December 23, 2009;  Life after death? is the topic on The Larry King Live Show on CNN.  Again and again it is mentioned that there are common themes around the world that people describe in near death episodes, seeing a bright light or a tunnel or a relative, etc.  It was said that this is evidence that this cannot be explained as a physiological effect produced by the body and brain alone but that this must show that there is some separate afterlife thing going on.  To me it seemed exactly the opposite.  The common themes prove that this is a human process in the human brain which all humans have, etc.  If there was some separate spiritual other dimension then everyone would have different individual, separate spirit or soul, experiences to describe, such as one person would be flying like a bird and another singing on stage at Carnegie Hall, and another swimming in the ocean, etc., etc., and it would be a wildly diverse endless thing.  Instead, the idea that everyone near death seems to have the same, or similiar, experience seems to prove that it has to do with other things we all have in common - brain, heart, blood, eyes, electrical pulses, etc., etc.

   The important thing about a program like this is that is shows the circular logic and psychological framework of people who sincerely wish to believe or prove or find evidence for what they think should be true.  Is there evidence that people touch another dimension when in the process of death?  No.  Did some of the people on the show believe that there is evidence?  Apparently yes.  The search for the meaning of life, or life after death, or the separate incorporeal soul, can be so passionate that even otherwise very intelligent people can become wrapped up in a vicious circle.  One gentleman just kept spouting some kind of personal jargon about how separate the mind is from the brain.  I could not help but wish I could have him in a debate in which each person drank a shot of whiskey every two minutes.  Then we could watch how his separate mind kept on speaking while his brain got sauced.  It's so ridiculous to believe that our consciousness is separate at all from our body and the air and water and Earth, yet here were these gentlemen seriously talking as though their body was just filling in for their soul just to do the speaking, or whatever.

    It's difficult for me because I refuse to totally step into their shoes to get the exact picture of whatever it is they are attempting to convince others is true.  It's just to bizarre for me to fully entertain.

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a little story...

Walking along the street one night I came upon a man on his hands and knees on the sidewalk in the light of a street lamp.  "What are you looking for?" I said, "My car keys" he responded "I lost them back there somewhere".  "Why are you looking over here then?" to which he said "The light is much better here".  That's what the Big Bang Theory and Religion in general are like.  People afraid of the dark or unknown stick to what is familiar, or "light" and thereby avoid any chance of finding out anything real about anything.  It's more comfortable crawling around in the light of myth, belief, and dogma that going out into the dark unknown to look around.

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What is the meaning of life? What is life about...what's if for...where is it going?
First of all, some people have that one all sewn up in a religious way and they are blind to evolution of humans from single celled organisms over millions of years, and in fact they cannot really believe that we are made up of those same cells today.
In Junior College Biology class I asked the professor about how an Ameoba motivates itself without a brain or nervous system and why it does what it does and how it knows to get away from danger and what is good to eat, etc., etc....and he simply explained that these things are not really known...except that there are chemical reactions and electromagnetic elements, etc..
But, these tiny things are in fact alive and they do reproduce and ingest food and move around their environment, etc., etc., and it's interesting that we are made up entirely of such things head to toe. Does that mean that a human life is related to single celled life?...of course...we are made of them.
Where is the meaning then? What motivates us...to eat, to drink, to reproduce, etc.? Are the same principles involved as with an Ameoba? How much control do we have in life? Do our cells tell us what to do? Is the meaning of our life dictated by the needs of the universe of cells we are?
The ultimate answer, and the correct one, was the one the professor gave me back at Junior College...
we don't really know.
We do know though that we are not above living things, just a part of it all, and we are not divine spirits apart from the physical world, except in the heads of the religious.
The meaning of life is best seen by looking at the part we play in our environment and how we live in balance with it.
By believing we are above being mammals and conglomerations of cells, etc., we have altered our environment such that we increasingly lose the things we require to be alive and in balance in nature. We are making a world for divine extraterrestrial holy beings who do not need the physical world, and therefore we are exterminating our own species.
What is the meaning of this?