gib” than I did 10 years ago, but if I don’t remember what my concept was 10 years ago and I think it’s the same as the concept I have now, I will still tell myself “it’s the same gib.”

gib

Thanks for answering, that is interesting the way you have put it. What you are saying is very meaningful . . . I have missed our exchanges . . .

It makes perfect sense to me what you have written. It actually took my mind back a few years - if I remember correctly I think I approached something similar in mathematics . . . or maybe it was physics . . . but yes you are right in this regard . . .

Hmm . . . I understand what you mean. There is something else that I have this feeling inside me about . . . I found something today from a week or two ago - I am not certain how long but that does not matter so much. I am not sure how many people feel this way either . . .

I guess I was thinking about some central reference point here - I am not too sure. All I know is there is something deep down that I feel that determines who I am at my most basic - without any change taking place - I am not sure whether it could be classed as physical either.

From what you have written and what I feel - I sense a couple of different things going on . . . I totally understand what you have written and totally agree with what you have written and in fact I really enjoyed reading what you have written too for that matter - no ifs or buts about it . . .

A meaningful exchange gib . . . I only wish my response was as good as yours . . . I would be very interested in more of your thoughts . . .

:smiley:

Man, if you only knew how easily my ego can be inflated… :laughing:

I’m sure there’s a way of construing the identity of a thing such that we can say it remains constant. I think, however, that constant would have to be on a more abstract level. I think for sure our physical constitution changes, as does that of every other physical thing. The constancy of things can’t be in their structure or form or material content. I’m sure it can’t be mental either. If anything changes, it’s the mind. There’s not a single experience I can imagine that stays in my mind constantly without changing. Maybe constancy lies in continuity. If we know that a thing started out as A and gradually became B, we could say that A and B share a common identity. The butterfly is the caterpillar it once was. What would be constant in that case would be the thing’s history. It’s not like the butterfly can change so much it ceases to have come from the caterpillar, as if its whole past has changed.

Another thing that might preserve the identity of a thing might be a range of states (or properties, or structure, or whatever). So suppose I buy a new hammer. It’s all nice and shiny, full of bling, no rust. But over time it might accumulate rust. This might wear a bit at its integrity. But so long as its integrity remains within a reasonable range of functionality (i.e. it doesn’t break when I hit a nail with it) we can say it remains within the range require to be a functional hammer, my hammer. But if one day, it got so rusty that it just broke apart, it clearly would have falling outside the range of acceptable change, and you would say your hammer got destroyed, it no longer exists.

This idea of range works well with another theory of identity (not mine). Some philosophers say that we identify a thing based on its essential properties. This is in opposition to a things peripheral properties. For example, what makes a car a car? Is it the color? No, because I could paint my car a different color and I would still say it’s my car. Is it the noise it makes? No because if the muffler was damaged and it started making a loud noise, I would still say it’s my car. These would be peripheral properties. What would make the car essential to being the car? Maybe its form? Well, it could change form a little, maybe incur a dent from an accident, and I would still call it my car, but if it got crushed in a compactor or got blown apart in an explosion, would I still call it my car in that case? Maybe the form is an essential properties (i.e. without it, the car is no longer the car I identify it to be) but it requires change beyond a certain range of states in order for that property to be said to be gone.

There’s also function. So long as a thing performs the same function, we could say, it preserve the same identity. In my computer, there’s an adder (circuitry for performing addition). If I tell it: compute 2 + 2, it will tell me: 4. This circuitry obvious degrades with time. It gets worn from the heat, from corrosion, from physical bumps my computer incurs, but even after several years it still computes 4 when I give it 2 + 2. It’s not like the result slowly changes with the degradation, like after a year it starts computing 4.00001, after 5 years, 4.01, and so forth. So we could say that the circuitry remains an adder so long as the function doesn’t change, but again, function is an abstraction.

In any case, whatever it is that makes a thing constant, it has to be abstract. Physics is always in a state of flux. Even solid objects like rocks are constantly undergoing change when you look at them at the subatomic level. None of its particles remain still. But they do tend to reacquire their prior states. That’s how atoms are so stable. Though the electrons, protons, and neutrons that constitute the atom are always undergoing change and movement, they tend to push each other back to their prior states, or keep each other relatively close to the same state. On a macroscopic level, this gives the impression of a constant, an object that just sits there doing nothing. Maybe the fact of the particles always remaining close to this state is like the range of possible states a thing can move within while still being consider the same thing. As far as the mind goes, I would say there is way to much flux there to identify any constant, but there is recurrence. In order to identify a constant, the mind has to bring to consciousness the identity of the thing, but it’s not like that identity remains in consciousness permanently. Once the thing is out of sight, we stop thinking about its identity, but it comes back to mind later when the thing appears again. That’s recurrence, like the state of the atom recurring from the mutual influence of its particles. It might also be like function: though the neural circuitry of my brain obvious changes over time, the concepts it computes might be exactly the same. If we want to define constancy based on something more abstract–like continuity, essential properties, a range of values–then that too requires mental identification (abstraction is, by definition, mental) which is to say it can’t be there when we’re not thinking of it and so only makes sense as a recurring thing.

In the end, however, I don’t think all this matters that much. I’m quite satisfied to say that my favorite coffee mug is the same coffee mug I’ve had for years. Somehow, this works even if I know the particles that make up the mug are constantly changing and the mug itself slowly degrades over time. The reason why we need to think of certain things as constant seems to be met in most cases, including our identification of people, not least of which is ourselves. I definitely think it’s one of these things–continuity, function, range of states–that we go on when we identify things, including who we are, and so long as this works, there must be something we are anchoring our identifications onto even if that thing isn’t literally constant. In other words, I think there is a way to resolve this problem philosophically (which means you probably do get to say you have a constant ‘self’ within) but I would veer away from imagining that thing as literally an object that literally doesn’t change. It’s got to be something more abstract.

