What does that mean?
A century ago, Albert Einstein taught us: everything is relative. The way you see the world depends on your point of view and context. What is hot for you might be mild for me, what is a success for me might be a failure to you. There’s no black and white, there’s only the perspective you choose to look at things. Everything can change in a snap when you provide context.
It’s impossible to be born into heaven. You cannot understand light without understanding darkness, you cannot know what hot is unless there is something colder, you cannot be born into heaven. Therefore to be born into utopia you would need to be born into dystopia and experience it before understanding utopia. Therefore to be born into heaven would be to be born into the last portion of dystopia, it couldn’t be perfect, and the perfect thing would be able to help create it. Billionaires are far happier when they earn it than when they are born into it, and I believe the same for heaven.
Everything in the World Is Relative
You can have anything you can imagine if you are willing to pay the price. But you’ll never be satisfied with life if you just mindlessly try to control everything. Life is like a river, you can’t control it fully, it flows where it wants, it was flowing before you and will flow long after you. Choosing the right perspective on life matters more than you think and only you can choose one that makes your life meaningful, happy and complete.
To him, the new house is beautiful and grandiose in appearance; to me, it's ugly and pretentious. It's all relative, then, isn't it?
You think you're poor? Then take a look at the skid row bums living in the sewers downtown. Everything is relative.
To start with, if you are VERY SURE about what life is, and how it operates I push you to question that…
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing” -Socrates
While your viewpoints may not fully align with my own, I at least expect you to have an open-mind, as you should expect me to have an open-mind towards your viewpoints. At the end of the day no 2 minds, or people are the same.
We all grew up with our different experiences and hold different beliefs and values for different reasons. While I do not ask anyone to share my beliefs, I of course want to outline where they stem from, why I think they are rational, and how they could help your life's direction as they have helped my own.
When I started viewing the world with complete open-mindedness I no longer could say Christianity, the Religion I was born into, was more right than my friend who was raised Muslism. Thus I relinquished the branding and stories associated with it and returned to the facts of life while holding on to the wise moral codes within it. This type of mindset, of looking towards the facts and what one can control in life is commonly referred to as Stoicism. Stoicism grew as a famous philosophy from Ancient Greece. In Ancient Greece college did not exist, instead the standard practice was not to join a school of philosophy, one of these schools was Stoicism. Each school of philosophy had different core beliefs on how one should operate in the world, and whichever one you connected with the most would be the group you joined to further your learning. These schools were not time based, they were life long, people transitioned over time, and many were just spin-offs or widely similar to others. These life philosophies would act as a guiding north star for the people within the school of thought.
The difference between these schools of thoughts and the mainstream religions which took the world by storm was the influence of a God, or Godlike figure. This rapidly changed the “viral factor” (how fast it spread and to how many people). In videos we understand viral factors to be perfect timing, good lighting, matching cuts to music, which all increase the amount of dopamine released in someone's brain. Video algorithms want to keep people on their platform, and thus focus on pushing content that users enjoy the most, thus keeping them using the platform longer.
When it comes to viral factors in belief systems (religion and philosophy are both types of belief systems), some of the main “viral factors” (how much it spreads) includes how many people you trust who believe in it, the risk or reward of believing in it, and how much once inside of the belief system you would then spread it.
The difference between philosophy and religion, which both act as belief systems is that while religion is based on a set of unquestionable beliefs and dogmas about human existence pertaining to the supernatural, philosophy focuses on sets of beliefs that launch a quest into the truth of the world around us and the reality of our existence.
Obviously, religions then can be built more easily with MAJOR viral effects, given the idea of pushing unquestionable faith, often using a FEAR OF GOD or fear of external punishment that increased the viral factor by an insane factor. Essentially, anyone who was a full believer of the religion, then could believe to not spread it is a SIN, and if they act against the belief system they could end up in an ETERNAL HELL. On top of that, countries and governments themselves added real world punishments to doubting or talking against the religious beliefs they held which was punishable by torture and death.
