For me, the idea of living forever held an obvious appeal: There might be things I've always wanted to do that I could never do in this life. No permanent death leaves open the door to fulfilling my dreams.
I'm not talking about "Oooh, I've always wanted to drive a racecar...." kind of dreams.
I mean dreams that everyone should have the chance to experience, especially the ones that people don't get to have if they die young, like falling in love, getting married, maybe having kids. Just for the experience of it, and the sheer enjoyment of it. Those are basic things I don't like being denied by death.
I wouldn't mind death so much if it were fair, as in everyone gets 100 years to live. Not everyone does. Not everyone lives in a safe, clean place. Not everyone gets a healthy body to inhabit. Not everyone gets a happy, rewarding life. Some people experience inordinate amounts of pain and suffering.
I don't like the idea of a universe where someone nice can be abducted as a child, held captive, tortured, and eventually killed.... their life short, filled with misery and dread the likes of which I cannot imagine and wouldn't want to.
But this world is not fair. This life is not fair. There is no cosmic justice. There is no balancing mechanism. There is no Karma. There is no angel lying in wait to save the faithful, there are no vigilante spirits ready to swoop in and attack the evil, and protect the unprotected.
You're not guaranteed a full, happy, healthy, rewarding life. Many, many people have been denied such an experience, and for no good reason.
Afterlife, for me, has always been a way of making sense of that... no matter what we put up with here, everyone gets the same positive experiences, every dream fulfilled.... or at the very least, a second chance. That way, the universe would seem more compassionate, even if temporarily cruel.
I thought of the afterlife as a place where your dreams may come true. Where every Christmas, you are certain to get presents. Every day, you're certain to live happily and healthily, and experience the joys you missed out on. Where no one forgets your name, or treats you coldly.
I can sort of imagine that eternity of that will lead to some sort of profound satisfaction, wherein all ones dreams are fulfilled. And, once one has accomplished everything they ever wanted to experience, with full knowledge of the nature of their existence, and to prevent the idea of an eternity of boredom and nothingness, maybe they could say good-bye to their family and thank everyone for the shared experience, and experience "rest" until their consciousness stops.
A not-completely-eternal afterlife, but just as rewarding.
Of course, this place would be supernatural and cater to my needs and allow me to avoid the suffering of real life.
That means, this place is just a reflection of my own ego and its desires. This imagined afterlife is the result of my brain wanting its biological processes to function properly, and to have biological needs and desires fulfilled. The strong desire to live forever is simply the brain's instinct not to die implanted deep into my consciousness.
Everything that I want in an afterlife is precisely what my primate brain imagines it needs in order to thrive, and my imagined afterlife is quite limited to expressing those desires and getting them all satisfied.
Essentially, it is the rational brain dealing with the irrational demands for never being hungry, never experiencing pain, never being lonely, and not having to work that hard to get my needs fulfilled. Since we experience those things in life, and then we die, but the brain is forever chasing those ideals, in order to keep the thing that is my body alive and well, and to satisfy chemical and hormone responses, the brain imagines that maybe there is a way to satisfy everything we ever wanted, and ignore the obvious fact of our eventual death.
That is the afterlife; it is the end result of desire and denial.
Wanting an afterlife, most everyone wants that. It's very doubtful wanting it is a prerequisite for having one. It's also doubtful that those who don't believe in it suddenly don't ever get to experience it, as children sometimes have no concept of death and then they die. What designer leaves them out of the fun? Seems a poor design to me.
So I don't necessarily buy that an afterlife is a reward that is given out only to those who believe in it, because most of us do, and I don't believe that skepticism of it makes you evil, or should deprive you of the right to experience it, if true. That doesn't make any sense at all.
I do believe that the afterlife makes sense as an expression of our egotistical desires, and it is a manifestation of a certain kind of mental craziness that we are all afflicted with to some extent: the irrational desire to have everything we want and to never experience suffering or death. Sure, it's an understandable desire, but it's a kind of desire that is so deeply rooted in our consciousness that many of us spend our entire lives worrying about satisfying, to the expense of our actual, real life.
Having a fleeting flash of anger and wanting to strangle your coworker, and acting on those base desires, is what separates us from crazy people or animals. Having a desire to not experience pain and suffering or death, and spending our whole lives chasing that fantasy, often at the expense of our actual lives, often leading to stress, fear, and inflicting suffering on oneself and others, is how that egotistical desire can manifest itself in harmful ways.
The desire is understandable, but when we lack any means of satisfying that desire, and when chasing that desire overwhelms our real, limited life, then it is similar to wanting to eat nothing but cookies, and sitting at a table and eating them until our stomachs explode and we die. We must realize that as wonderfully perfect as satisfying all our desires at once, forever, may seem, it is similar to trying to chase down a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow; it's an illusion, and one that is actually counterproductive, most likely.
I find it coincidental that there should be a fantastic place that satisfies every chemically-programmed need in my primate brain, that exists just outside of my field of vision and reach as a living person, that will arrive at the moment of my death, and replace my death, and give me everything I've ever wanted, but I'll never have any proof that this is so until my death comes.
I also find it coincidental that most everyone else on the planet has very similar desires that I have, and most picture a similar place that grants all their lifelong wishes, in their own various forms, either through reincarnation or various heavenly places, and even afterlife punishments for people we hate.
