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Where Do You Go When You Die? Anywhere? Nowhere?

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I am 25 days away from being *officially* old aged. What the actual fuck, but there we go, 65 here we come. Thoughts of mortality come with this stuff and thoughts about about what happens to me I when I die. Where do we go? Is there an afterlife or is it just *out go the lights?*
Death scares the shit out of me, it really does, and that is one of the reasons, the main reason I think that why I still run… as long as I can run then I am still healthy and alive.
Without getting in to deeply to the religion thingy, what do YOU think happens to you when you die? Lights out, or the Happy Ever After?

2

Comments

  1. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. This is all there is and I’ve no reason to suppose otherwise. It’s the most beautiful and liberating thought I know of. Nothing matters, so you get to choose what does. And then you’re gone, and your infinitesimal tininess is forgotten in the blink of an eye.

    So you get to choose what matters, since nothing does.

    I love that.

    • Happy impending birthday, though, Geach. I’m 5 weeks from 40, and definitely feeling like I want to do more of what I want so that I can meet the void a little bit satisfied when it comes up to take me.

  3. A friend of mine had a massive heart attack aged 40 (don’t do drugs kids). I asked him about the bright lights/heavenly choir/life flashing before your eyes thing. He said there was none of that, it was “very, very black.”
    Me, I think this is all there is.

    • A few years back, my Dad fell in the street, and came to (“back to life” as he put it) in hospital. He told me he knew what death was like – it was black, just blackness, and he didn’t like it. I told him there was an inherent fallacy in this, because he came to, came back, whatever, exactly as before, as himself. So whatever comprised him persisted through/behind/during that blackness, whole and complete, like passing through a tunnel. He just blacked out. Like shutting down your computer and waking it up again. This isn’t death.

      Late last year, when I was with him in hospital, he was disturbed by vivid and bleak dreams, which I won’t bother describing, and he was worried they were glimpses of the afterlife. I told him that dreams are frequently the result of mere physical discomfort (blue cheese snack before bed, anyone?) and these dreams were his mind supplying visual metaphors for his messed-up internal workings. This isn’t death.

      Comforting ourselves, or scaring ourselves, with opinions and beliefs about an afterlife (or no afterlife) is futile at best. We all get to find out (or not), sooner or later. In the mean time, life is enough to deal with.

  5. You’ll always be that 18 year old John Sebastian lookalike to me mate. Choose life, enjoy every breath and make at least one person happy every day. And remember, I’m right behind you. Maybe the question is – what do you do when you live?

  6. Pail Gambaccinni recites afew facts about you and then it all goes black ….

    Seriously though, any concept of an afterlife, and in particular the survival of individual consciousness after death, is bobbins.

  8. Today we delivered a pot of plants to my late parent’s (17 years gone) memorial in the cemetery, our sister in law died a year ago and my mother in law in February. Mrs Phil is terminally ill but somehow thanks to our wonderful NHS is still with us for now. We stood in the icy fog this morning and cried at the shock and blessing of a rapid passing compared to the drawn out agony of dementia. We made light of these people meeting up in some other place, having a chat and chewing the fat, looking at the shambles besetting the living. The reality of course is the small oak box containing those organic ashes overlooking the Thames Estuary, the Accrington garden of remembrance and a churchyard in south-west France containing the remains of generations of the same family. Believe what you wish, whatever makes it easier. Personally I believe the end is final – another pile of carbon – but sometimes it just works to kid ourselves otherwise.

      • Same here. I’ve openly walked out of church services, have an uneasy relationship with organised religion and have utter contempt of those who quote religious doctrine as a reason to inflict pain. I just don’t see the draw. Sometimes though, I guess a bit of fantasy can draw people away from the reality. Which I suppose is what they play upon.

  9. I’d like to think it’ll be like in A Matter of Life and Death, but on the whole I tend to the black…black…faction. Obviously how I feel about this depends on what happens in the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks beforehand. I’m open to being pleasantly surprised, though.

