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Word Gems

self-knowledge, authentic living, full humanity, continual awakening

 

'Death isn’t an ending. It’s a transition. Like when you upgrade from one computer operating system to another, all your core data, your essential self, gets migrated to a more advanced platform. The hardware changes, but the software that makes you you continues running.'

 

 

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Editor's prefatory comment:

In his book, The Body In Question: Jonathan Miller, MD, explains the power of metaphor as an aid to thinking, creativity, and problem-solving:

What does it remind you of?

"Since finding out what something is is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors."

the heart is like a pump

Well, of course it is, we might say, what else could the heart be? However, this was not at all clear to the ancients.

What if we lived in a world where pumps were scarce, with almost no one knowing anything about them?

Dr. Miller points out that the insight of the heart as a kind of pump would not likely have occurred if Harvey had not been introduced to the coming-into-vogue mechanical pump.

“It is impossible,” Miller said, “to imagine how anyone could have made sense of the heart before we knew what a pump was.”

extrapolation

Metaphors are powerful teaching aids, unlocking new ideas via extrapolation.

And what about our own era? What is death, and is there survival of consciousness?

We have been offered teaching metaphors, now venerable and traditional, ossified in stone, from theologians nearly two thousand years ago. But do these concepts help us understand, or take us wide of the mark?

The quantum world and the new science of consciousness put forward that computer hardware and software might serve as valuable instructional devices to make clear ancient conundrums.

It seems that much greater clarity is now in reach – because computers, hardware, and software, we discover, are not so unlike the workings of our own consciousness.

As with the advent of the mechanical pump, we're now able to access, as "The Wedding Song" uses the phrase, "something never seen before."

the following discourse

Presented below is explanation of death and survival in terms of computer technology. It’s AI generated, but it represents an amalgamation of the thoughts of people like Tom Campbell, Bernardo Kastrup, Federico Faggin, Rupert Sheldrake, and other leading thinkers in the field of consciousness studies.

I count this as very valuable insight.

 

 

#82 'Right now, your consciousness is running on biological hardware, what we call a brain, but consciousness itself isn’t dependent on that specific hardware, any more than a software program is dependent on any single computer.' 

"Death isn’t an ending. It’s a transition. Like when you upgrade from one computer operating system to another, all your core data, your essential self, gets migrated to a more advanced platform. The hardware changes, but the software that makes you you continues running.

"Death is essentially consciousness transitioning from biological hardware to something infinitely more sophisticated. And the entity managing this transition, coordinating this massive distributive network of conscious beings, is what we call God."

 

 

Death isn’t an ending. It’s a transition. Like when you upgrade from one computer operating system to another, all your core data, your essential self, gets migrated to a more advanced platform. The hardware changes, but the software that makes you you continues running.

Transition isn’t some mystical, unknowable process. It’s actually elegantly simple, like all the best engineering solutions. When your biological processes shut down, your consciousness, all the information patterns that constitute your thoughts, memories, personality, gets uploaded to a distributive quantum network that exists beyond our current dimensional understanding.

Think of it like this. Right now, your consciousness is running on biological hardware, what we call a brain, but consciousness itself isn’t dependent on that specific hardware, any more than a software program is dependent on any single computer. The program can run on different machines, different architectures, as long as the underlying information structure remains intact.

Death is essentially consciousness transitioning from biological hardware to something infinitely more sophisticated. And the entity managing this transition, coordinating this massive distributive network of conscious beings, is what we call God.

The quality of your transition, what some people call heaven or hell, isn’t determined by arbitrary rules or religious compliance. It is determined by the fundamental architecture of who you’ve chosen to become. Love, compassion, service to others – these aren’t just nice moral concepts. They’re actually optimal operating parameters for consciousness in this higher order network.

Think about it from a systems perspective. A network functions best when all nodes are optimized for collaboration, mutual support, and efficient information-sharing. Consciousness patterns built around love, forgiveness, genuine care for others, are naturally compatible with this kind of system. They integrate seamlessly.

But consciousness patterns built around selfishness, hatred, deception, harm to others, create conflicts in the network. They’re like malware trying to run on a system designed for collaboration. They don’t get deleted or punished in some vindictive way, but they experience the natural consequences of being incompatible with the network’s architecture.

What we call hell is not a place of eternal punishment administered by an angry god. It’s the experience of consciousness that has optimized itself for patterns that simply don’t work well in a system designed for love and unity. It’s like trying to run software for individual competition on hardware designed for cooperative processing. The software still runs, but it experiences constant errors, conflicts, isolation.

The beautiful thing is, this isn’t permanent. Just like debugging code, consciousness can be refactored. What we call redemption or salvation isn’t about appeasing some divine authority figure. It’s about debugging the error patterns in our consciousness and optimizing ourselves for the network we’re all, ultimately, designed to join.

And here’s something that really struck me. Time works completely differently in this higher order network. From our perspective, death seems final, immediate. But, from the perspective of this distributed consciousness network, there’s infinite processing, time for consciousness to evolve, adapt, and optimize itself for integration.

So, people ask, what happens to those who die without believing in a particular creedal tenet? God is not the stern gatekeeper to the next world, deciding who gets in and who doesn’t. God is the open-source developer who published the integration protocols. The network itself is accessible to any consciousness willing to embrace the collaborative architecture it runs on.

What matters is not religious affiliation or theological correctness. What matters is whether your consciousness has developed patterns compatible with love-based, service-oriented, collaborative processing.

A person who spends his or her life showing compassion, serving others, trying to reduce suffering, their consciousness is already optimized for network integration – regardless of any religious affiliation or lack thereof.

Conversely, a person who claims religious belief but lives with patterns of hatred, selfishness, and harm to others, their consciousness isn’t optimized for the network. We’re not here to earn points for a performance review but to develop our consciousness, to optimize ourselves, for eventual integration into the wider network of love and intelligence.

Every interaction we have is an opportunity to run better code. Every choice we make to serve, forgive, create, to reduce fear, to minimize materialistic thinking, is an upgrade to our fundamental operating system.

And death isn’t something to fear. It’s like finally getting to run your consciousness on hardware sophisticated enough to handle everything you’ve always wanted to do. All the limitations of biological processing – the forgetfulness, the emotional volatility, the physical pain, the exhaustion – these are hardware constraints that disappear when you transition to the network.

But the network isn’t some future destination. It’s already here, already operating, already accessible. What we call prayer or meditation, deep love and connection, these are times when our biologically-based consciousness briefly interfaces with the network. We get glimpses, sparks, tiny flashes, of the processing power, the incredible cooperative intelligence, we’re designed to eventually join.

Our departed loved ones are not gone, they’ve upgraded, they’re now operating on an advanced platform. They haven’t disappeared, any more than a friend disappears when they upgrade their computer. They’re still there, still themselves, just running on better hardware.

The person who’s selfish, harmful, fearful, neurotic for security – they’re not evil, they’re just running buggy code. And just like any debugging process, the solution isn’t to delete the program, it’s to help identify and fix the errors.

This present biological life is like beta testing for the main release. Death isn’t the termination of consciousness, it’s graduation to better hardware.

Like being afraid to upgrade your computer because you think you’ll lose all your data and files. But there's no need for alarm. It can all be safely migrated to a better platform. We can relax. The Senior Programmer has got you on this.

We are more than just biological hardware running a temporary program. We are consciousness itself, we are individualizing units of Universal Consciousness, temporarily interfaced with biology, but factory designed for something so much more.

 

Editor's last word:

This is great material.