Friday, September 26, 2008

Teachings of an Initiate

"...But at length there comes a time when the yearnings of the spirit are felt, and the personality sees the light and sets out to seek its Higher Self across the bridge of mind. And as flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, the body is crucified that the soul may be liberated and joined to its Father in Heaven, the threefold spirit, the Higher Self."
~Max Heindel

http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/ros/ti.txt

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Purdy doggone wise, unless the soul is just a product of the body, isomorphic to a program running on a computer, you smash the computer with a sledgehammer and a program running on it doesn't have much of a chance of continuing to run, but then if the soul is defined as that which is left behind in the form of memories and memes within people's minds and within the Global Brain then maybe one can toy around with that being the soul, although the analogy prolly holds that it's the weak version of a soul, compared to the strong version one had while it was housed in the person's physical body, you know, like strong vs weak AI, the strong versus weak anthropic principle, strong versus weak you-name-it. Amen.

Sophia said...

Do you remember that time I mentioned how cool it would be if our consciousness could be uploaded to a computer?

Anonymous said...

Yes, I do. I'll think about an answer, but right now I leave for a no online access all weekend!

Sophia said...

I think it was the "Second Life" phenomenon that inspired that idea. Imagine living life as a computer game character.

Have fun on your trip. See you when you get back. :)

V said...

Who the hell is Max Heidel!

Anonymous said...

I don't fancy the idea of my consciousness being uploaded!

Anonymous said...

Ok, I'm back.

You had me thinking about this quite a bit over the weekend.

And the answer is---I don't know. I haven't studied this too much. It's a common sci-fi plot.

I do know we send bits of our consciousness to other people/computers all the time, it's called conversation, meme transfer.

But to upload your whole conciosness? One question you always have to ask is why would I want to do this? You don't want to do things which aren't useful.

How would you do this? Have some sort of scanner that scanned your neural net and duplicated that in the computer?

I guess the answer is that I don't know, I'd need to go study up on what's been written about this, and even then I just betcha there a lot of speculation and not much more. This one is right up there with FTL travel, time travel, mass teleportation, etc; ie, bad *ss hard to solve.

Anonymous said...

I think that uploading consciousness is a misnomer since computers hold data and procedures and consciousness is a very different thing.

However I did see a movie ("The Astronauts Wife") recently in which an alien civilization invaded the earth using this very technology, so I may be wrong.

Sophia said...

Siegfried,

He is an occultist writer of some Rosicrucian texts.

Sophia said...

Lisa,

At the time I thought it was "cool", it was because I imagined that to be uploaded would mean immortality.

Sophia said...

Hi Don,

Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed your trip.

These things are things that dreams are made of. The ideas alone show how advanced the mind of man is. Many things have been accomplished when mankind has put their mind to it.

Sophia said...

Mossy,

Maybe I'll mention that to my grandmother.

She surprised me yesterday with something that was rather open-minded.

She considers herself to be a very devout Christian. She goes to church every Sunday, and when she can't she watches church programs on t.v. She has Bibles around her house, Christian figurines, crosses, devotional books laying around, etc.

I love her dearly but I've always been disappointed in how prejudiced and close-minded she is. She still refers to African Americans as "colored people". And insists that it is not right that my sister has black friends. She says that my sister should not hang out with "people like that".

Perhaps she is one of the reasons I've turned away from Christianity years ago, because I've seen how she and some other Christians I know have principles that differ from what I believe to be right.

But, I've only discussed this to create the foundation for what I want to say, which is, just yesterday on the phone she said the other night she watched a UFO floating in the sky for a half an hour.

Well, the whole point is, I just couldn't believe this story was coming from my grandmother.

V said...

M. Heindel.
Never heard or read.
Are you sure he could walk on water?
Some Yogi, eh?