    I may have mentioned this before, but when my previous wife died the vicar rang up and asked if I’d like the grave dug double depth, so I could join her when the time came. Sure, why not, I said. Now, of course, with a whole new life and a whole new wife, I’m going to feel I’m being unfaithful to someone whatever I do. I expect I’ll be cremated anyway, the price of air-freighting corpses being what it is.

    So, if anybody’s interested in a pre-dug grave in Cornwall, just say the word. The headstone will need to be adjusted, though: “…and some bloke she never met” should do it.

  10. I’m not remotely religious. Actually, I believe that much of organised religion is pretty evil. I don’t believe in the afterlife/heaven and hell as somewhere we go to. Ghosts don’t exist. Fortune telling is hokum. Mystics contacting the dead is fraud. Etc.

    That said, my thought has always been that there are two heaven and hells; one whilst you’re living and one when you’re dead. The former is determined by where you are, based on your own choices and actions, but also with external influences upon you, i.e. if you are happy, have a clear conscience, people think well of you, are healthy, etc, you are in heaven. If you are unhappy, have bad things on your conscience, are disliked, have addictions, that kind of thing, then you are living in hell. They are just examples though, and they are interchangeable, but you get the idea.

    Heaven and hell after death is simply how your life/deeds/actions affect people’s memories of you. If you lived a good life, were respected, liked, etc, then you leave behind people thinking well of you and you have gone to heaven, so to speak. If you are a miserable old sod, commit crimes, are a nasty piece of work, then the people you leave behind will have nothing but bad thoughts about you and you have gone to hell.

    Of course, it is possible to move between the two. Jimmy Savile springs to mind, although a large amount of people already had him firmly placed in hell. Similar somebody like Rolf Harris, who went from heaven to hell whilst living. You would have thought that with the sordid life he led he should have been in hell all along, but people like that don’t believe they are doing anything wrong, so as long as he kept it under wraps and the public perception of him was good, whilst he lived his wealthy life he will have certainly thought he was in heaven.

    As for the afterlife, a trailer for the new Pixar film that I saw today before Star Wars summed my view up. Your afterlife remains as long as the last person who knew you, or of you (this is where me and Pixar slightly differ!), remains alive. I am of the last generation of my family who remember my grandparents, my children arrived long after their deaths (or am I supposed to say passing these days?), but they will live on for a while with my children because of the photos we have and the stories I tell them. Eventually though, either they will forget the stories or they won’t recall them to their children and therefore my grandparents’ afterlife ends. Someone like Shakespeare or Mozart, or more recently Lennon or Bowie, will have a very lengthy afterlife, because their work and their lives live on in the minds of their fans. So your afterlife is in the minds of others. You, I’m afraid, are rotting in a box or blowing in the wind!

    • Sounds like someone at Pixar’s been reading David Eagleman…

      “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”

  13. I believe that when you die, my life flashes before your eyes. I cannot adequately communicate to you the weight of this responsibility, but suffice it to say that I’m doing my bloody best here.

  15. I like the idea that our bodies turn to dust but our soul pops off into some other world and hooks up with another little body somewhere. And the law of karma and all that stuff. It’s kind of a nice thought

  17. In an infinite universe, all things than can happen will happen, so maybe we do carry on somehow. I’m nearly 68, so this is getting mighty real.

    Horribly, I read an article recently that reckons your mind carries on for a while after your body stops. I really, really wish I hadn’t read that.

  18. When I was a child, the afterlife was an absolute certainty and I was very scared about the prospect of going to hell. Perhaps at about 12 I started to think differently and over time I eventually moved away from all of that.

    For about 20 years I argued for the non-existence of God based on logic and lack of evidence. But the kicker was the experience of actually losing people close to me and the deep, deep sense that they are gone and will never, ever come back. It’s not a debate. I now see the belief in God as an interesting philosophical recreation rather than operational truth.

    What do I mean by “philosophical recreation”? Well…

    I think I have mentioned Mr Nasty before. Mr Nasty was a character on LBC’s radio show for kids in the 70s. He would argue quite brilliantly with children about various ridiculous positions he held – for example, that sausages grew from the ground. As children would call up to argue with him, he would tie them up in semantic knots – and he mostly took each one of them down. Sometimes he just shouted and shouted without letting them get a word in. He hated girls, sounding physically ill if he had to speak with one. The interesting bit was the occasional caller would agree with his position and Mr Nasty would turn – on a sixpence – into a really cheerful avuncular character and send the child a prize (as long as it was a boy).

