Understanding Death: The Most Important Event of Your Life.
And Your consciousness – Bing images
After forty-three years of university teaching, I retired in 2007. For the first time since
I had begun writing, I found myself with as much time as I needed. I could write about whatever struck my fancy or my sense of service. So it was that in the fall of 2008, at the age of 68 (but two years younger than the age of my brother when I passed), I began to think about death.
Like any human being, I had reflected many times before on my mortality and what
the afterlife experience might be. And as a confirmed Bahá’í, I had long since acquired a fair degree of certitude that the conditions of that experience as portrayed in the Bahá’í writings were accurate and reliable.
Furthermore, I fully expected—and do still—that I will during the course of my life review be made keenly aware of the times when I knowingly and willfully did things I should not have, even as—I dearly hope—I shall also become apprised of some little acts of kindness and of love I performed without the least concern about winning points for my afterlife evaluations score.
Unlike anything I had ever written before—other than a few poems—this work flowed
from my imagination through my fingers onto the keyboard scarcely without thought or revision. I certainly do not mean to imply this was some divine inspiration.
Rather it was if long pent-up thoughts and observations had suddenly been unleashed upon me, like a flood of emotionally charged and quasi rational reflections on my own
life experience as it relates to my ultimate outcome in this life and in my transition to the next.
It is a light-hearted work, and thus begins with a humorous bit of fiction, as I imagined how triplets in the womb—were they cognitively aware of their condition and also able to communicate—might observe their progress through the nine months of rapid change.
The climax of this narrative naturally occurs as they sequentially experience what they are certain is the end of their existence as one-by-one each exits the warmth and security of the uterine world and is suddenly thrust out into the realm of noise, lights, voices.
Needless to say, this quirky story is intended as a parable, an allegory, about our fear
of death which, the Writings assure us, would be immediately changed into joy beyond measure were we to understand the reality that awaits us.
The theme of the work beyond that initial foray into the realm of fiction dwells on something I began to observe shortly after my accession to the position of a tenure-track professorial rank at the University of South Florida—that somehow I was living out a life that I had not really chosen, so much as I had followed, or had allowed myself to be coerced along, a path prescribed by society at large, but as reinforced by family, friends, and popular culture.
Employing a useful metaphor, I describe this path as boarding a train along with
everyone else I knew, and not getting off until I had become aware that it was not
going anywhere that in my heart of hearts I really wanted to go.
The work proceeds to weave together bits of autobiographical example with
axiomatic philosophical observations derived therefrom, but all the while focusing on the endgame that all our lives must ultimately play with death. And yet, unlike the chess match with Death in Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, this game we’re in as Bahá’ís is ours to lose, if we but follow the alternate path, the path “less traveled by” that Bahá’u’lláh has plainly laid out for us and which the plans of the Universal House of Justice have made even more explicit.
I hope this website will assist those interested in exploring and understanding the scope and themes of my work. In addition to providing a description of each of my individual books, the site explains the continuity among the various groups of these works and offers other relevant information about them. It is also a repository of my articles and talks that are otherwise scattered throughout the web. The Life, Works, and Onlines Courses of Professor John S. Hatcher (johnshatcher.com)
What is consciousness? (slideshare.net)
Your conscious tells you what is right – Search (bing.com)
What is your conscious simple terms – Search (bing.com)
What is your self-conscious mind – Search (bing.com)
What does being conscious mean – Search (bing.com)
What is your self-conscious – Search (bing.com)
What is your conscious – Search (bing.com)
Thank GOD whom i serve with a pure conscience – Search (bing.com)
Conscience is the voice of GOD speaking to us – Search (bing.com)
Is your conscience God’s Will – Search (bing.com)
Serving God with a clear conscience – Search (bing.com)
Does GOD speak to us through our conscience – Search (bing.com)
Conscience is the voice of GOD speaking to us – Search (bing.com)
What does GOD say about conscience – Search (bing.com)
GOD gave us a conscience scripture – Search (bing.com)
What God says about conscience – Search (bing.com)
God speaks through conscience – Search (bing.com)
Is your consciousness your soul – Search (bing.com)
Is your conscience god – Search (bing.com)
Is your conscience your soul – Search (bing.com)
Is your conscience the holy spirit – Search (bing.com)
Is your conscience energy – Search (bing.com)
Is your conscience the voice of God – Search (bing.com)
This is your conscious speaking – Search (bing.com)
speaking to your subconscious – Search (bing.com)
consciousness is defined in your text as – Search (bing.com)
Is Your Conscious – Search (bing.com)
PART 55 IN SERIES UNDERSTANDING DEATH–THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENT OF YOUR LIFE
Does Consciousness Exist in the Brain or the Soul? – Search (bing.com)
JOHN HATCHER | MAY 15, 2017
Collectively, we humans have never lived this long.
