I've got some good news and bad news for you. The good news is that part of you lives on after you die. The bad news is that it isn't your soul, your consciousness, or anything else you likely currently consider to be "you."
But hey, something is better than nothing. Especially when it is a believable something that doesn't require blind faith in supernaturalism.
I've finished Brian Lowery's book, Selfless: The Social Creation of "You." Lowery, a social psychologist, makes a convincing case that who we are is the product of relationships extending far beyond the narrow confines of our mind and body.
This is obvious when we think about it.
We are a child because we have a relationship with our parent(s) or caregiver(s). We are a student because we have a relationship with our teachers. We are a citizen of some nation because we have a relationship with this country. We are friends with other people because we have relationships with them.
And so it goes.
Who we are is largely determined by how others relate to us. When we're affirmed and loved by other people we feel great. When we're rejected and hated by other people we feel terrible. We may believe that we're an island unto ourselves, but the truth is that we're a product of our surrounding landscape.
Lowery writes:
Even as adults, who we are around changes us. The people in our social orbit affect the way we dress, speak, and view the world. Our lives are driven by a large ensemble of players, both on- and offstage. Experiences with your family likely taught you what it means to be a good daughter or son and brother or sister; experiences at school and work have taught you how to be a good friend or coworker.
But consider a brand-new friendship. When you meet a new friend you don't arrive alone. You bring all your other relationships with you. At this point in my life, if you met me you would be affected by others in close orbit around me: my partner, my sister, some of my work colleagues, and a handful of close friends.
The same is true for you, for better or worse; there are people in your life, past and present, who influence who you are and will be if we meet. Who you are, or were, in those relationships shapes who you can become in a new relationship. And who you become in this new relationship will also affect who you are in your existing relationships.
Given all this relating, it isn't surprising that in a final chapter, "The End?,' Lowery discusses death from the standpoint of the relationships we've had while alive.
When you say someone died, everyone understands that you mean the person's body has expired. What's not said, but implicitly claimed is that the person is their body, or at least that their self can't exist without a living body. As we've learned here, though, the self is not the body. In terms of life and death maybe the self is like the body.
Meaning, maybe the self doesn't die all at once. Parts of your self flicker briefly and then pass while other parts of your self last a lifetime. Some deaths of self pass painlessly or even joyously; other deaths can feel like they are tearing you apart.
My partner recently retired and at her party I remarked that a retirement feels like a combination of a funeral and a baby shower. One aspect of the self is dying, but something new, someone new, is being born. Your self as lawyer, doctor, or teacher is ending, but your self as gardener or French-learner is coming into existence.
Old relationships will fade and new ones will be born. It's the same for graduations, moving out of your parents' home, getting married, and having kids. It's also true that a divorce, the physical loss of a life partner, or death of a parent is the end of one self and the beginning of another.
Why should the balance between life and death, the shift from one state to another, be any simpler for our selves than it is for our bodies?
Lowery than goes on to talk about something that most of us, me certainly included, have thought about in one way or another, but not as cogently as Lowery explains it. Meaning, the older I get (I'm 76, and just wrote about my college-age self on my HinesSight blog), the more I wonder about what will live on about me after I die.
The books I've written will. Until they're no longer available. The memories loved ones have of me will. Until they forget about me or die themselves. The work I've done on our house and ten acres will. Until a new owner of our property or the passage of time undoes the improvements we've made.
Nothing lasts forever. But Lowery says that our self will last for a while after we die — through the relationships we've established while living.
You certainly have your own beliefs about what comes after your body expires, if anything. As for me, I am not a believer in life after death, when life in this case means a continuation of my conscious experience. I don't believe that a form of my body or my unique consciousness will persist.
But as should be clear by now, I don't think that these things constitute my self. The body and the self are linked, but they are not one and the same.
So, perhaps, a self can remain after the body dies. Rather than life after death, think of it as self after death. But the self is not immortal, either. Although the self can outlive the body, just as the body dies, eventually so does the self.
