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.

@Livingtothefull I agree. We have only 5 senses and even the data we observe through those is not directly available to us but interpreted by our brains. I love for example, the our brains invent the colour magenta to make sense of the data. It does not exist, yet we experience it. It's actually basically the same as teal green. 🤣

Ultra violet light, infrared light, x rays and all kinds of other things exist that we can't perceive directly. Snakes can sense infrared. Many animals have more senses than us so their experience of the world will be vastly different. Some have skills we cannot even explain yet so perhaps are sensing things we have not yet discovered.

These things existed before we discovered them and it would be naive to think we now know all there is to know and science is complete. Clearly it is not because we still cannot fix the discrepancies between the best theories we have, like relativity and quantum physics. We are still discovering new particles. There are unexplained phenomena. We are also limited to a three dimensional existence.

We are tiny and have limited intelligence, gave had only a miniscule period in which to build up knowledge and have very short life spans. It's highly unlikely due to the scale of the universe that humans will ever be able to know all that there is to know about it even if our civilisation survived for billions of years (highly unlikely). And it would also be impossible for us to know we knew everything even if we did.

There is much in the universe to wonder at and be awe inspired by, not least the sheer scale and complexity of it. We are just one possible formation of the matter in it.

But there's also no need to posit some other existence of which it is impossible for us to know anything. To do so would be rather pointless because there is no way we could ever know about it anyway, so it's a distraction. Why does it matter, when it will make no difference to our reality in any way? And this reality is so astonishing that no fantasies are required to fuel our imaginations.

This universe could be some kids' computer simulation. It could be something made accidentally and forgotten about. It could be a dream. What's almost certain is that stories made up to try to explain it in the form of religions and myths, by the same limited human brains that can't comprehend it, are wrong. All major world religions are also logically inconsistent to the point of incoherent self-contradiction.

One thing that always strikes me as particularly odd about the idea that humans have "souls" is the arrogance to think this applies to a certain type of monkey only. What about the other monkeys? Or other mammals? Or insects? Birds? Octopu are very intelligent, do they have souls and go to heaven? Dolphins? What if they don't "believe" or "repent" or follow the prescribed "moral codes"?

No, I'm agreeing with you that 'There are more people alive on the planet right now than have ever lived in the history of human civilisatio' is a.myth.

What if you're on your deathbed right now and what you think is the life you're living is actually your life 'flashing before your eyes' like some people say happens as you are dying. Much like a dream, it happens in an instant no matter how long it feels.

So you think you're here reading this but you're actually 90 years old, moments from death, remembering it.

But if your entire life flashes before your eyes at the moment of death then that obviously must include the moment of death where your life flashes before your eyes.

So you'd be stuck in an infinite loop reliving the reliving of the reliving of the reliving... In an instant in real time but to you it's forever.

I think humans will always speculate on what is in store for them @MagentaIsNotReal , whether or not speculation is futile. With regard to religions: I can believe that a few individuals have had/been given exceptional insight into the nature of reality and our place within it (through the imperfect lens of the human mind) which inspired some of them to found religions.

Some of the seeming logical contradictions between religions may ultimately be resolved within a bigger understanding, and may turn out not to be contradictions at all; just as the sky really is blue and simultaneously really isn't. So I would not conclude that they are 'wrong' just because they are not 100% accurate and are based on human attempts to articulate the unexplainable.

Religion has earned itself a bad reputation as (at least in the West) it has been a useful tool for keeping the masses in line and a cover for evildoing. But that is an abuse of people's faith based on lies, not faith itself.

I agree that it is arrogant to presume that animals are unimportant in the scheme of things compared to humans; just based on the complexity of their physicality (just as astonishing as our own) they certainly are not, and we cannot know the nature of their souls. But then at more than one time it has been categorically stated that women don't have souls. So human arrogance is one of our own worst enemies.

I just finished Midnight Mass on Netflix and there is a soliloquy that one of the main characters gives on the nature of death and what happens after. It's long but I loved it:

Myself. My self. That's the problem. That's the whole problem with the whole thing.
That word, "self." Thats not the word. That's not right, that isn't……How did I forget that? When did I forget that?
The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons. Little lightning bolts, like fireworks inside and I thought I'd despair or feel afraid, but I don't feel any of that.
None of it. Because I'm too busy. I'm too busy in the moment. Remembering. Of course.

I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body is mostly empty space after all, and solid matter? It's just energy vibrating very slowly why there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I'm no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy. Not memory. Not self.

