I Am You

03 Nov 2021 06:37 - 26 Nov 2022 12:59
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    • book by Daniel Kolak that attempts to show that there is exactly on person that we are all variations of. An extreme form of reincarnation theory, although also its inevitable conclusion. Reincarnation + Solipsism.
    • A point made also in Alan Watts - What happens after Death (Lecture) - YouTube. (via Death, Nothingness, Subjectivity ).
      • To be simply not there, forever and ever.
      • Death as endless nothing makes no sense. (agreed)
      • Reincarnation not a belief in something unprovable, just common sense.
      • Another being who is I just as you are I.
      • Consequences: don't be sad at the extinguishing of memory at death. Do we really want to hold onto the old forever?
      • It is the forgetting of thing that renews their wonder (yeah well looking forward to senesence then (not)).
      • His voice is like a magic spell uniting all the consciousnesses of history...
      • The world is centered on yourself. Everybody's name is I. "Every I is in some way the same I". And that is the root of the great virtue of compassion.
    • Have to say while I can kind of get the idea – if selves are fictions anyway, maybe they are all the same fiction, or chapters in a single mammoth story, the vagaries and vicissitudes of the One True Agent – this kind of enrages me. Personal identity might be an illusion but god damn it is my illusion and an attack on the reality of persons-in-general is felt by this person-in-particular.
    • I class it with the mind-destroying ideas. Such a spirit is necessarily abstract and the glory and minds of humans are bound up with their bodily and environmental specificity.
    • OTOH, it makes all of humanity closer than brothers, and in some respects a belief very like this animates the very mainstream and normal sentiment towards human universalism. Which I support, or maybe I just wish I did.