…What I do expect to persist to some degree is my socially constructed self. Meaning, I hope relationships I have made will sustain my self. For at least some period of time, new people might discover my experience of life and relate to me from their unique social situations. As a faculty member I've advised a number of PhD students, and maybe those students will tell their students about me.
…My hope is that my family and friends, the people I touch in some way, will maintain a relationship with their experience of me and engage with each other around their shared experience of me. I hope they will talk about the times we shared, they make fun of my foibles, and that these conversations serve to connect them to each other, and in so doing tighten their connection to my memory and to me.
These interactions sustain my relationships that constitute my self now, and can perish after my body passes. What's left after we die are relationships. These relationships are not extinguished when the body dies. They may be transformed by grief and the divide between physical life and death, but relationships persist.
…If tomorrow everyone you ever knew forgot or denied your existence, your self would cease to exist — whether your body died or not. If everyone you knew died, and no newly born people knew of your existence, your self would also cease to exist. Eventually this fate will befall us all, but it is not physical death that marks the beginning or end of this process.
…These relationships are what constitute a life. They can also produce an ethic: maybe we should strive to give generously and leave gracefully. No party does — nor should — last forever.
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In your many years of meditation did you not ever glimpse who you were in your last life or have deja Vu about it? How do you explain child prodigies? Reincarnation explains so many things and you don’t have to believe in it for it to exist but I’m 100% sure it does. I can’t believe you’d be so attached to your present body after that many years of meditation. Something’s lacking Brian. I hope you don’t need a damn good whacking.lol . Little piggies by the Beatles. But be here now, that’s a good saying.
Part of you lives on but are you sure you want it to be here on earth? What if you have to come back and find it again. I’m going to study your history but it sounds like you don’t have any children. That’d be all I’d wanna leave , and not many. The concept of “leaving no trace” is arguably centuries-old, linked to the actions of Native Americans and Indigenous peoples. These cultures have taught and practiced land stewardship values for hundreds of years. It seems that Gurinder wants it all and played it safe by asking the pope for forgiveness just in case. I’d like to see him goose-stepping around Gaza. The one good thing that kid Gill has done was to take away the special seating arrangements in public Satsang that the tourists had for so long.
My thinking is that the basic self is formed in the first year or two of new-borns where the infant be-gins to feel or sense that they are an individual separate and distinct from the people and things in their environment – they know that there is ‘me’ and ‘not me’. This early sense of a separate self or me is the self that hasn’t been shaped by society, family or past experiences – sometimes referred to as the core self.
This core self is fundamental; it is the basis that ensures our survival (and the survival of any other creature) simply because it enables the awareness between what is ‘me’ and ‘not me’ – what is food and what is prey etc. All other labels and features that we use, such as name, gender, nationality, profession, wife, husband etc. are used to consolidate one’s identity, and admittedly, as Lowery points out, they are ever changing and determined by our social interactions.
We can refer to such identities as my ‘self’ though the reality is that they are merely a series of experiences and knowledge committed to memory and used to navigate one’s environment. Any of these accrued identities can be lost, perhaps through brain injury or disease resulting in not knowing your name, where you come from, where you live and so on; but the sense of me, of being my ‘self’ al-ways remains. These identities are not selves, they are functions.
I would add that at this point, it is comparatively easy to see that the identities we adopt are just labels and functions that can be seen through as not being ‘me’ – and some meditation practices address this issue. But the deeper, more fundamental core self often remains hidden and unresolved. To inquire into this core self is to explore – the mostly Buddhist practices – of emptiness and impermanence. And just to be clear, as fundamental, important and basic is the core self, it is still a mental construct.
Lowery’s notion that our social selves exist for a while, is correct according to the concept of’ ‘social selves’, though the more fundamental core self will naturally immediately die along with the body.
https://www.quora.com/Are-the-Illuminati-always-watching-you