    Mr Nasty really enjoyed his job, you could tell. But he knew/we knew/the kids knew, he was talking total bollocks all of the time. No harm done.

    Except…the boys that called to agree with Mr Nasty about sausages growing from the ground. They were so easily led and really willing to do so – because they’d get a prize.

    Round about now you might be expecting me to make some neat, rounded Point about all of this but you get my drift.

    • Two very different questions, mind. “Is there an afterlife?” and “Is there a God?”.
      I can’t see any logical reason to believe, or even suspect, that there’s an afterlife. Whereas I think it’s quite logical to believe in a God. Although “God” is such a loaded word, it gives the wrong idea (the idea of an interventionist God, the God of religions, an idea which doesn’t hold up to scrutiny). I prefer “Creator”. I find it difficult to accept that there is no logic or purpose to existence. It seems to me that the purpose of every living thing in the universe is procreation and I suspect that’s the purpose of the universe itself. To make another one. (Whether via technology, chemistry, or some means we presently have no concept of.) If I accept that as a logical possibility, then I have to accept that our universe was most likely “created”.
      Not that this makes any difference to anything.

  19. From wikipedia…

    In 1990, (Australian media tycoon Kerry Packer) suffered from a heart attack that left him clinically dead for seven minutes….In a press conference he later remarked on his temporary oblivion “I’ve been to the other side and let me tell you, son, there’s fucking nothing there…there’s no one waiting there for you, there’s no one to judge you so you can do what you bloody well like”.

  21. “Congratulations! You have completed level 1. Level 2 will commence shortly..
    (Yes, that’s right: 42 – as per The Book Of Douglas Adams and revealed to the prophet Mark King)
    Those who lived before electricity and antibiotics take the second door.
    Those who lived before jet packs and orgasmatrons take the third.
    Oi, Sewer Robot, you need to take the lift to the underbasement – I once saw you kill three men in a bar with a pencil. With a f*ckin’ pencil!“
    Seriously – beats me why people find the idea of an afterlife appealing at all..

  23. I seem to be in the minority here – I firmly believe in the afterlife and it’s what keeps me optimistic. Thoughts of finality would lead me to believe everything was/is futile.
    Just hope when I eventually get there my football team are not as shite as the one in the real world.

    • So….I’ve always wondered about life other than human life? Other sentient beings exist as well…and what about lower forms? And at what point in evolution did ‘humans’ obtain a passport to the afterlife? It really doesn’t stack up for me unless you do believe in a creator somehow making us special. It doesn’t make life futile if there is an end…for me it just makes life more important.

    • Finality ≠ futility – at least, not to me. The opposite, in fact. We have one chance to try and get it right, and if that’s not a motivator, I don’t know what is.

      • ‘Get it right’ – what does that mean? Seems to imply judgement. By whom? Not nitpicking or being awkward. Just interested in what source you are drawing from in order to ‘get it right.’ I am not religious at all.

        • Helpfully enough, I already did this, but on another thread, which I thought was this one!

          “first do no harm, and then try to be a kind person and ideally make the lives of those around you at least marginally better for having known you”.

          That’s what I think of as getting it right. And if you can do that while also enjoying yourself a fair amount, then so much the better 🙂

          Afterword dinner party

      • Nah worse than that BC – Birmingham City – Southampton might be in freefall but in Nathan Redmond they have the last decent midfielder who played for us and got him for a steal.

  24. When I go I will become ashes &/or plant food, neither of which bothers me.

    No afterlife, no heaven, no hell, just nothing.

    Slight aside. I was widowed in 2001, my adored wife karen dying from breast cancer a few weeks after her 39th birthday.

    While we were together I could not/would not discuss death. Truth be told, the thought of it terrified me. Not any more. When my time comes I hope its gentle/easy/painless, but thats it. No fear/curiosity of what may lay in wait, nothing.

