What will you be doing in a Million Years?

This question is primarily aimed at people that believe in an afterlife. For those that don't believe in an afterlife, the simple answer would be, " I'll be dead won't I?"

I am working on a blog post that kind of highlights the lack of imagination most people have about the afterlife. Your average Christian when asked this question will reply with, "I'll be with Jesus or I'll be in heaven." Never really giving a thought to the details about what that might entail. When you probe further, the average person will give a description that includes wings, harps, clouds and streets of gold. Which other than being pretty naive and biblically inaccurate, is pretty boring.

When you get right down to it, eternity can be somewhat mind boggling. Before I give my interpretation of eternity, I was curios to how some ATSer's might answer this question. I have faith that you guys will be able to give a few more creative answers than I usually get.

P.S. This question/thread isn't really just aimed at Christians it is for anyone that believes in an afterlife. For myself I believe in an immortal soul and reincarnation. So anyone from any background feel free to chime in.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.

I don't know what I will be doing, but I think I will be somewhere out there.
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/34a017228a4c.jpg[/atsimg]

reply to post by wisintel


This question, along with some other nagging things, is what made me really question my faith.

My pastor would always go on about "streets paved with gold!" and "ruling and reigning with Jesus!". I asked "ruling what?". He looked dumbfounded.

In my head, I started thinking that maybe it's all part of a grand Jesus Army recruitment plan. You get to heaven, get issued your "holy fatigues" and get deployed to the universal version of Afghanistan. It's just as plausible as any other made up story.

But to answer your question...I would say existing as a lamp in a doctor's office in some parallel dimension.

reply to post by wisintel


Well since you placed the timer at 1,000,000 complete universal rotations (lol circles/spheres rule: yes) I would be returning from the LAST BATTLE OR THE ONE ON THE CURRENT HORIZON w/ all who fought to eliminate the nebula- stars- planets-dimensions universe of the evol 1z.

Upon arrival I will locate my loved 1z in their heavenly placements and reaquaint with them all after being away and not seeing them since they were welcomed into the gates or pearls of Heaven and I was not, due to me being INTENTIONALLY filled with the evol to penetrate the evol fortresses IN TRIANGLE FORMATION.

I would then report to the FATHERS SON and give update on current evol eradication and methods used in casting process of SATANS MINION WITHIN realm OF NO LIGHT and hopefully receive my cleansing from the LAMB to be welcome for eternia IN THE REALM OF HIS MOST HOLY.

Afterwards I will go to the FATHER and return the FALLENZ energies CAPTURED in which he created FOR I NO NEED TO POSSESS THIER ENERGIES OR THEY CAN REGROW WITHIN, THEIR INTENT EVEN THO CASTED. After catching up on so much INTELLIGENCE NOT KNOWLEDGE and being caught up I will return back to my loved 1z and ask to take the woman I chose upon EA in our past 3d lives to the location of my birth for its my favorite spot to be. There she and I will reunite into our original selves and remain guardian once again. After our atonment shall we return to the herd in which we are ALL part SMILE AT MY STARSEEDS I spawned (my 3d children of the old) and prepare for the great WELCOMMING OF EA HERD (those who made it) and exist for eternia to do with our wills WHAT WE ALL SHOULD KNOW is ok to BE DONE life is a good test...

AMEN ALL MEN GOOD QUESTION S&F

What will I be doing in a million years? Exactly what I've been doing for the past two million years. Absolutely nothing.

Just kidding, I'll hopefully be either reincarnated into a prophylactic (giggity) or at very least, be brought back to life by E.T.'s by the DNA found in the idiotic way I died. (Playing in tar pits.)

reply to post by wisintel


Good question, not really too good at planning, will have to check my diary (if I had one).
Seriously though we are all but energy and energy doesn't dissipate so I will be part of something else. Will my conciousness survive? I think yes, time restrains will have no real effect on it. We are all part of the same thing and time is just a construct that we are observing in this conscious state.
Regards

Double post, somehow, sry

reply to post by wisintel
wisintel,

The eternal afterlife is something that none can boast of and most don't know among Christians that our permanent home will be this earth made new and that won't be done until after the second resurrection. The first one is looming close and the second is a thousand years later. He has prepared for this earth the Holy City to be brought down to earth at the second resurrection and the redeemed have been dwelling in it in heaven those first 1,000.

Then each will go out on the earth and build their own country home and so have a home in the Holy City and one in the country. It will always be as bright or brighter than noon day in the Holy City and none ever grow weary and tired. Eternity then isn't numbered in years. No one will age and become old and worn out.

When you reincarnate where and what is the place and condition you expect and where do you get the info. from?

It would take a book to fully explain all that and won't venture further here.

