The Afterlife
 

Religion aside, do you believe in life after death? Or if you don't, do you wish there was? If you're Christian or whatever religions preach that there is life after death, do you believe it or do you just shrug and hope it's so? If you're not, and you believe we all end up just, as Waits says, dirt in the ground, are you okay with this or do you wish there was something we could look forward to? Do you look on the idea of being reunited with your loved ones with scorn, but secretly wish it could happen, or do you in fact believe this is what awaits us after death? Or have you resigned yourself to the belief that once people are gone, they're gone, and you'll never be reunited with them? What are your thoughts about death? Does it scare you? Do you think about it a lot? Are you comfortable knowing you will die at some point, or are you thinking about cryo? Looking for ways to live forever?

There is the possibility that we don't understand life at all and what we view as death is some kind of sentience that we haven't understood.

There's also the concept that the amount of activity in the brain causes us to perceive time in an extremely slow manner. That brain activity would cause us to experience time as far slower than if you were healthy. Monumentally slower. There's a chance that it could be infinitesimally slower. Combine that with the tales of people's life flashing before their eyes (I do kind of wonder if this is a Western thing, I haven't read up on it), you basically just live your life again for an eternity. That might be what enforces some people who have near death experiences to believe in a heaven or hell, because if you have a ****ty life then your near death experience is going to be too, right? People who live like a ****in Mormon sitcom and dig that experience that from a sheltered little brief experience that's different from their life.

Could be 100% bull**** and the opposite though. Or so wrong it's not even on the same plane.

I could take it or leave it. I don't know what I would be signing up for tbh, there could be a lot of work involved and idk about that.

I don't know if I would say that I believe that, but I don't see any reason to doubt it.

How do I know they're going to pick out all of my loved ones? I don't like about a third of my family or many of the people who consider me a loved one, even though whenever they die I feel a lot of empathy for the way they go and the timing within other people's lives. That just sounds like a lot of work tbh.

[cheesy answer about how learning about them through the people that are left behind is like being reunited with them]

It's a hard fact and it's probably not in our best interest in the long run. You can only find out the hard way. I'm not really seeking it out.

The real death experience, I do kind of look forward to it in a way because I almost see it like doing a crazy new drug. I would rather work on making my life good than worry about what happens when I'm done.

I think about real world deaths a lot and how much they suck, but I don't ponder much about the afterlife.

I cryo every day, but not about the afterlife. I'm comfortable with the concept of death as the end. I'm not comfortable with it coming upon me or anyone else.

We know that the world will go on around us, so we can only do whatever we can and leave the biggest footprint so that no one forgets you.

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Can you explain what you mean by that? I don't understand the reference here at all.

He wants his afterlife to involved subservient children.

It does kind of sound like that, doesn't it? :confused: :confused:

No afterlife. This is the only consciousness we get.

I misread it as "bowling acquaintances."

https://i.imgur.com/25HfwVJ.jpg

Frown, thanks for the long and considered reply. Let me respond to a few points here:
This is very possible. Even Christianity kind of tells us that life is a preparation for the afterlife, as if we're in training before being hit with the real thing. Maybe we should all walk around with "Trainee" badges on us?
This is very interesting. So are you saying we could end up living the same life but at a tremendously slowed-down rate? Or just that we would continue living, but again much slower? A sort of immortality in slow motion?
You mean you don't want to work in God's paddy fields after death?
Nor do I, to be honest, but I don't want it to be true. I want to believe there is something, whether it's Heaven or some variant, a reincarnation or some new plane of existence, a great journey to be undertaken.
I guess I'm lucky then. I can't think of anyone I've lost with whom I would not wish to be reunited.

I suppose, but it's not the same is it?
Neither am I, but it's always there. I especially fear going before Karen, as I honestly don't know what would happen to her.
I certainly wouldn't think if it that way, though as I say above, the idea of starting out on some new amazing journey is very appealing.
Of course I meant cryogenics. You knew that.
This is true. Be the best you can while you live, and make sure that when you're gone people will speak kindly of you and remember you with fondness.
(That's me ****ed then!) :laughing:

I suppose I'm just thinking about this more now that I have something to fear, as I mentioned above. It's kind of on my mind a lot of the time. Not healthy I'm sure, but there it is.

Same. It's the one thing we are all going to go through and we cannot stop it. It's scary and also exciting.

So, Frown and MLM: if they came up with some way you didn't have to die, would you take it or would you rather say "Nah I'm quite looking forward to death thanks mate"? Is it just the fact that we have no choice, you reckon make the best of it, can't stop it, or do you actually have that level of curiosity about it? And what if there's literally nothing: you close your eyes, breathe your last and never experience anything ever again?

Living forever sounds like a lot of work. I'm content with the conventional lifespan.

It's both.

Then I'll know what a last breath is like.

But think of all the terrible music you could write! :D
Yeah but you won't retain that knowledge. It will die with you. So what's the point? I can see, if you're reincarnated or you go on to the "next phase", but if you just hit a STOP sign and that's it, end of the line, what does it matter what you learn or what you experience?