    As I say, plant food.

    OOAA (As ever).

  25. I am not religious, and I don’t particularly believe in anything ‘woo’ beyond daily meditation.

    But I am starting to think we have something like a soul, or spirit. I dunno, I don’t even know what I’m writing. Maybe it lives on somehow, maybe it doesn’t. But I think there is something beyond the corporeal; or maybe our brains are so complex and (largely) unknown that we create feelings that there’s some other essence.

    Of course you can believe in a ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ without thinking it lives on. Rambling now and probably into the realms of wishful thinking.

    A tangent, and perhaps more concretely, I love the idea that we are made of stars:

    “The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently, we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
    ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

    ETA: What a mess of a comment. Heh. 🙂

      • Yes, I like that, or rather, I like the idea of a soul (not sure why). I think we all want to believe we are more that meat-bags.

        I don’t know if the specialness of the human brain means that we really are more than meat-bags who are products of evolution, or the human brain wants to create the idea that we are something more, because human brains can do such things. Probably the latter, but….

        Must go to a meeting. *down to earth with a bump*

        • I feel like we’re, as I’ve said before, sort of hilariously over-powered. We mostly don’t need our brains to be able to do what they can do, it seems to me, and a whole ton of that spare capacity goes into either creativity or introspection. Both of which are, clearly, blessing and curse. Devil, idle hands, etc.

          I don’t believe in a soul, or rather I don’t believe that the soul is a discrete thing. To me, the whole dualism thing is an illusion caused by the awareness that we are so much more than we seem to be from the outside. People look at the wall of our faces and sum us up in four or five words: great bloke/a pain/shy but nice/bit of a nightmare/twat/sweetheart. And when we hear ourselves described, a part of us always bridles a bit because – even if the judgement is nice – it misses all the other billions of things and people that we are. Nobody sees the full great glorious tangle of our personalities except us (and mostly not even us: it’s rare that we understand ourselves fully). And only the luckiest of us get to meet anyone who sees a hint of our multifacetedness.

          And because we’re so rarely seen, I feel like the idea of the soul can help. And maybe that’s why it’s so comforting to imagine that this huge THING that it feels like we’ve got in us might live on? Maybe, in death, we can be seen and understood, stripped of the walls we’ve been trapped behind all these years. Maybe someone will get us.

          Case in point: I’m conscious that I can be an extremely difficult person to get close to. As most people on here who’ve met me in person will probably attest, I’m very friendly, very talkative, probably come off as very smiley and confident and perhaps even funny (matter of taste, obviously) etc. And all those things are true: I do like people, I do love conversation, I generally am pretty comfortable in social situations, I love to laugh and I do it a lot.

          But it’s been my experience in adult life that many new friends get just so far, and then they hit a bit of a wall with me. Not consciously intended, just a bit of a wall beyond which for all my apparent gregariousness and openness it’s hard to break. Behind it is the bit that only the real loves of my life truly see. It’s the bit that’s seething with all kinds of contradictory shit, good and bad, and if I could call anything my soul, it would be that.

          But it’s all just… brain. I’m sure of it. A massive network of billions of connections, all firing away nineteen to the dozen and making this huge VR game called consciousness, a ghost in the machine, the inevitable but unexpectable consequence of what happens when something unimaginably complex has its power switched on. A weird (very fucking weird) upshot of purely physical processes, and the elements whose combinations caused them will end up as soil or water or air someday very soon.

          Hell, I even tried to write what I think about this stuff into a song, which ended up on my band’s record:

          All your doubts they are particles
          Everything is reducible
          They’ll light up your skull like a carnival
          Dimming with the day
          Your fears are electrical
          The power cuts out and they are soluble
          Re-combining and recyclable
          Into something beautiful

          God, what a load of waffle. But I am genuinely fascinated by human beings, and what living a good life means, and whether or not I’m doing it. I think about it a lot.

          • Yes, absolutely- very interesting, thanks. I agree with all of that (with my rational head on). For example, I have had what might be called ‘spiritual’ experiences when meditating, but I know fine well these are just what the brain & body does when in a state of deep relaxation (and they’re very likely to be hypnagogic experiences).