Hi gib,

…and here I thought that you were possibly one person (not the only one of course) in here who did not have that negative kind of Ego. :evilfun:
I am so appalled and disappointed in you, gib. :stuck_out_tongue:

But IS one’s essence their Self? I thought that it was established that it was not.

I agree with you insofar as that thing not being literally, an object, but something abstract that is difficult to name and difficult to see.

I think of it more as the scent on the rose but I remember having a discussion with someone in here about that scent being an actual thing because of what it consists of/comes from and I can understand that ~~ but still, to me, we can have a sensation of it - that is its constant essence until it is dead.

I guess it all comes down to what one’s perception of a thing entails…solid or ethereal. Can a thing be ethereal and still be called a thing.

I’m like an accordion. Sometimes I’m inflated, other times deflated. Your disappointment deflates me. :smiley:

One’s essence is what one is. It’s how you define “me”. There’s a subtle difference between how we define a thing, including ourselves, and the actual instantiation of a thing. We can define things that don’t even exist. We have a definition for Santa Clause. We know what Santa is. Thus, we can project an essence of “Santa Clause” without seeing him or believing he exists. Unless we’re able to attribute our understanding of what a thing is to an actually existing thing, the essence is “without a home” so to speak. But if we do attribute it to something that exists, then the thing and its essence become one. The essence makes it into a thing. It becomes the thing’s identity. So we have a concept of ourselves, and by itself it’s just our essence, but because we experience ourselves as existing, we attribute this concept to yourselves and we become our essence.

Sure, the word “thing” doesn’t necessarily connote solid. We say that “government” is a thing–an abstract thing. They key is: can we attribute an essence to it? That’s the same as asking: do we have a concept of it. Concepts are what make things into “things” for us. The human mind seems quite capable of form concepts of abstract things, so I’d say there’s no problem there.

An ice cube is a thing. Heat it up and it turns to water. Heat it up again and it turns to steam. Steam is ethereal. And it is
also a thing because it has physicality. You may say steam cannot be a thing because it is not solid. However solidity is an
illusion because atoms which are the fundamental constituents of every object are only ninety nine per cent empty space

Steam is not ethereal. Ethereal means ghostly, means something there occupying space but poses no resistance to objects moving through it. Usually invisible. It’s like the stuff physicists used to believe in before Einstein’s theories, an ether permeating all space and serving as a “fixed” background for all motion.

Yes, this makes more sense. In fact, I’ll add that the few points at which there is matter in solids (i.e. the particles) are more like waves than tiny billiard balls, making it questionable whether there’s something there at all.

I just can not get my head around it all . . . everybody is making sense in one way or another . . .

I know that we are all trying to talk about the same thing here - the problem I have is that there are many times when I agree with views that differ from each other. So I am just going to throw something in the mix to ponder. Sometimes the views are similar with slight differences and sometimes views are entirely different and all still make sense. I hope that makes some kind of sense. The problem I have with what I just said comes down to contrast.

Now to my main point . . .

So lets say we have the following definitions of slots:

O = Our Origin - Never Changing
B = Our Biological - Ever Changing
C = Our Conscious - Ever Changing

I propose that we each have an origin(O) - a lot like the origin on a graph - except that we don’t need any dimensions for the definition of our origin - it is purely a starting point of sorts. I further posit that each of us has a biological(B) which is easy for us to agree on. And lastly we should be able to agree on each of us having a conscious(C).

Our O is never changing and everything after this point changes so we can say that:

O < B < C

In other words; O leads to B which leads to C ~ because ~ O is less than B which is less than C.

Keep in mind that I am only using the ‘~’ symbol as a separator to make it easier to read.

Where does the essence fit into this logic?

Is it ~ O or B or C?

Else ~ Does it fit somewhere between one of these three slots?

Or else ~ Is it a combination of all three?

Somebody please let me know if this logic is not making sense - I just want to make sure I am on a similar page if not the same page as everybody . . .

I just can not get this essence out of my mind. I was thinking that O(Our Origin) was our essence and is ethereal and eternal - allowing for life after death.
Another way to look at it is that Our Origin is like a Seed to be planted into the Garden Of Life - and therefore our essence - in my mind anyway . . .

:-k

Any thoughts?

I agree with all this with one change that your consciousness has an unchanging aspect of O as well that occurs before it’s placed/born in a physical body/shell so an OC, original consciousness,then the biological consciousness would be the BC, the changing aspect which comes after the O and the OC.

Hey encode, what does it mean to say O is less than B, which is less than C?

I agree that our origin never changes, but that’s a specific case of: the past never changes. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Change requires time, so if we’re considering something that happens at a single point in time, it can’t change.

Then again, you could consider an event that extends through time–your birth could be said to take several ours, you were hardly born in an instant–and in that case, you would see change. By definition, an event involves change (you wouldn’t call a rock just sitting there for hours an “event”). But it’s still change that’s “fixed” in the sense that it’s in the past, and whatever change it went through, it’s now written in the stone of the past. This seems to be because calling it an “event” means that we’re thinking of it as a whole, not a part that we know will change as more of the event unfolds.

The past (time in general) is an abstraction. Moreover, you could say that the past keeps changing in the sense that more keeps getting added to it. Today, the past does not contain what I will do this evening. Tomorrow it will. Nonetheless, once something becomes part of the past, it ceases to change. The question in my mind is: is the past real?