My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures, picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain. And I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the energy firing the neurons, and I'm returning. Just by remembering, I'm returning home.
And it's like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it's always been a part. All things... a part. You, me and my little girl, and my mother and my father, everyone's who's ever been, every plant, every animal, every atom, every start, every galaxy, all of it.

More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. And that's what we're talking about when we say "God." The cosmos and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It's simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I'll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split-second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It's a wish. Made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything. I am all. I am that I am.

@sundaydayisnotmyfundayday that's lovely, thank you. I've saved the quote.

Thanks from me as well for the quote, it echoes a lot of what I feel about life and death.

Poster upthread mentioned Lovely Bones and I think that is perhaps how people imagine the afterlife. I have always hoped to see my dad again and one or two of my aunties, but of course can you pick and choose? Will I have to tolerate angry, alcoholic auntie?

But sorry op, there is no afterlife. I nearly died after an operation and was out for a long time. I had just gone. I was very surprised to wake up eventually to worried faces . Like I had accepted I had gone. No tunnel of light, just like I was switched off. People do report all kinds of visions but I think it is a bit like the paranormal.

To digress, I watched BBC2's Paranormal where they did their utmost to explain away the unexplainable. The people were very normal and believable. But the suggestion of REM sleep arose as explaining levitation and visions.

Strangely last night I woke up to my teenage grandson coming in the house, very late indeed around 3 am. I made my DH get up to make sure he was ok. I went to have a word with him about it this morning, but he was not here -because he never came home.

2 possible concepts of the world, human experience and the afterlife:

The first - the view that 'everything is God and God is everything'. I suppose you could call it a pantheistic view; that everything part of life's rich tapestry, all part of the same 'stuff' of the universe. That includes evil and evildoers, as under this view there may be no evil as such but just our viewpoint/experience of certain things & people as evil. If there is an afterlife then logically according to this view, everyone ends up there. We don't have to do anything in particular to get there, just 'be'.

The second - the view that good and evil are fundamentally different kinds of 'stuff' like oil and water, so they can't be mixed and ultimately one has to be separated from the other. This could be called a dualistic view. Under this model you have to actively work to belong in an afterlife by getting rid of your evil .

Personally I do tend towards the second view, I think that evil is very real and if there is an afterlife and evil people get into it they would ruin it for the rest of us just as they ruin this life. I mean those who are truly evil btw; not regular flawed but fundamentally decent and well meaning people.

@sundaydayisnotmyfundayday that is amazing and pretty much what I was trying to say in my clumsy, muddled way upthread.

What do you even mean by "evil". In order to set a threshold for admittance to the "afterlife" you would have to be able to define it clearly to distinguish your "flawed but well-meaning people" from you "evil-doers".

Its all fantasy, so the afterlife can be whatever you make up in your own head. Dream away OP - I think you're mad to even think its a possibility though (Personally I think once you're dead - that's it. Game over.)

No. There is a difference between "accepting there are things we may not yet know" (as I expressed in my post, that you were responding to) and holding logically incompatible views at the same time, views which it is impossible to all be true because they literally contradict each other. This is inherent - this logical incoherence - in all major world religions so that it is literally impossible for any single one of them to be "true".

There may be some kind of other existence or afterlife or beforelife. But no kind of monkey including humans could ever know about it, by definition. It is therefore a futile waste of life to spend time on trying to work out what it would be like if it exists. And it certainly won't resemble some self-contradictory, arbitrary, logically incoherent nonsense cooked up by a type of monkey if it does exist. Or be dependent on whether you ate pork, or refrained from stealing to feed your starving children, or performed certain arbitrary religious rituals, or said certain words in a certain building before you had sex with someone, or stoned your child to death because they didn't wear clothes you liked or went out without a man present, or didn't "confess your sins" to somebody who proclaimed themselves the representative of "God", or didn't give enough money to the Church to avoid "purgatory" etc.

These a human systems, created by humans. Awe at the universe - which we are one tiny, transient part of: the universe observing itself for a split second due to the constitution of matter within it - is fascinating and mind blowing.

Monkey stories about an all knowing, all seeing God who cares about your thoughts and feelings and prayers and what you eat or who you have sex with? Not likely, really. If such an all-powerful being created this universe - the size of which our brains literally cannot compute - the idea that being would concern itself with the wellbeing of you is like positing that some beings living on the other side of Betelgeuse are worrying daily about the mental health of the ants living in my garden on Earth, multiplied by several billion levels of not caring about this irrelevancy. Given that Betelguese is not very far away at all in the scale of the universe. Are you worried daily about how the microbes on your forehead feel, and those in your stomach? If this isn't on your mind much, you can expect a being who created the universe (if such a thing existed) to be approximatley a trillion trillion trillion trillion times less interested in how you are feeling.

