Our losses of loved ones are not true losses, though they may leave temporary wounds in our heart. Death is not an end, but the transformation of what will always remain alive. Life is immortal, though it may seem to die in this or that place from time to time. The living breath of the world continues to roll on towards providence despite the mini-tragedies of our earthly lives-a-billion. There is an immortal soul beneath the many minds of humanity, a single source of personality to whom we each owe our own most intimate selves. The dead awaken to an experience of themselves as identical with us; it is only we the living who remain forgetful of our essential unity with one another. We the grief stricken living sometimes experience ghostly apparitions as the dead begin to converge upon our minds. Until we the living are able to integrate the dead (that is, resurrect them through the power of love by living in their spirit), we will be haunted by them.
"The safest general characterization of the philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." —Alfred North Whitehead
Matt,
I’m now starting to entertain the idea (from Griffin) that actual entities may retain their complexity apart from an animal body. This doesn’t mean they enjoy the full range of experiential memory and other data, but it means they are able to still in some sense retain some of, or prehend, the former life. This awareness was coincidental (but I don’t believe in coincidence) with my reading in Griffin (Reenchantment w/o Supernaturalism) and with the passing of my father.
Aloha
Matt,
I’m now starting to entertain the idea (from Griffin) that actual entities may retain their complexity apart from an animal body. This doesn’t mean they enjoy the full range of experiential memory and other data, but it means they are able to still in some sense retain some of, or prehend, the former life. This awareness was coincidental (but I don’t believe in coincidence) with my reading in Griffin (Reenchantment w/o Supernaturalism) and with the passing of my father.
Aloha