Thread: What 'IF' Our After Life Is What We Make Of It?

I've thought about this extensively. I've experienced WEEKS in just a few hours of sleep. This led me to think up what I call my happy ending theory (I'm sure plenty others have come to the same idea, but I thought of this before hearing about it elsewhere):

Surely you've experienced a dream in which you perceive time to be flowing normally (most of my dreams, if not all, flow "normally"); but what about a dream that lasts longer than the amount of time you've been asleep? I'd argue most of you have experienced that as well. I've had dreams that span an entire week. Our subconscious flows more quickly than our conscious, yet, while we dream, we perceive that flow to be normal.

Dreams can last for a longer amount of time than they last in "reality."

What happens when we die? We're all of different faiths, or lack one entirely, but I believe in a rather strange end to our existence. Perhaps I thought of it to cope with my nihilistic crisis as a child...

What if, before we die, we slip into our subconscious, the split second before our brain ceases to function. Perhaps that would be enough time. What if we slip into our subconscious and dream, the moment before we die. With our brain processing what is happening to us, it will be in a heightened state of activity. Our final dream's flow of time would be nearly impossibly quick, yet we would perceive it as normal. What if we dream of the afterlife we have believed in our whole lives? People with near death experiences claim to see a light, or even their god, or their deceased loved ones, or paradise, or etc. People of all faiths experience this and truly believe what they have perceived. This is contradictory in nature, yet...

People have seen glimpses of their afterlife while near death.

What if our afterlife is only a split second of our current one, lived out in our subconscious? What if every religion's notion of this afterlife is wrong in that all are right and experienced by their followers upon death, before they slip into the nothingness of nonexistence? What if every religious belief is fulfilled by their believer, whether that belief be that they're going to Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or none of the above.

What if we all have a happy ending?

Edit: I realize this should've probably gone in Religion/Spirituality. You guy's may glady change it over if you wish (:

Based on the flow of time... I am guess that afterlife will last a few seconds because your brain is just releasing all it's chemicals before it dies, so you feel this "heavenly feeling".

I think when people experience a NDE, their brain thinks it's going to die so it goes through this process. I'm able to time dilate any dream, but in the end, time rules all.

Note: I'm not a scientist, so I might be wrong, and if it's true, sorry for ruining your hopes and dreams.

I remember reading this book my mom gave me called the 'Hundred Secret Senses'. In it, a character named Kwan, who is very spiritually in-tune describes her past lives and what the afterlife is like. She explains it that it is a little like you get a ticket, and the better you were in your life, the better your ticket is, and the more options you have when it comes to the afterlife. So if you were bad in your past life you only get all the sucky options like being re-incarnated as a lower-life-form or going to hell. If you have a better ticket then you can do things like be re-incarnated as another person or go to heaven. Personally, I think this is what the afterlife really is like.

I don't think it has anything to do with your perception time slowing down and your brain creating an everlasting dream. This might also gyp some people out of the afterlife. Say like you were killed by being shot in the head with a gun. Your brain wouldn't be there to create the afterlife dream. Granted, we have no way of asking someone who got shot in the head what the afterlife was like, or if there was one at all, so I suppose that it is just as likely...

I didn't grow up in a very religious or spiritual household. I know my moms' side of the family goes to church sometimes. But we tend to explain most things with science, saying that atoms and such makes up the universe. But we can't explain consciousness and dreams and many other things. So chances are there is some kind of afterlife, spirit world, and such thing as a soul.

Bump, any more thoughts?

It's one possibility out of many. Nothing new. A better question might be, how does believing this improve your life and facilitate spiritual growth?

Heres a thought. The afterlife is real. Of course its what you make of it, lol.

All you people who don't believe in the afterlife, there is something weird about you I just cant grasp my mind on. Why do you NEED to prove the NDE is LIMITED to the brain? I don't understand this. I thought you would be leaping up and down with shouts of joy that 1000's of people report back you have an immortal consciousness that continues to exist long after the brain. No? Not even remotely interested in hearing this message? You NEED to disprove it? Why? Really, why?

You think its about science? I wholeheartedly disagree!!!!

Science is clear. Everything that we experience we experience in the brain. Therefore you can't look at the experience happening inside of the brain to discover if its also happening outside of the brain. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't matter how many plugs or what technology you use to examine a person while they are having an NDE. It will NEVER be proof that the experience is only limited to the brain. It can only show you the parts of the brain that are active when a person claims to experience an NDE.

Consider this.

You're brain is hooked up to a machine and the scientists watch your visual cortex light up. The ask you "what are you seeing?" and you answer "I'm looking at an orange". Can the scientist look at your brain to determine whether or not you are actually physically seeing an orange, or hallucinating one? No. In order to determine that you are actually seeing an orange, they have to get off their chair and take a look at what you are looking at. And then they'll tell you if youre crazy or not "sir, that's an apple"

The brain will never tell you what is real or isn't.

It can only tell you what it is experiencing.

All reality needs to be called reality is the consensus of two people.