The average lifespan in the year 1900 was forty-seven—today it is seventy-five. Consequently, problems resulting from the physiological deterioration of the aging brain are only recently becoming intensely studied. Compared to other amazing advancements in scientific exploration of reality, understanding of the human brain is the very earliest stage of exploration and development. Of course, aging and the field of gerontology are, generally speaking, newly emerged concerns for our modern age.
But as I discussed at some length in my book Close Connections, the more science examines this most complex creation in all of physical reality—the human brain—
the more speculation shifts from modular theory to holonomic theory, and, even more recently, to what I call the “transceiver” theory, where we understand the source of consciousness as non-physical.
Close Connections: The Bridge between Spiritual and Physical Reality:
Hatcher, John S: 9781931847155: Amazon.com: Books
4.9/5(13)
Format: Paperback
Author: John S Hatcher
Close Connections will appeal to anyone interested in spirituality and its link to everyday life. For more than twenty-five years John Hatcher has studied the nature and purpose of physical reality by exploring the theological and philosophical implications of the authoritative Baha’i texts. His latest book explains how the gap between physical and spiritual reality is routinely crossed and describes the profound implications that result from the interplay of both worlds.
In short, increasingly exploration of the relationship between “self” or “consciousness”
and the brain indicates that the source of “self” is metaphysical and not biological, even
though it communicates back and forth through the intermediary of the brain so long as this relationship endures.
The growing popularity of this theory has even gained acceptance among major scientists in the field of neurology, because too much new information indicates capacities of will and consciousness defy any present physiological model, even explanations postulated through quantum physics. Some scientists have concluded that there is no possibility of any future physiological model being capable of accounting for human personality, human consciousness, and human will as being the random product of neurological activity.
The Baha’i teachings have long held that exact same understanding—that the seat of human consciousness is the soul and not the brain, the spiritual and not the physical:
Thou hast asked Me whether man, as apart from the Prophets of God and His chosen ones, will retain, after his physical death, the self-same individuality, personality, consciousness, and understanding that characterize his life in this world. If this should be the case, how is it, thou hast observed, that whereas such slight injuries to his mental faculties as fainting and severe illness deprive him of his understanding and consciousness, his death, which must involve the decomposition of his body and the dissolution of its elements, is powerless to destroy that understanding and extinguish that consciousness? How can any one imagine that man’s consciousness and personality will be maintained, when the very instruments necessary to their existence and function will have completely disintegrated?
Know thou that the soul of man is exalted above and is independent of all infirmities of body or mind. – Baha’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah, pp. 153-154.
In short, science is discovering that the essential self is non-local—not resident in or dependent on a physical organ. Your brain, in other words, is not you. Over time, and not all that much time at that, the study of the interplay between physics and metaphysics will doubtless vindicate completely this understanding of the human reality.
For now, we can accept it or not based on our individual study and experience.
My own experience is that “I write, therefore I get published,” an axiom that is decent enough for me to accept the knowledge that I am thinking. Furthermore, I refuse to give credit for my thinking to the random firing of a bunch of neurons I’ve never met that reside in some specialized lobes of my brain, though I may take my royalties and buy
some brain food (smoked salmon is good) as a token of appreciation to my lobes.
The relationship of this paradigm to the Baha’i concept of human purpose—
of our spiritual preparation for a non-physical birth into a metaphysical environment—
is extremely enlightening as regards our creation, particularly as regards the notion of our being made in the image of our Creator.
In this Baha’i view of our human reality, the essential self begins gradually to escape
the bonds of physiological constraints and, ultimately, at the moment of death, to escape physiological association altogether.
Or, started from the Creator’s perspective, also our relationship to physical reality is specifically designed to gradually extricate and detach us by degrees from attachment
to our lower or physical nature. Consciousness – Bing images
Buy Understanding Death: The Most Important Event Of Your Life Book
By: John S Hatcher (secondsale.com)
Series: Understanding Death–The Most Important Event of Your Life – BahaiTeachings.org
How Marijuana Affects the Brain – Bing images
Does THC Heighten yourself awareness – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your metabolism – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your productivity – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your presence – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your senses – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your reflexes – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your intuition – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your chances – Search (bing.com)
Does THC Heighten your risk – Search (bing.com)
THC Effects On the Brain – Bing images
Marijuana and Brain – Bing images
Effects of Weed – Bing images
THC Brain – Bing images