Supernatural theories of immortality

This is a small list of supernatural theories about immortality created by Deepak Chopra. He writes "If we look at how various cultures perceive the afterlife, there are roughly seven categories:

1. Paradise: Your soul finds itself in a perfected world surrounding God. You go to Paradise as a reward and never leave. (If you are bad, you go to Satan’s home and never leave it.)

2. The Godhead: Your soul returns to God, but not in any particular place. You discover the location of God as a timeless state infused with his presence.

3. The Spirit World: Your soul rests in a realm of departed spirits. You are drawn back to those you loved in this life. Or you rejoin your ancestors, who are gathered with the great Spirit.

4. Transcendence: Your soul performs a vanishing act in which a person dissolves, either quickly or gradually. The pure soul rejoins the sea of consciousness from which it was born.

5. Transmigration (or Metempsychosis): Your soul is caught in the cycle of rebirth. Depending on one’s karma, each soul rises or falls from lower to higher life forms — and even may be reborn in objects. The cycle continues eternally until your soul escapes through higher realization.

6. Awakening: Your soul arrives in the light. You see with complete clarity for the first time, realizing the truth of existence that was masked by being in a physical body.

7. Dissolution: Eternity is nothingness. As the chemical components of your body return to basic atoms and molecules, the consciousness created by the brain disappears completely. You are no more.

The seventh theory is usually considered a scientific theory but surprisingly it is also supernatural because it contains some supernatural assumptions. It seems true that when a body dies it no longer produces consciousness. But the statement that you are no more is a simple statement, but what does it really mean? You can be dead but your body is still there. Are you your body? The matter that your body has contained during its life time still exists even though it gets spread around the universe over time. But this is not what we are talking about really. What we are talking about is you being conscious again death. What we know is that you are conscious now and we think that we know that your body is producing that consciousness. The question is what are the conditions that produce your consciousness by matter? You are conscious now, to think that matter will only come together in the right way once in all of eternity to produce your consciousness and never again is a very big assumption when we know that the universe is so extremely large and we have no idea how long it will last. And it is possible that there are multiple universes.

There is another assumption, and this is: you are only what you are experiencing at this moment. You are at least everything that you have experienced in your life time. All of those experiences correspond to the functioning of matter. So duplicate any of those structures and functionings of matter that corresponds to some point in your life you will have your consciousness produced again at that point in your life. But guess what, this version of you is not likely to have the same environment than you did so you will experience a new consciousness. You will experience this newly created consciousness unless the enviroment is so differnt than it changes the structure and functioning of your body so much that a very differnt consciousness is produced. Think about all the different environments that can be applied to any point in your life and all of the different lives that can thus be created that you will experience. This adds up to a very large group of different structures and functioning of matter that will produce a consciousness that you will experince when or if they are created. This solves another problem that is often used against the idea that a replica will produce the same consciousness as the original which is that we can never know the structure and functioning of a person at the end of his life because of the complexity of the brain. Consequently, even if the replica produces the same consciousness as the original the replica can never be produced by us. But since there are an extremely large amount of structures and functionings of matter that will produce a consciousness that you will experience, there is a much greater possibllitiy that the universe will randomly produce a structure and functioning of matter that will produce a consciousness that you will experience.

There is the supernatural assumption in the "'Dissolution theory that there is something special in the matter that produces your consciousness that no other matter can produce. But your body is constantly replacing the current matter with other matter from outside of the body, randomly. It appears that any matter in the body can be replaced with any matter outside the body and still produce the same consciousness if the same structure and functioning of the body is maintained. This should imply that not only can you replace some of the matter over time but all of the matter as quickly as you wish to the point of instantaneously replacing the whole body. If you accept gradual replacement but not instantaneous replacement of matter then you have to apply another supernatural concept and that is the assimilation speed concept. Which essentially is that there is a speed limit to how fast matter can replaced in the body in order to continue to produce the same consciousness and or ixperiencitness.

I can imagine an almost endless amount of supernatural theories of immortality. If we consider any one of the theories above there will be a very large amount of personal interpretations of each one. For instance the first one Paradise has a heaven and hell. There are an endless amount different ways of thinking about and imagining heaven and hell.