Email to Mark Wilkerson
Drop in the Ocean
     Index     
Return to:   Site   or   Emails   Description

20120907               Death

To: Mark Wilkerson ejtonefan@gmail.com
From: Scott Sinnock ssinnock@netzero.com 10:03pm, September 7, 2012
Subject: Re: Soul

Of course it was a serious question. A very serious one, though perhaps a bit rhetorical too. Thank you for your definition of a soul. I love your metaphor of the drop returning to the ocean. I am a geomorphologist so I put the drop in the river of one's life, as Buddhists do oft also. Does the drop know it is still a drop when it mingles back with the "one"? I know I am a drop now, and I love it. I am not so sure I will know I am a drop after I re-enter the ocean, but if I don't, who cares? Not me, for I am no longer. A huge part of me, the only part I can know, says Descartes, is the ME part, the distinct part, the different than EVERYTHING else part, the "I think therefore I am" part, with emphasis on the "I" rather than the "think". I suspect this uniqueness is inseparable from my body, inseparable from the continuity of glucose metabolism, the "self-perpetuating chemical reaction". What survives its demise?

I have no experience that tells me what happens after death, unless you count the experiences of someone else telling me what they think or even "know" happens then. I have no experience of talking with anyone who claims to have seen let alone been on "the other side", who is not in my judgment, perhaps wrong, a charlatan. Stories abound, some quite lovely, some quite awful -- heaven and hell; some quite neutral, nirvana perhaps. Wars are fought defending the "truth" of those stories, though it doesn't seem quite right that they all could be right. So it seems to me, none can claim an authority beyond conjecture. You mentioned the "collective soul" in your definition, but in the conditional tense, using "may be". I am also struggling with the idea of the "collective mind", the "species memory" and its relationships with language, writing, and now binary recording. That is a huge "hard drive" (another of your metaphors I picked up) from which to select things for attention in MY soul or MY brain, but select I MUST, for the "knowledge" stored in written and digital format is far beyond my ken's ability to know. But by judicious selection (which EVERYONE employs), I can learn from the "collective" and focus, specialize my attention to a tiny subset where I just might be able to add a little more to the collective (actually I can't help but add a little, it's just not always what I might think I'm adding; each life, each action has its influences, its effects). Does or can the "individual and unique" soul "know" the "collective knowledge" in some way, in life or, conjecture solicited here, after death? If so, how then is it distinguished as "individual and unique"? Does the drop still know it is a drop? These aren't new questions; just ones that never seem to go away. Many great minds have addressed them each offering a different answer, so I conclude that no one "knows" or at least no one knows how to clearly tell anyone else about it.

So "Yes" that mortality thing; that ole' unstoppable steam engine of death barrelin' down the tracks at us. I don't know what happens then, but I do know it's not here yet, so I have more of this unbelievable gift of awareness, consciousness in your definition, to relish. After that, well, I am pretty sure I will hold my own as I negotiate with St. Peter at the pearly gates about which way I will go next, even though I will not shy from asking him, even, "Are you sure?".

Damn, this used up all my typing energy today, and I was just in the process of typing up a long journal entry when I read your email, but quid pro quo, dialectic is probably better than trying to rehash old ideas, though I do want to type up enough to see if you think it's worth it. So there is lots of time to both banter and digitize.
                                             
Rnd*800 = 208 days ago = 19 Feb 2012
20120219