There are parts of the brain associated with seeing. There are part of the brain associated with hearing. We call it experiencing reality. And, we now know that there is a part of the brain associated with experiencing all things mystical, magical and spiritual. That we literally have an organ in our brain that exists solely to give the human being spiritual experiences. Think about that. And if you want to experience that without nearly dying than take some dmt (no I didn't say that I'm joking don't arrest me!)

How is this spiritual organ in our brain any different than the parts of our brain associated with sight, hearing, smell or touch? We assume all the other senses allow us to experience the world around us. So why do we assume this spiritual organ is the exception? It doesn't make any sense. Ask anyone who's had an NDE or taken DMT and they all resound the same message "it was real".

So you can continue to tell yourself "its all in the brain it has no reality behind it" and thats cool. But that's actually not a scientific assumption. Nope its not.

Because if youre gonna say "these experiences which have been proven to be associated with these faculties of the brain are LIMITED to the brain, BECAUSE I SAY SO" well then you might as well say the same is true of all experience. Because its all in the brain anyways right? So it might as well all be limited to the brain.

But wait, that would make reality a dream reality? And if its all a dream...do we still die?

Originally Posted by juroara

Heres a thought. The afterlife is real. Of course its what you make of it, lol.

All you people who don't believe in the afterlife, there is something weird about you I just cant grasp my mind on. Why do you NEED to prove the NDE is LIMITED to the brain? I don't understand this. I thought you would be leaping up and down with shouts of joy that 1000's of people report back you have an immortal consciousness that continues to exist long after the brain. No? Not even remotely interested in hearing this message? You NEED to disprove it? Why? Really, why?

I often think that people really do have an innate need to disprove an afterlife, while paradoxically and just as innately believing that one exists.

This need to disprove an afterlife might reside less in arrogant or misguided materialism than it does in psychological necessity. After all, if there is an afterlife, and it is potentially better than physical life, and if we knew it was a real, inevitable condition, what would that do the the importance of our current physical lives? I'm thinking there would be a lot more suicides, or at least lot more people sitting around waiting to die so their "real" lives can begin, to the point where things like hard work, creativity, or even the joy of being alive begin to seem like a waste of time, energy, and priority. Ultimately, so many of the things that make us human, and help us develop our lives, culture, and future, would begin to seem unnecessary, even silly. Why improve (or even practice) things like medicine when we're better off dead anyway? Also, if there is an eternity of creativity and perfection just around the corner regardless of what we do here on earth, why waste time building our mundane knowledge base at all?

So I have a feeling that we may be hard-wired to be skeptical of an afterlife, simply because absolute knowledge of one would at best turn us all into a bunch of monks waiting to die, and at worst make suicide the number one cause of death in the world... and neither of those things are very helpful to improving or expanding the species.

At the same time, though, we are hard-wired to believe that we must not die, and do everything we can to prevent that event. This is true for all living things, of course, but humans have the ability to intellectualize that instinct to survive, to raise it from a need to stay alive to an assumption that we cannot die, ever. This assumption is hiding deep within even the most strident after-life deniers, I think. From this instinct to survive/intellectual reaction to that instinct soup could come a sincere belief that there must be an afterlife, simply because we know we must stay alive.

And so, with this difficult dichotomy racing through our heads, one natural reaction might be to ease its pain and confusion by disproving half of it (the afterlife part), even though we still might believe in it at some level.

EDIT: I almost forgot the bit that was actually on topic: An excellent portrayal of the afterlife being what you make it is the movie What Dreams May Come; if you haven't already seen it, it is worth checking out (excellent LD'ing movie, too, BTW).

Some who have had NDEs claim that when they passed into the afterlife, it was like awakening from a dream, their previous physical life being the dream and their new nonphysical state being true reality. I've had a similar experience during a few of my revelatory higher-level OBEs, so this is a correlation worth considering in my view.

I don't believe in afterlife. I think I believe in some sort of quantum immortality.

IHadADreamWhere, imagine that you're dying not in your bed, but in epicenter of nuclear explosion. You'd be erased by light - at a speed of light.

Given my knowledge of near-death experiences, I actually believe that our afterlife is what we make of it.

However, that doesn't imply that the afterlife is great because "it's what we make of it." Based on my experiences, I also happen to believe that we have less free will than we like to think. The experience of "death" may automatically trigger a panic attack in one person and euphoria in other - leading to very different "afterlives."

Though I do believe that a person's mindset would play a large part on what one experiences after death. For example, a person full of guilt who is aware of the concept of "hell" may go to their own eternal hell. But a person who is content with how they lived their life may be more likely to enter a blissful after life.

With this said, I am motivated to live a "good life" because I don't want to get a bad afterlife.

So if there's a potential for consciousness/unconsciousness to exist outside of the physical constraints of the workings of the brain, could we hypothesise that we could in some way construct elements of our afterlife through diligent dream work? In addition to the waking consciousness we weave everyday? Of course in the latter we are influenced by other people's consciousness, and the inescapable realities of waking life, but perhaps in dreams we are more autonomous to potentially create our own after-lives when our consciousness is liberated from the physical?