Because even if I don't remember it afterward, I'll still have experienced it. That experience in itself, not reflecting on that experience, is what I'm referring to when I say that I look forward to death in a way.

Tbh I'd be happy with literally nothing and not experiencing anything again. If that's what happens then there's nothing to fear whatsoever. And that's probably what does happen, that was what happened before I was born so no reason for me to think it'll be different when I'm dead.

I am curious about it. It depends how I die though.

This is very true, and for most people probably the main reason to fear death, or rather, dying. For me it is slightly different as I already mentioned, but yeah, I want to die an easy death. No fire, drowning, torn apart by wild Batlords or any of that guff. Go in my sleep, preferably after Karen has gone. As my boss used to say "All I want is for the obituary to read Suddenly, at his residence..."

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Hah! I don't think that's what he had in mind! :laughing:
Ah, ok. But why then would your children be treated in this way by you?

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So if you're (say) reunited with them in (say) Heaven, you won't be close to them? Do you expect the same from your own pare - oh sorry. I forgot. Well, your mother?

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Thanks, but I'm certainly hoping my useless scumbag of a father is heading the opposite direction.

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Wrong: when you die, death happens.

It's party time for all the little worms!

Whenever I start pondering death too much, I just remind myself of this Mark Twain quote:


“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

About whether I would want there to be anything after this life, then both yes and no.
This lyric from a song by Christian Mistress always stuck in my mind, especially the bolded...:

Don't believe in heaven
Don't believe in hell
There isn't anything
Beyond the physical

Eternity is a long time
Would you want to know yourself that well
Eternity is a fine time
But it's all in your mind

As a few posters have already described, I've always believed that death will be no different than what it was like before we were born.

I’m also going with a big fat “no” for belief in the afterlife. I prefer to trust in the scientific method which recommends that we always opt for the minimum working hypothesis, the simplest explanation for the available evidence. So I comfortably dismiss a bunch of mysterious phenomena; ghosts, dragons, UFOs, the afterlife, and ( sorry to break it to you so brutally Trollheart) Leprechauns.

In fact I have two problems about the notion of an afterlife – one frivolous and one serious.

For the first, I’ve never been convinced by anyone’s logistics about heaven. As some posters have suggested, being with your loved ones for eternity isn't necessarily Paradise; tbh, a week with them at the beach is usually sufficient. So let’s say instead that my Heaven would be “Marlon Brando, Pocahuntas and me” sitting around listening to Neil Young cds. Does that mean they’d have to sit through eternity with me? What if they don't like NY's songs? But if they get to choose a heaven as well, chances are they'll have different plans that don't include me at all. So all of a sudden, it looks like everybody is gonna need a heaven of their own….

And my serious issue with the afterlife is this: on the basis of scant evidence, more as a question of faith, religious leaders have used the idea of an afterlife to blight millions of lives. More specifically, (and also adding to the implausability) they have encouraged the idea that your conduct in this life affects the quality of your afterlife. The tradgedy of this misconception is that it has led some people to sacrifice happiness today in hopes of an eternal reward later. There are, for instance, monks in Tibet trying to log up karma for the next bardo, Western religious orders intent on denying or chastising the flesh, and suicide bombers prepared to die because of the virgins they’ve been promised in the afterlife: thousands of lives over hundreds of years that could've been lived differently if people took a more rational approach to the afterlife. It's immeasurably sad imo.

Yeah, well, you've never been to a Leprechaun party. Those dudes rock! :laughing:
Yeah I have a (not entirely serious) theory about that. When you die, you go to this huge waiting room. After what seems like (and may be) an eternity, listening to some truly awful elevator music, you're called into the presence of not God, of course, but one of his aides. A busy man, he directs you to a chair without looking up. He pushes a form over the desk towards you, again without raising his eyes. There are three options on the form, and you are to check one and only one. He informs you (looking up for the first time, with blazing red eyes just for one microsecond) that this contract is legally binding throughout eternity and beyond.

Your choices of Afterlife are:

1. You may choose to go back to Earth, reincarnated in another body. You accept the small print which tells you you will have no recollection of your previous life, and that any flashes of "memory" you may get from time to time are nothing more than what humans call Deja Vu, and should be dismissed as such.

2. You may spend eternity in a room off to the right, which will afford you access (sound and vision) to your loved ones still alive. You may then watch over them. When they too pass on, you will be allowed to choose option 1 or 3 again. The contract states very clearly that you will NOT be able to interfere in the lives of anyone living, just observe.

3. You may opt for your own private Heaven. This will be filled with all the things and people you wish, you can be who you want, do what you want and live any life you want, forever.
But sometimes hilarious. Sort of.
:shycouch:

I like what Frownland said about us might not really being able to grasp what life is. Because I don't think we do. These concepts are so casually talked about that they seem simple when in reality I don't think the human truly understands consciousness or life, what exactly time is, the concept of infinity. Like, we all know what infinity is but our minds still truly can't grasp infinity. We say we do, we can trick ourselves into thinking we do, but we really can't. It's beyond human comprehension at this time. So to think anybody could truly know or understand death, what death is, what truly happens to our consciousness, that's ludicrous. Also one of the reasons why I hate that religious people are pretensions enough to think they know there is a god and what it is. Like, bitch, we all struggle with basic logic at times. ALL of us do. So NONE of us could ever perceive what a god would be if god was real. I digress, and probably accidentally stirred a pot of some sort again.

