(Apr 20, 2026 08:16 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] One caveat though: MUST there be so much suffering in our afterlives? I mean we get it. Life seems like a nihilistic wasteland of meaningless distractions till we just grow old and die. Over and over the same old wearisome theme. Can we not have a little something that's totally new and entirely unprecedented? Something so unimaginable and revolutionary it maybe even shatters the great wheel forever?

Arthur C. Clarke (1956): Of all the thousands of forms of recreation in the city, these were the most popular. When you entered a saga, you were not merely a passive observer, as in the crude entertainments or primitive times which Alvin had sometimes sampled. You were an active participant and possessed -- or seemed to possess -- free will. The events and scenes which were the raw material of your adventures might have been prepared beforehand by forgotten artists, but there was enough flexibility to allow for wide variation. You could go into these phantom worlds with your friends, seeking the excitement that did not exist in Diaspar -- and as long as the dream lasted there was no way in which it could be distinguished from reality. Indeed, who could be certain that Diaspar itself was not the dream?

[...] For adventure and the exercise of the imagination, the sagas provided all that anyone could desire. They were the inevitable end product of that striving for realism which began when men started to reproduce moving images and to record sounds, and then to use these techniques to enact scenes from real or imaginary life. In the sagas, the illusion was perfect because all the sense impressions involved were fed directly into the mind and any conflicting sensations were diverted. The entranced spectator was cut off from reality as long as the adventure lasted; it was as if he lived a dream yet believed he was awake. --The City and the Stars