It’s important to note off the bat that we are still in Plato’s cave and that speculation will remain speculation in the absence of solid evidence. Hopefully by sharing information we can assist each other in climbing out and witnessing the shadows for what they really are, and may we all step together into the spectacular light.
As many others have expressed, myself included, I would have considered myself an atheist/agnostic before I became interested in this topic. I, like many others, now believe that most world religions contain some profound truths about our reality. Powers exist in dimensions beyond the ones of our physical perceptions, our awareness is non local, and some form of consiousness persists after the death of our physical bodies.
Assuming the above to be true, it would stand to reason that a sufficiently advanced intelligence would be able to visit its neighbors in a dematerialized state as a point of consciousness.
The weird thing about consciousness though (as I’ve discussed with my psychiatrist recently lmao) is that we don’t really understand what consciousness even is. Science hasn’t been super helpful in this regard (Hard Problem of Consciousness).
Most would say consciousness is a phenomenon that emerges from neurochemical processes in the brain. There is no evidence of this. It could be just as likely that neurochemical processes in the brain work to reduce consciousness down into a form that is useful for our physical bodies. The sense of an individuated self that you experience is a reduction of the fundamental force of consciousness.
This fundamental force of consciousness is what some people would call God. The Hindu story of creation explains how this ‘God/Consciousness’ might undergo the process of indivuation through a series of reductions, wherein the self is able to expeirence itself.
~~~
On the vast canvas of the self
The self itself paints
The pictures of the various worlds.
And the supreme self itself
Derives extreme bliss
From seeing that picture
–Shri Adi Shankara, 8th Century CE
submitted by /u/OSHASHA2
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