The thing that gets me is unrequited love and/or multiple loves or marriages. Do you get stuck with someone who loves you but you can't bear? Or have to share your love with their other loves?
I have answered it for myself by imagining it as a permanent dream state. Explains hell too as if we are feeling guilty about things, we'll dream ourselves punished for them.

Your atoms literally do become part of other stuff, though. All organic matter rots down and becomes minerals and gases. Earth becomes rocks (in one way or another). The water from dead organic matter evaporates and becomes rain and falls to become rivers or parts of other living organisms.

This is how we are eternal. That, and, more immediately, in the memories of those who love us and in the artefacts we leave behind.

Exactly @HardcoreLadyType this is what is so awe inspiring. We are the universe, we are borrowing some atoms from it and we will return them. Once they were all inside the singularity, then they became gas clouds then stars and rocks and meteors and then eventually people. We are atoms and the "eternal life" is that the atoms in our bodies will be others things after we die, for hundreds of billions of years, long after the sun dies, consumes all planets in the solar system and eventually explodes as a supernova,

Obviously none of that because again, marriage and all such nonsense are human social constructs. Why would any such nonsense have any bearing on anything eternal? Do animals have souls? Consciousness for many of them has been demonstrated already. Do they all go to hell because they didn't have a marriage ceremony? Or is heaven only for humans? Wgy pick this type of monkey on a random planet that has had 6 mass extinctions already out of all of the species here over the time to be sooooo special they have some kind of eternal life after their body dies? Do you expect to meet aliens there from the thousands and thousands and thousands of trillions of other galaxies too? Or do none of them have souls, only

Sorry, hadn't finished typing!

...only this one particular special breed of monkey on Earth?

Seems a very odd choice for a "God" to make. Very odd indeed. Rather discriminatory, one might say, against all of the other species of aliens that exist on other planets in other galaxies, given it is a mathematical fact that it is almost impossible for them not to exist.

These human-centric views are as arrogant and oblivious as the idea that the Sun orbited the Earth, or the lack of even questioning whether women or other races should vote or have rights. And yet even today there are still people who hold such obviously completely illogical views but still believe them completely and can't see why it makes them look just as blinkered as the ancestors I mentioned and that their descendents will laugh and scoff at how utterly ignorant they were to not have applied the principles that were meant to have been learned from these historical examples of human folly and failure in logic to their current situations, even when the analogy could not have been more brazen without punching them in the face! It is embarrassing really.

Maybe Trevor is at work here, OP. That is my suspicion. 😬🤣

@MagentaIsNotReal Are you trying presenting a philoshphy essay here?

@LonelyJulie

I read it all, and I'm sorry about your DC. x

@Isittimeformynapyet

A gracious apology! 👏

Another problem with the concept of spending eternity surrounded by our loved ones, is what about those who are unlucky enough not to have any loved ones? The children born to abusive parents? Loners who have difficulty making friends? Some people go through life without becoming close to anyone. So that’s not very fair is it, for there to be some people spending eternity with huge crowds of family and friends around them, and others as billy no mates.

Reincarnation seems fairer to me - getting another crack at things. Roll the dice again.

And why not? It's the biggest question there is. It's not like OP asked what everyone was having for tea tonight.

@Saverage
Because it sounds as if we are being given chapters from an first year philoshphy undergrad's essay

Reading this and all the theories about the afterlife it occurred to me that dreams have come up a fair bit on this thread. It's another one of those everyday unknowns. There are theories but still many more questions.

We know that our pets dream because we observe it. What about woodland animals and birds? Why are we all dreaming and why do some people remember their dreams while some people don't? And then there are types of dreams.. nightmares, lucid dreams, recurring dreams and dreams which leave us feeling disturbed or enlightened. Why don't I dream about my lovely late dad? Many questions...

Sorry a bit off topic but it set me thinking.

I like the theory where we become part of the universe again after our body dies. I don't know why but it scares me that one day I won't exist. Even though I didn't exist before I was born and it's the natural way of the world. Its an irrational fear really I suppose.

For me the point of the thread was, from the start, whimsy, idle musing, using one's imagination and exploring ideas. I've found it very entertaining and enjoyable.