All of this mirrors exactly our egotistical desires, manifested in fantastic form, tailor-made for each and every person, because that is the source of this heaven and afterlife; our desires. Since some people have very base desires (more women than we could ever want, whatever we want to eat, and personal approval from God) which are reflected in their beliefs about the afterlife, and others have very wrathful desires (my enemies will suffer, death is not enough for bad people) and they imagine a place where they're burning forever in agony or are shamed or punished forever, or at least severely. That reflects our desires.
Some people imagine a more forgiving afterlife, where even our "enemies' get scolded but perhaps reformed and allowed to coexist with us. Some people imagine a place where it's not just base desires like sex and food that we experience, perhaps it's something more.... on a higher plane. Maybe there are no racial differences, gender differences.... everyone is simply a unique spirit totally unlike anyone else. This reflects some people's desires for justice and equality, rather than selfish desires or vengeance.
And yet, all of this is desire fulfillment. I don't think that "the" afterlife can be a simultaneous reflection of everyone's desires and still be a consistent thing.
The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to believe that the afterlife is similar to other illusions we have. Being a species that was once "wild" and still has instincts related to that, we often perceive ourselves being watched. This helps us imagine and look out for predators, even if we cannot see or hear them. This feeling that we are not alone when we are alone has a real purpose, but because it is so vague and subconscious, when it reaches our consciousness, like dreams we assign meaning to it. The meaning being, there are ghosts, or angels, or our dead relatives out there. Maybe spooks, demons, devils.
Of course there are dreams as well, and many people assign meaning to that, and interpret the images and emotions that we feel when our consciousness is at rest as some sort of meaningful message. And we selectively interpret, dismissing the parts that make no sense and embracing that which we could suggest means something.
Much of our beliefs revolve around our brain essentially talking to itself, reacting to complex and contradictory or irrational thoughts, desires, and feelings. If we couldn't break away from this sort of mental chaos, we would never be lucid, we'd always be dreaming or imagining. We would look like paranoid schizophrenics living in a delusion that never ended. Instead, our conscious, rational mind has pushed all that to the edges. We only dream sometimes, we only imagine creepy things are following us sometimes. We only spend our time dreaming the impossible sometimes. The rest of the time, we are rational enough to interact with our existence in a sane and realistic manner.
At the same time, the desires are part of who we are. I can no more separate myself from that than I can promise to never be angry ever again. I don't even necessarily think that our ego-driven desires are inherently bad or unhealthy for us. They obviously serve a purpose. I try to put them into perspective. But there's only so much you can separate yourself from your basic instincts, emotions, desires, and your dreams.
As I no longer believe that my desires for an afterlife are in any way indicative of such a reality, I find myself expending less energy focusing on satisfying those goals, and more energy on this life and its goals. Some of my priorities have shifted, to try to enjoy this life and the days I have to live, but that's not to say that I don't plan for the future (it's only prudent) or that all my goals are now for the sole purpose of satisfying my own ego. The cruelty of a world without natural justice and the idea that maybe not everything works out in the end, leads me to believe that we really should take our life and our death a little more seriously, and do our best to try to spare everyone needless suffering and death, and certainly not to inflict such.
Although the ideal of heaven is out of our reach, there is a compromise that is very much worth dreaming about and working towards: And that compromise can be anywhere between baby steps and massive leaps toward a potential world that is less unjust and cruel. Anything, really, that is better than what we have now, is an ideal worth working toward. As far as I'm concerned, I'm okay with no guaranteed afterlife as long as we try to make this life a little bit more like heaven and a little bit less hellish, for everyone we encounter.
Imagine, if that had been the united goal of all of humanity for all these years, how much closer we could be towards that goal.
Well, time to stop waxing philosophical. Anyway, my previous ideas about the afterlife have all been about making dreams come true, and while I deny that it's probably how things are, that hasn't stopped me from trying to make it true in my own way. Maybe if there is an afterlife, that will count for something, but I'm not counting on it.
* If the afterlife exists why do ALL creatures fear death & seek to avoid it.
This life would be quite short if all we ever did got us into mortal danger. Even if there is an afterlife, temporary fear of death would still be useful and common sense.
* Why doesn't anyone remember being dead (not NDE's but in-between lives or pre-birth)?
Since our memories and consciousness are at the very least represented by the physical activity in our brain, then any time our brain is dead, we won't remember anything, even if there were life beyond that.
* Are humans special? Do rabbits have an afterlife? They certainly have personalities. Only humans having the afterlife seems arbitrary.
If we are special, would creatures that are vastly, vastly superior to us in intelligence and lifespan be that much more special than us, on the same scale?
In other words, if there are Q-like beings out there, and as an evolving species we do endeavor to be that powerful and intelligent one day, then aren't we about as valuable in comparison to them as rats are to us?
Does intellect make us special? Does that apply between people? Is Einstein more worthy of life than a disabled person?
Such questions sort of frighten me in one regard, because it puts a moral question to how we treat "lesser" beings. It seems supremacist to me, and that sort of arrogant attitude has lead to some very awful things.
I don't believe we're that much more special than other species, however, out of affinity for my fellow human beings and a desire for the species to survive, I am obviously rooting for homo sapiens first. I also think humans would appreciate it more if I cared about their life than, say, a mosquito who isn't really aware of me. I am also more emotionally attached to human beings, so it's kinda selfish. But I wouldn't change it.
I would agree that an afterlife only for humans seems arbitrary, especially after varying degrees of intelligence, empathy, and morality are displayed by other higher order beings. I'd also like to believe in such an afterlife, they would be able to expand in intelligence to the point where they could communicate with us fully.
But these are just things I want. What I believe tends to focus on the tangible; things I can sense and experience firsthand.