Truthiron.

reply to post by truthiron


Yes, but won't perfection and utopia, especially the lowly inclination we have at this stage of what perfection might be, get rather boring after a few hundred thousand years? Everyone imagines a happily ever after. I think if we just got a mansion and had dinner parties or what have you for eternity it would become unbearable. I need adventure, danger, excitement and surprise. I think imagining that we will just live out the rest of our eternal existence in the perfect beyond is coming of short of what is possible and plausible.

I heard once a way to try to slightly grasp the concept of enternity, Imagine a steel ball the size of the earth. Every 100,000
years a small dove flys by and slightly brushes its wing across this earth sized steel ball. When that steel ball has worn down to the size of a grain of sand, you've only taken one step into eternity.

In a million years, I might create that earth size steel ball.

What I think is:

To even raise the question "what would we be doing in a million years", and mean what would we be doing in the after life, is limiting even with in itself. I don't want to sound like a crazy person, but to just point out that even within our life times a number of things to cut death off could occur (bio-mechanical intervention, enlightenment, time travel, a new quantum discovery into the fabric of reality.)
Than on top of assumptions we can make about our life times, you add assumptions towards death: Would death mean the end of THIS linear time line? Is it possible that you can reincarnate into the past? If heaven exists, it would have to be outside this "time zone" (you know times relative, right?).
As we explore these questions, more arise: Is time itself even linear to begin with?

So, it seems by now all I have been able to accomplish is opening up new questions rather than addressing the one at hand, but what I'm trying to point out is what you said: " ..highlights the lack of imagination most people have about the afterlife.". You brought up how you believe in reincarnation though. How could one question the after life, yet believe in reincarnation? Or is this to show the actual impossibility of what a true after life would be?

Now I'll just say, if there was an after life, and I could put it into whatever sort of shape I wanted and put it (I'll drop the whole time thing now) a million years from now. I think I'd probably still be exploring the cosmos, learning about what keeps it together and how, the whys to existence and probably going on some crazy adventures. I'd imagine death being an event like falling asleep, going into a dream like state. Where eventually you need to "wake up" or "become lucid" though we would just be realizing that what we left behind was nothing but another piece of material. The world, to an individual is a humongous place. From here to the moon is an accomplishment to us. Mars feels like its as far away as ever, and we haven't even explored every inch of this worlds surface. The "KNOWN" universe, 13 something billion light years, would be impossible to even imagine.

To quote Terence Mckenna quoting someone else whom I cannot recall right now, "existence is not only stranger than we suppose, its stranger than we CAN suppose."

reply to post by wisintel
wisintel,

Hey man you would get it whatever is our cup out there in the country, not crowded, Pristine streams full of fish, beautiful forests, and each would have gardens of their choice, flowers, vegies, fruits of all kinds etc. The flowers never die, no pesticides and pests and diseases, no robbers, no cheaters and great reccreations we could not dream of now as there will be no fatigue and each with perfect health and bodies. There can be no accurate apprasial of that time. The garden of Eden would be the only comparison and we have little on that. The earth would not become polluted again as the way would be far above that. Just run your imagination to what is paradise for you and it will be better than that. No bills, no taxes or house or car payments no heat or cooling bills, you would have peace man.

Truthiron.

reply to post by wisintel


In a million years?

Probably still trying to figure out why the Hell I married my ex-wife.

~Heff

Excellent question.

Many have tried to answer it, in various ways. C.S. Lewis painted a rather poetic picture of a celestial "mountain" that would be forever climbed in his Great Divorce.

Atheists have given it thought too, like the fictional Murray Templeton in Isaac Assimov's The Last Answer.

The real point to a meditation like this, from my perspective as an agnostic, is to mentally explore the nature of existence itself, along with what exactly our "essence" consists of.

Would it even make sense for something like a human to exist forever? Why so?

Obviously, the Christian notions of "heaven" beat the heck out of various types of "hell", but they are fairly short on descriptions, ever since St. Paul just left it at, "Eye has not seen, nor ear has heard..." As one poster pointed out, the "streets of gold" thing isn't terribly satisfying!

Mormons try to imagine their eternity, as just so much more of what we already have really: wives, sex for ever, children, reigning over worlds, without end. Endless sex? Sounds great, sign me up!

But the reality is that the more we look at "what" we are, the notion of an eternal existence gets very hard to picture. And that's even after leaving aside any corporeal necessity (again, for sake of argument).

The area where we may still find potential is in "who" we are, which, while bound up with the outward "what", seems intuitively to go beyond mere flesh and blood.

So, if some part of our consciousness "survives" physical death, the next question is WHY?

In answer, some possibilities:

If "death" is in some way an illusion, then even the terminology is off, because the word "survives" suggests a different default.

If our "essence" / "soul", etc. is of it's nature "eternal" already, then that could be an answer. But if this is so, then we would want to answer the "why" all the more, since it implies that "we" really will be around a million years from now!