That lack of an ability to be a skeptic is the drive that pushed many towards Freedom, and thus the creation of America. Many fled Great Britain because of the inability for independence of thought. They were so strict on Christian faith, to talk poorly on it was enough to be executed. It makes sense why it became such a viral belief system if you were killed if you didn’t believe in it, and hey why wouldn’t you, what evidence did you actually have to question it, we had access to a tiny fraction of the information we do today.
Of course, there were many more exciting factors for people to come to America, and given the main inflow was from Great Britain where most people had DEEP SEATED Christian beliefs it was brought over. We see now, that the viral factor spreading for Christianity, for each new generation that mainstream Religion's power in people's lives is decreasing.
Instead, the emergence of the combination of spirituality and science is growing. Some of the “feelings” we’ve had about the world are being backed by science. The concepts of heaven and hell are becoming realized, not in a different universe or form but something we are approaching the creation of here and now.
“the probability of you existing at all comes out to 1 in 10^102,685,000 — yes, that's a 10 followed by 2.685 million zeroes! Binazir concludes that the odds of you being alive are basically zero.” - Business Insider
Thats 10 to the power of, not just 1 in 100 million. 2 million zeros behind it.
If you think about it, you’ve been “dead” for at least 13.8 billion years, and since you can only experience the portion of life of being alive, feel as if you just spawned in not long ago.
However, this assumes that your consciousness came into being "from the void" to begin with, and if that's the case, one could make the case for it being a possibility that you can indeed die, and that your consciousness will simply continue as a new person "ripped from the void" again, presumably without memories of your "past life" (unless there are other hitherto unknown mechanisms at play). This would also imply that your consciousness has always existed, and never came into existence at any point. Things get really hairy when considering the implications of these aspects of quantum mechanics.
This makes sense, as more people begin to think outside of a script they were given, and open themselves up to all the possibilities of life, spirituality (the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things) becomes more common.
And as we move forward with Science, we are beginning to uncover the fact that WE REALLY DONT KNOW HOW THE FUCK REALITY WORKS. (Linked is a video which goes over the double-slit experiment, the experiment that set forth the quantum mechanics revolution and broke our understanding of reality, essentially proving that at any single moment, every possible future reality exists, and we are just living in one of them, but we still have no idea WHY it works like that. This is called the many worlds theory)
What this also means is the possibility of proof of free will, evidence for us being in a simulation/videogame and much more. There also exists quantum entanglement, another thing we simply have no fucking idea why it is possible. It’s often called spooky action at a distance because particles, no matter how far apart, even light years away, will instantly influencer each other. I am not asking you to dive deep on these videos unless it interests you, the future ones linked in the article are more worth your time, I mean people have dedicated their life to studying this field and at the end of the day our understanding is still in its infancy.
The reason I even mention it is because of its scientific proof to our lack of understanding how the universe operates. Its evidence that thinking we know truly what reality is, is just false.
These deep concepts, such as quantum immortality stem from the many worlds theory which now has the most evidence for how our universe operates because of the double-slit experiment.
What quantum immortality posits is simply that there will always be a continuity of consciousness if it’s possible to have one.
If you imagine ten realities and in 9 of them you die, and 1 of them you are alive. Then it suggests you will of course live in the reality where you are alive. This is only true to yourself. Other people can of course die in your reality, your consciousness is the only thing that is “necessary” to exist.
Have you ever taken a nap where you closed your eyes, opened them and hours had passed? By this I mean one in which you never really reached REM sleep, the portion of sleep where dreaming occurs.
Quantum immortality is the idea that you will of course live in the reality where you continue to be alive, and this idea is peculiar to me because it aligns with the point at which we spawned into existence way too well. When I was young I was not spiritual at all, I didn’t question how or why life was the way it is, and only later did I realize how ridiculously crazy it is that we were born at this period of rapid acceleration.
I now believe this life to be HEAVEN and if it’s not, it’s just better to think that it is.