The Egg by Andy Weir

[Solie123]

Maybe it just depends on what we choose to take away from the story, or how you interpret it ...

Personally, I took away the story the fact that the author insinuates that all consciousness is ultimately from the same source - and when all consciousness is returned to its source it once again forms 'God' so to speak.

Whether the mechanics of reincarnation are expressed correctly or incorrectly in relation to consciousness & the idea of souls, I have no idea, but I merely took the story for what it is, a story, and took the overall message to be about the shared source of all consciousness.

But maybe I'm just reading into it what I want to read in to it, and each person reads it differently?

Exactly!!! I also think it's what you take away from the story, while I think we should also appreciate obyvatel's dissection of the literature, as knowledge always protects!!!! I don't think we should be so heavy hearted about the matter though.

 

[edgitarra]

It is a story? Can you tell the difference between a story and reality?

I think so. This particular story presents cosmological views of the New Age type. Presenting such ideas as fiction is common and convenient since no claims are being made about it being real. So ideas can be presented without accountability.

Do not however underestimate the effect of fictional ideas on the mind. Simplistically speaking, ideas are like food that we digest. If you are interested in a more scholarly look at this concept, follow the pdf link provided in this post regarding a hypothesis about "How Mental Systems Believe".

[quote author=Edgitarra]

If you reach the end of the story, there is only one soul? Like a collective soul? So maybe when God adressed to him he adressed to the soul as a whole, to the soul group? I can see you are very fixed into what Gurdjieff says. Like he was the only one who ever said the whole truth in the history of humankind.

You say this is just a story, yet you defend it with gusto. What you see about me is not accurate but that is ok, though it is not relevant to the discussion.

[quote author=Edgitarra]
[quote author=Gurdjieff]
Blessed is he who has a soul, blessed is he who has none, but woe and grief to him who has it in embryo.
[/quote]
Hmm, in the end of the story it seems like the "soul' is a fetus. Embryo, rings a bell?
[/quote]

If it is a fetus, then it is not "gigantic" as described in the excerpt. But that is the license of fiction. One is allowed to say contradictory stuff and get away with it without clarification. But if a reader accepts the idea wholesale (magnificent, gigantic fetus) , then such contradictions can cause issues down the road.

It is possible to reconcile this specific contradiction but that is not my point. The motivation behind my previous post was to raise the point that pseudo-esoteric stories like this should be treated with careful thinking.

[quote author=Edgitarra]

How then can one explain cases of accurate remembering of past lives, as is studied and cited in reincarnation studies? I personally think a lot of assumptions we hold about "isolated and localized minds" need to be challenged to find alternative explanations. Carl Jung's work on the "collective unconscious", Rupert Sheldrake's work on "morphic fields" (discussed very briefly here ) provide some preliminary directions. To give an analogy, when my old computer was "dying", I was able to copy the data stored in it in an external hard drive and then copy it back into a new computer. The new computer now "remembers" all the old data - is it a reincarnation of the old computer?

I am not sure your analogy is very well suited for reincarnation. What is the hard drive then ? What are the efforts of the hard drive so to speak? Memorizing. How does it do that?
[/quote]

If this interests you, reading Sheldrake's ideas on "morphic fields" could be useful. It is too complex a topic to discuss in this thread. The basic idea is that memories may not be strictly individual but a collective and distributed resource. The brain/mind can be more like a tuned radio receiver accessing and playing out such records.
[/quote]

I was defending it because I got caught by your comments, which I found challenging and interesting. I agree with you on the part with the effects of fictional ideas on the mind. This is why whenever I read something, I firstly put the guard on by defining it - story, news etc. I find it more difficult with the news though.

 

[Keyhole]

Maybe it just depends on what we choose to take away from the story, or how you interpret it ...

Personally, I took away the story the fact that the author insinuates that all consciousness is ultimately from the same source - and when all consciousness is returned to its source it once again forms 'God' so to speak.

Whether the mechanics of reincarnation are expressed correctly or incorrectly in relation to consciousness & the idea of souls, I have no idea, but I merely took the story for what it is, a story, and took the overall message to be about the shared source of all consciousness.

But maybe I'm just reading into it what I want to read in to it, and each person reads it differently?

The way I understood obyvatel's post was that he was warning how one would be wise to approach "pseudo-esoteric" fictional work carefully. I would imagine that is related to how a person may not necessarily have any conscious control over what they subconsciously absorb from a piece of fiction that they have read, and as a consequence may unknowingly internalize false concepts which subsequently alter the way that they think. Therefore, by taking a "careful thinking", analytical approach, the reader should be less susceptible to this kind of unconsious internalisation of wrong concepts. In this process, the reader would be able to gain more from the book.

This was my impression of the post anyway, so feel free to correct me if I have misunderstood Obyvatel.