Which brings us to that which is perhaps slightly beyond the philosophical, entering into the "theological", since it is in that branch of thought that people have had to grapple with the issue, from perhaps a "religious" perspective, but still forced logically into the issue of what an eternal being might "do".

The introduction of monotheism made the issue especially difficult, since before that time people could still imagine a universe where "gods" could at least have each other for equal company. But once they were put aside, the logical question was, "What would a solitary god do, if he/she had no equal?"

Enter the "Trinity", an interesting "solution", which gave God some "company" if you will. Why this was important was because as humans, we regard relationship as essential, and yet realize that having a pet, is nothing like having a fellow human as a friend, or spouse even. Certainly a god would want an equal, and we are not it.

Hopefully, no one got lost in that digression, but the point is that this is more about who we as humans are. We can anthropomorphize "god" by assigning "him" more than just arms and legs. It's about how we see ourselves.

This being the case, it seems that our inherited human thought to this point suggests that what we would be doing a million years from now must at least retain something of this essential, otherwise we would not be "we" anymore.

Which finally takes us to "Love", a thing most of us experience at least in some small way in our lives. Usually, when we reflect upon that love which has felt the most genuine, our every instinct craves/demands that it never end. Intimately (you might say) related to this is the physical thing that accompanies physical love, which is the orgasm. These "partners" of flesh and "spirit" do indeed seem to cry out always for more.

But still yet a little further. Rather than stop at a mormonesque version of sex/love in perpetuity, I would tend to still want "more", because love is so much more than mere eros. It is here that our imaginations begin to falter, and yet the poet in me says that it could at least be a "clue" as to what we might be doing a million years from now.

JR

reply to post by wisintel


well my hope would be that technology will have me alive in some form, and i'll be exploring the universe. but in the likely event that that does not happen, i hope i'm in heaven instead of hell. in heaven i will probably be......*shrugs*? celebrating my 1,000,025th birthday?

As an atheist, merely joining this discussion for amusement and a little speculation - I'll add:

Eternity. A trillion years times a trillion years to the trillionth power and that's just the beginning. Incomprehensible. Anyone surviving that long would go utterly mad from boredom. When you've seen it all, and done it all (numerous times) - what else is there? There would be absolutely nothing new to you. Nothing would ever surprise you. There would be nothing left in the universe for you to even WONDER about. Even if it's sex, football games, free beer, parties, building ranch homes....after the 100,000th time, it would fell exactly like the hundred millionth time. There would be no anticipation of anything, because you'd pretty much know what to expect at any given time. I think you'd go stark raving insane in less than a million.

I'm pretty sure that I will be in the same place I was in for the last 14.9 billion years.

reply to post by sykickvision

I think you'd go stark raving insane in less than a million.

Yeah, good point. I'm not a religionist either, but if you're going to play this game, you may leave a lot of folks pretty far behind with anything too bleak. I get it of course, I'm a fan of Albert Camus, so it's as "bleak" as you can get (I suppose) from the point of view of the religiously inclined anyway.

It's sort of a tough thing for people to consider I've found. In my post above, I asked if such a thing even made sense for a human, and if so, why? "Eternity"?? Yes, utterly incomprehensible.

And yet, there is something is us that I would call the "poet", that seems to want to make wonderful things last, perhaps even "forever". But once you really begin thinking about it, at least logically, the poetry can fade!

I try to keep and open mind, and continue identifying myself as "agnostic", even if it isn't terribly different from "atheist". Not that such a nuance is even appreciated by the average person, but it is, what it is, at the moment.

Great food for thought though, on what "eternity" might be for a human. I'm guessing the religionist folk might end up calling such a thing, "hell"!

JR

reply to post by wisintel

Hopefullly I won't still be here trying to iimmanentize the eschaton, that would suck.

I've asked to be a future starship captain..

Anything to keep things interesting and fun, I don't care what.

P.S. I am a Christian believer.

P.S.S. We are ALREADY in eternity, how can you not know this or understand it.

reply to post by JR MacBeth


Yes, sorry for the rather bleak output. It was my intention to further indulge with a few possibilities that can't be proven, of course, but I had an urgent game of bingo to play with my kids.

This gets really confusing because you have to determine exactly what consciousness is, and for it to live forever, you have to assume that it exists separately from the body, or mingled in some intangible sense.

The only way I can see it not getting incredibly old and boring, would be if you were just reborn as someone or something else - with no memory at all of ever having existed before.

Originally posted by NewAgeMan
reply to post by wisintel

 

Hopefullly I won't still be here trying to iimmanentize the eschaton, that would suck.

I've asked to be a future starship captain..

Anything to keep things interesting and fun, I don't care what.

P.S. I am a Christian believer.

P.S.S. We are ALREADY in eternity, how can you not know this or understand it.

edit on 20-12-2010 by NewAgeMan because: (no reason given)

I have to agree it is a hard thing to do alone.

as for now, I'm really not sure with that question at all.
Life and death is still a mystery for me.