            And yet….I’m not sure we know enough about, for example, ‘the consciousness problem’ yet (and other aspects of the brain). And perhaps we never will. And maybe it’s that that leaves the door open to ideas of the soul, i.e. the unknowable nature of the mind.

            But yes, I agree that it’s partly that we all believe that there is something more to us (because there is, some of which is hidden even from ourselves).

            I dunno, I know nothing about the philosophy or theology of any of this, I only know (a bit) about brain functioning and cognitive processes.

            • But yes, it’s true….we don’t need some of our brain processes. But we developed it anyway. And the human brain is much more plastic than we ever knew (see, for example, the hippocampus (involved in memory)). So why, then? Why did we develop these aspects of brain functioning?

              ETA: oh, I’ve just read why. Serendipity, plus meat-eating (yes, really). Oh, well, pointless comment. 😀

            • 🙂 Daniel Dennett is fascinating on this stuff. He’s a pure physicalist, and probably one of the only great philosophers of mind who actually seems able to achieve a working synthesis of science and philosophy. It seems to me that until the 20th century, philosophers were so busy fighting either with or for religion that a lot of their ideas were framed theologically. (And theology is one of the few academic disciplines that I have proper contempt for.)

          • Terrific post Bob, thanks for taking the time. You’ve summed up a lot of things I could have said about my own experience.

            I have a very strong suspicion that we all feel a lot more like each other on the inside than maybe we’d routinely realise or admit.

            The experience of being a human is, as you say, impossibly complex and full of all those fractal filigrees that make life interesting; but the underlying thing, the algorithm, is driving the same basic meat machine, which means that many of us share almost identical thought patterns, we feel uncannily similar fears, experience the same wonderments and the same puzzled frustrations.

            But the lizard part of us still sees things in front of us, including other people, as out there, separate from the me, perceived as threat or food or with indifference, and so despite our profound commonality some deep layer inside us persists with the eternal, unsolvable dissonance between internal ourselves and everything else.

            And none of this suggests to me any reason to believe in the existence of a soul that transcends the mortal, rather the layered result of unimaginable years of human evolution and the profound power of our imaginations, things to be cherished and enjoyed while we have it, that will inevitably cease to be when our bodies stop functioning.

            • Either you believe in an “immortal soul/afterlife”, or you don’t. Either way, it’s only a belief you hold, like a strong opinion. You can believe, or not, in anything, as you wish, but it makes no difference at all to what will actually happen, or is happening now. I’m always surprised/baffled by life before death – I didn’t expect to be here, I have little control over events – so why should I bother myself with holding any belief about what happens next? I’m open to surprises.

              • Your post prompted a brief diversion into the thoughts of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. I broadly embrace your sentiments although I’ve struggled to live by them myself. What if you are the kind of person that doesn’t like surprises? And surely an empiricist would argue that what happens after death is more than just an opinion or belief. There is no heart beat; there is no brain activity. The body becomes a resource for other organisms. You have to come up with something pretty special to conjure an afterlife from those ingredients.

                • I can’t make a case for the existence of an afterlife any more I can for its non-existence. I have no first-hand knowledge, so I don’t know. The rational (empiricist) view that everything in life is reduced to quantifiable material – that this is all there is – is, in spite of its seductive logic, just a belief, with the same value as the (widely held across all cultures and religions) belief that physical death is merely the death of the physical form. “Conjuring an afterlife” is the same as denying its possibility, and it doesn’t matter which view you take. You – we, I – just don’t know. We can comfort ourselves that our “rational” approach is the sensible option, based on clear analysis of data to hand and rejection of “airy-fairy nonsense” (whatever), or we can comfort ourselves with the idea that this life is a period we pass through. Or, we can scare ourselves shitless with either notion. Or remain impassive. But proving the non-existence of anything is pretty tricky, as the most logical mind will admit. Those who take the view that there’s nothing, just blackness, would find it difficult to answer the question of exactly how this black nothingness could be perceived, and by whom.

