The Afterlife... How Does it Work?

[ghostestwiththemostest]

Forgive my ignorance but I am thinking of believing in the afterlife and have a few questions about the logistics....

In my mind, the afterlife consists of a nicer version of life on Earth. No death, no having to go to work, sunny with a gentle breeze, verdant, relaxing, no housework, and surrounded by loved ones. In essence, my life now only better.

However, I realise that I have oversimplified things. Assuming that I reach (fingers crossed) old age, does this mean that I will be trapped in eternity in the mind and body of an 80+ year old? Does this mean that I could potentially be sat on a sofa with my elderly mother, my elderly grandmother and my elderly children all bickering and shouting "you what??" for all of eternity. Will Heaven turn out to be akin to one of those god awful retirement communities in Florida, all golf carts and incontinent pads?

So, my biggest question is will we be the age that we die with or do you think they will let us pick our own age?
If the latter, do you think that it will be full of idiotic 15-18 year olds at a perpetual disco? If so, who is going to clean up all their shite? Will they end up irresponsibly procreating and who will be stuck dealing with it all?

What would happen if my mother decided to come back as a baby and I ended up stuck looking after her. She would deliberately be as difficult as possible by way of revenge.

Can I choose my own house and plot do you think? If pets go to Heaven (which I've always believed that they do), will I suddenly be greeted by 7 cats, 8 dogs, 11 rabbits, 4 hamsters, 100+ fish and a horse, all elderly and incontinent! That's a big commitment, particularly for an 80+ something.

Even if we are ghosts without bodies (which would be a real shame as I'd miss the cuddles), surely our spirits/personalities would remain and we would largely be fairly world weary and cantankerous. Or could we chose our spiritual age?

What if I end up with crap neighbours? What if Jeremy Beadle or Paul Daniel's live next door? There's nothing to say that you can't be both sufficiently pious to get into heaven, but also seriously annoying. In fact, most pious people I know are exactly that!

The more that I think about this, the less heavenly the dream.

Can someone please help explain the logistics of all of this. No cynics please. I want to believe. I want it to be nice and fluffy, so please don't shatter my delusions. I just need help visualising the reality of it.

What you are describing sounds an awful lot like someone's personal hell...

Maybe heaven is just your Self floating in a void experiencing permanent ecstasy?

I think if it exists, the least logistically complex approach would be for us to just turn into our spirits and sort of mingle around in ecstasy for the rest of eternity. Spirit cuddles would be better than human cuddles and there would be no age or sex/gender. Because we’d have nothing to do but float about (and praise God), we’d have no jealousy or need to talk or whatever. Read the passage in the Bible “and I saw a new heaven” to understand where I’m getting at.

Alternatively, although my view is that we just go to sleep and know nothing more than we knew before being born, it could be as described in His Dark Materials where your atoms just become part of other stuff and that’s the afterlife.

It's Heaven. Logistics don't come into it at all!

You're trying to rationalise the irrational.

(That doesn't mean I don't think Heaven is real - just that Earthly laws of physics obviously won't apply. Everything is possible, there is no "understanding" of how it is possible)

I am literally crying with laughter . Your mother coming back as a baby and being delibrately difficult had me spitting my tea lol

Will Heaven turn out to be akin to one of those god awful retirement communities in Florida, all golf carts and incontinent pads?

Oh god no. I'll take Hell please.

It almost like it’s a totally impossible preposition OP.

Well basically, you’re all going to burn in hell. Except for me because I am tne one true believer.

But seriously @ghostestwiththemostest the afterlife can be whatever makes you happy to imagine. Because we’re material beings. Our consciousness only exists because we are flesh and blood. When our bodies die, so does our consciousness.

I think its like being in a series of othose dreams where you are at your prime age but everyone in you life is there at the age you have your happiest memories of them.
Like when you dream you are back at school with your friends and have no worries but you still know your husband and your toddlers.
Or its the day you get married but you grandparents are there and they are in their 50s not frail and elderly.

Indeed.

OP, I wouldn't waste your mental energy trying to believe in an unworkable hypothesis arrived at by people (understandably) afraid of dying.

Amuse yourself instead by looking at how different religions envisage the afterlife.

The problem you have is trying to put a logical framework around something that’s a load of superstitious bollocks.

