Such a beautiful stream of consciousness cannot be allowed to go unanswered.
I determine the terms of the equation which allowed this flow of intro/extro-spection to roll so off your fingers to be...
+ NY + Starbucks + wireless = Nirvana˛I love reading these forums and then catering to my admittedly mildly egocentric mission to educate the world with my take on the fundamental nature of reality by contributing a little of myself to the soup. I am driven, but I know my limitations. We simply can't know everything because the more complex evolution makes us, the more refined the limitation to the extent of our understanding becomes. It is tantamount to a beautiful irony. The ancient scribes wrote literature that most people of today have difficulty stomaching. The library at ALexandria until the 2nd century CE was more complete than today's American Library of Congress. It is likely that the scriptures and books that make up the bible were probably on loan, or stolen from that great institution at Alexandria at that time when the Vandals plundered the area and burned it to the ground. Who knows what literary elegance, practical knowledge, and philosophical wisdom we are missing?
What I can say about life after death is that I am absolutely certain that the potential for the continuation of the singularly unique identity that your corporeality affords you the opportunity to define is established as surely as the matter that composes itself into you. Life is to inanimate matter as the spirit is to life itself. Neither is more miraculous than the other and I can see no reason to doubt the existence of either. Insomuch as evolution is an ongoing process, so is the nature wherein that evolution manifests an evolving context. We just happen to Be Here Now.
Idealism is merely an interesting philosophical sidebar. If we were making our own reality and life was just a solipsist interpretation of existence then I wonder at the lack of perfection in our world, of the genocide and wilfull destruction, the accidents, the pain we encounter, the trouble we land ourselves into. What sort of masochistic projection then is this Universe? Would we still have the capacity to be mentally unhealthy? Would we blame that on projection or an actual biological malady? What would compel us to project anything but a perfect Eden? No, my friend, I think only in practical scientific terms, of the real and the substance, symbiosis and ecology. We remind ourselves when we stumble that we are always in a state of collision with this world because of gravity. In the practical world we don't wonder at how it came to be. I more wonder at the fact that it is.