                  I cannot consider this world, and my place in it, as rational, explicable, and in any way ordinary. And I am prepared to admit that my knowledge of this life is limited, by the very thing that’s doing the knowing. The here and now is more than enough to be getting on with.

                  • I accept that we are forever constrained by the limited tools at our disposal – our brains – but that doesn’t mean we can’t use them to the best of our abilities. All the signs suggest that we are naked apes with big brains, blessed with a consciousness that can lead us down cul-de-sacs, such as questions about the afterlife. Why do we never ask questions about before life? We accept that we did not exist before we were born and the world kept turning. Why is it so difficult to accept the same non-existence awaits us when we die? Why invent whole new layers of magical and metaphysical thinking to account for a problem that may not exist? I say may because I am happy to accept that I may be wrong.

                    Embracing the material does not exclude or drive away the magic of existence. Knowledge is both power and beauty. The fact that all living things are connected by ancestry and evolution is a magical and awe-inspiring realisation that breeds love and respect for all life on Earth. You can have a sense of oneness and universality without recourse to any power higher than your own limited tool kit.

  26. Apparently we are physically composed of little particles of “stuff” and according to certain “laws” of “Physics” these particles of stuff can be neither created nor destroyed. If all that is correct then our constituent parts have always been somewhere in existence and us dying and our bodies ceasing to be animate and decaying away does not mean those particles aren’t around any more. They just merge into the sort of background matter of wherever they happen to be.

    Our consciousness, having existed, presumably also consists of something or other, possibly some conglomeration of particles that science has yet to discover, classify and enumerate. If so, then these particles are also still going to be around after they cease having any ability to control our physical bodies. There is no reason to suppose they would behave any differently to the other particles of which our reality is composed. Whether they will still be capable of knowing or doing anything afterwards is anybody’s guess.
    My personal guess is they will sort of dissolve and merge into the great mass of “stuff” that comprises “reality”. Whatever that is.

    • Scarlett Thomas’s ‘The End of Mr. Y’ is a really good novel about consciousness, and much of Mike’s post appears in it.

      And as Andy Partridge puts it

      ‘Don’t you know?
      About a billon years ago,
      Some star sneezed,
      Now they’re paging you in reception’.

    • I think it’s highly unlikely that consciousness has its own particles. It’s the periodic table, in vastly complex combinations, with an electrical charge running through it.

      He says, with his fucking English degree. 😉

    • A physicist writes… Creation and destruction of particle/anti-particle pairs goes on regularly (its quantum and doesn’t last long). But the energy in a closed system (e.g. the entire universe) cannot be changed. So things can transition from energy to mass, and mass to energy using our friend E=MC2, but not easily. More common is the particles will change. (and then we get the complicated questions of precisely what do we mean by “particle” and “destroy”).

      Consciousness (again, a good definition would be helpful) is electrical impulses which stop when the body stops (and the information encoded decays over time).

      Good news is that in about 5 billion years the Sun will expand to swallow the Earth becoming a Red Giant before shrinking into a White Dwarf and slowly evaporating into the heat death of the Universe on some timescale that is literally unimaginable.

      Personally, I’m hoping to go to The Good Place. But I worry it will just be an eternity of being on hold on the phone. I expect nothing.

      • “Expect nothing” is a great policy for all situations.
        That’s the whole problem with Christmas: you know it’s coming on December 25th and you know you’re going to get something. So the whole of November it’s IwannaChopperIwannaChopperIwannaChopper! and you come down on Christmas morning and it’s a different bike. Whereas, imagine there’s no Christmas and one morning you come down AND THERE’S ONLY A BLOODY BIKE THERE! FOR YOU!
        (Notwithstanding the fact that Choppers were sh*t).

  27. I don’t see death as anything to be scared of, although you have to pass through some suffering to get there, but you won’t remember it and think ‘oh that was awful’. It all falls away leaving nothing. Want to know what death is like? Cast your mind back to before you were born. You’ve already been dead for most of eternity & it was fine. I find this incredibly comforting.