This is why i love the book ‘the lovely bones’ by alice sebold - susies version of her afterlife where it is everything you want and you get to meet only those you want to meet again.

in my version i live in a queen anne grade II listedhouse with a walled garden (and gardners!) fabulous large kitchen with a 4 oven Aga. Need to work out which people i want to invite round but my mum, grandma and my hugely missed dog are top of the list.

Our consciousness exits to another dimension which cannot be detected by human science or religious practice. It’s a dimension not meant for the consciousness while it inhabits a human body.

Oh god, that's hilarious and I want to read your novel.

It will be what ever you think it'll be. You'll never get there (or anywhere) once you've died so it's a pointless exercise.

Decide on what makes you happiest to live your life and believe that. Nobody knows or can know so we all just believe either what we were conditioned to believe or what makes us happiest to believe.

I've stolen the scientific explanation about energy - that energy cannot be created or destroyed thing and applied it to humans so I choose to believe that when we die, what makes up us carries on in a different form. I don't think we exist as us in any way that we could recognise and I'm not sure we retain our current consciousness but every part of us becomes part of something new.

I used to think of you were married twice who would hang out with in heaven?

None of it made sense. Hence I'm now a non-believer :)

I don't believe in a after life and you certainly wouldn't retain the information from your life. I've seen to many people forget relatives, their life, where they lived, their own parents caused by dementia to know that when the brain dies you die with it.

@BreadBag

Oooh, I like it! That could work for me! That's exactly the sort of solution that I need!

That could presumably avoid generational clashes over technology or evolving music tastes and culture? For example, my Grandmother, who was never one to mince her words, was a huge fan of Joe Pasquale, but would thoroughly trash my choice of TV viewing habits. Us and my children sharing the remote would be a hideous experience. So that's a massive relief that we don't all have to share the same reality at the same time.

I want to believe in flying unicorns but don’t understand how effectively having 6 limbs while the other mammals have 4 would have developed, evolutionary. It’s almost like it’s an impossible proposition, but no sceptics please.

I think if there is a Heaven, it’s just your soul there anyway. I’m in my mid 40s but in my head I feel in my 20s still and have a bit of a shock every time I catch my reflection in the mirror. I think you would feel whatever age you feel internally without the body holding you back. I don’t personally think it would be like the world we are in now. In my mind it’s just souls in a beautiful forest/garden like the Garden of Eden. I don’t think I believe we will see people again as the physical body is dead. The more I’m thinking about it now, the more I’m talking myself out of believing in it.

It's an interesting thing to ponder, isn't it?

I feel like reincarnation makes the most sense so you wouldn't get bored being stuck in the same place for eternity.

If you get to hang out with who you choose, what if they don't choose you? Maybe it's like a kind of heavenly version of Tinder. You both have to spiritually swipe right for them to appear. It would be pretty gutting if you arrived in heaven and then realise someone you really loved doesn't want to spend eternity with you.

If everyone gets exactly what they want then are there multiple versions of everyone hanging out in heaven, meaning you're not really interacting with that person, just a facsimile or an echo of them?

I would not live in your version of heaven (8 incontinent dogs plus a mean baby and no option of blowing my brains out), but I’d read your novel. Can you turn your imagination towards something more productive?

I've always wondered what happens with people who have perhaps lost a spouse to illness and subsequently remarried. Is heaven full of weird menage-a-trois setups? Is it like some sort of creepy sex cult?

Sorry, I have another question that has been playing on my mind!

You know when your departed loved ones are around you still and watching you from above, well, do they get to see EVERYTHING or just the things that you think that they would want to see? I concerned about privacy. There are understandably certain things that I most certainly don't wish to be witnessed by anybody, not least my mother or grandmother, ( For example, the time that I administered fellacio to a hot guy behind a statute in Bolton town centre after a night clubbing, aged 17). Do you think that my grandparents could have seen that? And could I redream /revisit that moment (he was incredibly hot) in the afterlife without any family members knowing?

Can random strangers watch me from above as I writhe about on the bed in the mornings trying to wriggle into my too small pair of tights? I find that too intrusive. Or is it like Facebook with a certain level of privacy settings?

Could I simultaneously revisit ex's without that being classed as cheating if I dip in and out of different time periods/dreams? I have someone particular in mind.

I'm just struggling with all the logistics here.

It's very interesting, and we'll never know. My head tells me that when we die, we have no consciousness but my heart says that heaven will be like a better earthly existence. Warmth, love and happiness. Unfortunately my head wins.
I do think that there's far more in the universe than our human minds are capable of perceiving, so there's a bit of hope there.