I asked Rubber Ducky if there is an eternal soul? He said there is a Duck word, “Mack”, for which there is no direct English translation. But roughly, we could say it means “It doesn’t matter“.
He went on:
“If there is an eternal soul, Mack, this Earth is a school to learn about many facets of the Universe. You can’t learn these things with divine intervention. It would be like placing an exoskeleton on a baby and having that be the way it walks – it will never learn to really walk. If there is NOT an eternal soul, what you do in life lives on forever. As the Duck theorist, Mack, says, ‘If a Blue Heron pecks its beak in the Common Area Pond, lakes in Argentina will freeze over.’ Many very little things in parallel kicks off webs of complex cause and effect, immediately unpredictable as we would need to track everything in the Universe. You interact with dozens if not thousands of people just on your way to work. Each of those interactions kicks the billiard balls in a slightly different direction. At worst, dealing with your Dukkha, which means emptying your mind – so it can be filled with a mode to be in the present, not just when meditating but always, unencumbered by the inertia of what your brain “knows” and a future you don’t control – you will lose your angst. Losing one’s angst so one is freed to see the entire Universe, not just what you think is that cage you call your life, is the Buddha’s teaching.
“Accomplishing that, at best, you have learned to become one with the universe, live out your life helping others now that you ‘put on your oxygen mask first’, and then move on to infinitely neater things; at worst, your brain and body will live angst-free, happy life, taking actions that cascade in unpredictable manners through the life of this Universe, and all of that is you, even what is millions of years from now because you decided to or not to flip off that asshole who cut you off.”
Fishnu 