On the afterlife, I don't have any firm belief. I have theories. One is that there is none. It's that our consciousness ceases to exist. Which is scary at times and relieving at other times. A lot of people don't like that answer because it shoves the over all meaningless of life in our faces and tells us how trivial any thing that was ever important to us is in the grand scheme of things. The other theory leans towards a yes but not in a sense that religious folk like to hear. Or even people that want to believe in karma. When you die DMT is supposedly released into your brain. Now DMT will **** with your perception of time. It's like dreaming. Dreaming ****s with your perception of time. You can fall asleep for 5 minutes and have a dream that lasts hours, or days, or weeks, I don't know, my dreams have never lasted ultra long periods of time for me. So if this whole chemical gets dumped in your brain when you die you are going on the ultimate trip of your life, errrr, death. How long this sequence lasts and things like that is a mystery. I don't know much about DMT trips, but I think that when you die you are going to be flooded by the emotions and thoughts that reflect upon how you lived. You might feel gratitude and happy and proud that you got to do so much in your life and that might effect your trip and make it very pleasant. Or you might be haunted by your regrets or your guilt or your anxiety and that could send you on into a nightmare. And maybe it all eventually drifts away as your brain dies and you slowly lose grasp of your identity and your feelings and your memories. What happens in a moment in our perception could last thousands upon thousands of years to those that die.

For one point to go towards theism, if this DMT theory is true it does seem like something of intelligent design. Or something that is meant to happen to ease us into death. Like there is something behind it that we don't understand and probably will never understand.

But to perhaps shake that point away from theism, people have chemical imbalances. Some people have brains that have problems providing certain chemicals that cause certain emotions. I'm bipolar, my brain sometimes has problems providing the chemicals that cause happiness and I get depressed for no reason. So if that could happen with serotonin or what ever chemical it is that I lack at times, it has to be possible that some people have brains that can't properly provide DMT. And that's a scary thought if said theory is true. I hands down don't believe in an afterlife heaven and hell dictated by a god. But I am afraid of a self induced hell brought on by my own guilt. And I'm also afraid of being shot in the head and having that drastically destroy what would be the afterlife. Decapitation is fine but anything that immediately damages the brain kind of frightens me.

I obviously think about my own death a lot as people should know by now, and this is just my thoughts on what it could be. But what do I know? I'm just another dumbass high school drop out that listens to terrible cringey music and willingly subjects himself into the slavery of materialism and social separatism to desperately retain some type of identity and ego as rich corporations make money off of my predictable choices fueled by the low self esteem they pounded into my head like the rest of us.

^ That's a well-thought out response! I particularly like the paragraph about DMT, and your reminder that so much is about the chemicals in our heads. We get so caught up in the nuances of our thoughts and feelings that it's salutory to be reminded that they're generated by chemicals and sparks or whatever.

Also you neatly answer my point about everyone having a heaven; it's only in your head anyway, so of course everyone has one each. Nice.


^ This is an interestingly detailed scenario, TH, but if I end up in a place where I have to make complex choices that carry irrevocable long-term consequences, then I know I will have arrived at my own private Hell!


^ That's good! In a couple of seconds they've covered the main plot of that entire Bedazzled movie in which Dudley Moore doesn't quite specify the details of his Paradise - although now I think of it, Dudley Moore was selling his soul to Satan for an earthly Paradise, while suicide bombers are laying down their lives for an eternal reward from God. Supposedly complete opposites morally, but also superficially the same kind of deal. :confused:

Logically dissecting afterlife scenarios isn't necessarily the right approach since this stuff doesn't have to be logical.
It's like asking whether god could microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it.
An all-powerful god could do both.

@Lucem: just want to echo what Lisna says below: excellent post and really well presented.

Decisions, decisions, huh? It could even be a test. Make the wrong choice and you could end up on a one-way trip down.
Well, he didn't really lie: they are virgins! :laughing:
An all-powerful god would know not to eat a burrito, unless he also had an all-powerful toilet. Which raises another interesting question: if God gets sick, to whom does he talk on the Great White Telephone? Discuss. :)

I've had multiple near death experiences. As far as I can recall, it felt like staring at your toes and drifting off into outer space. I don't remember there being a heaven, hell, or anything else. Just drifting further and further until I came back covered in puke. I like the idea of reincarnation though, with or without karma attached. In my next life, I'd like to be a monk. All reclusive and immersed in nature.

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I didn't read the entire thread but when loved ones pass away. I like to think that I will see them again. Yeah it is cliche but I never say goodbye but see you later.

I wouldn't mind my life essence being transferred over into another body without the memories of my previous life.

Fixed. :)

Because the legend of the rent is way too high.

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