Reincarnation might not be so bad after all

[Magical Realist]

“Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands.”
–Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I'm certainly game for that. So many life experiences we are capable of as human beings that just never happened to us in this life. And then there's always the return of sex. Good sex, bad sex, weird sex, no sex...the whole glorious gamut of human horniness! 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?

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[C C]

[...] 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?

Even the residents of paradise eventually have to escape its perfect, antiseptic horrors by venturing into the disorderly contrasts of primitive worlds.

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

And I doubt that there's much difference between Nirvana and non-consciousness or non-existence: "The beatitude that transcends the cycle of reincarnation; characterized by the extinction of desire and suffering and individual consciousness."

[Magical Realist]

wow..that description of the sagas by Clarke synchronistically echoed something I just finished writing:

"One thing they forget to tell you when you're going thru school is this: it's not really the facts they are teaching you that are so important. And it's not what you actually end up doing for a living that matters so much either. It's the possibilities...the what if's...those bittersweet "if only's"..that will shape our souls in the end.

Turns out all of those other lives we AREN'T living that we watch on TV and in movie theaters and read about in books and online journals and news stories are what really captivate us the most. That whole vibrant and chimerical "soul world" we all live in and daydream about even as we go thru the motions of our otherwise dull and mechanical lives. Rarely are we just who we are. Rather, we are what we are always longingly imagining we could be in the great and ever ubiquitous "Once upon a time.." "We are such stuff as dreams are made of."

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So in our own mundane way we are already well-prepped for living in these alternative realities. Maybe that's what the afterlives will be!

[Syne]

If reincarnation is true, the only suffering in the next lives is the same available in this one. You either learn the lessons here, and face new challenges better equipped in the next, or you don't, and you make bad choices and suffer until the lesson is, hopefully, driven home. Heaven and hell are always just states of being in our present reality, and we are the makers of which we experience. If we learn the lesson of agency, we take responsibility and action to better our state. If we don't, we play a blame game down into suffering.