    (I’m not religious but am fascinated by religion, and respect anyone who has faith)

  29. A few months after losing my beloved lass I was as usual painting. I always stand to paint but I keep a chair behind me so I can sit and rest occasionally. On this particular autumn afternoon I had just sat down while I waited for a patch of paint to dry and to plan my next steps in the completion of the piece in my head before continuing. My attention and thoughts were entirely caught up in this process when I became acutely aware of someone standing behind me and close to my right shoulder. I felt an intense feeling of cold pass across the nape of my neck and all the hair on my neck and arms stood on end. I immediately said “hello sweetheart” and the sensation ceased. The whole experience must have lasted seconds but it was very real and utterly tangible.
    I am by nature an outright sceptic and despite this happening to me I remain so. I can’t explain it I just know it happened and it was intense.
    You can scoff now if you wish.

  31. I’m very fond of my man Tich Nhat Hanh’s take on such matters.

    ‘Ask a cloud: what is your date of birth? Before you were born, where were you?

    If you ask the cloud, ‘how old are you? Can you give me your date of birth?’ you can listen deeply and you may hear a reply. You can imagine the cloud being born. Before being born it was the water on the ocean’s surface. Or it was in the river and it became vapour. It was also the sun because the sun makes the vapour. The wind is there too, helping the vapour to become a cloud. The cloud does not come from nothing, there has only been a change in form. It is not a birth of something out of nothing.

    Sonn or later, the cloud will change into rain or snow or ice. If you look deeply into the rain you can see the cloud. The cloud is not lost, it is transformed into rain, and the rain is transformed into grass and the grass into cows, and then into milk and the ice cream you eat. Today if you eat an ice cream, give yourself time to look at the ice cream and say ‘ Hello cloud, I recognise you!’
    From ‘No Death, No Fear’.

    And remember, to paraphrase R. Kliban (cartoonist & genius), ‘ The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, which is why bringing sandwiches and a change of underwear is recommended’.

  32. It’s one of those things that once you start thinking about it, your brain won’t let you determine. The process (for me anyway) goes a bit like this.

    “What is it like to die?”
    “If everything shuts down and you can’t sense anything any more, then you’re never going to know.”
    “Yes, but what’s it like to sense nothing?”
    “…..”

    I wonder if, because you can’t imagine what it’s like to sense nothing, there must be something, or whether that’s just the will of the human mind trying to fill a gap that’s unknown but inevitable – almost trying not to make you concerned about it.

  33. Nothing. There is no more. Complete cessation of self; body and mind.

    Which is of course a bit of a shame. Because that body and mind is the universe to us. We fill ourselves with thoughts, hopes, doubts, joys, pains and activity ceaselessly. How can all that we feel ourselves to be just cease, we ask ourselves. All that vitality simply can’t end! We’re so special, surely!? Well, none of us are.

    It’s our own fault for being at the top of the evolutionary chain and able to express so much. Ultimately we’re atoms that go phut, fall apart and make something else

    Also, something that I’ve wondered for a while, what if there is some form of afterlife, or continued consciousness somehow. What if you don’t want that? What if you’re content to cease, to end, to be no more? Why do we need to experience eternity? Not being able to opt out, even if it isn’t a hellish experience, would be agony surely? .

    • I agree, Beezer.
      I concluded at quite a young age that I found the notion of an afterlife profoundly frightening, whilst oblivion (or at least a rearrangement of one’s atoms into something very different to what ‘one’ was) has always seemed very peaceful & not at all alarming.

  34. My reason for a belief in a hereafter is not based on any religion or any faith but a peculiar and very strong feeling that I have been here before.
    I have had a recurring feeling and quite often that I was a smuggler in Cornwall. I have no Cornish ancestors and had this feeling long before I ever visited Cornwall. It could be complete nonsense of course or it could be entirely true. The beauty of our existence is that we don’t know and never will know as if we are reincarnated we could be having this conversation as different people some time 100 years from now. The mystery of life.

  35. I was in my late forties before I had a general anaesthetic. It was a profound experience. One second I was counting backwards, next I was being gently shaken by an angelic nurse with a cup of tea. It was probably an hour later but my brain had not registered the passing of any time between one event and the next. I plainly had not died but for me that hour did not exist in any way. It was snipped from my existence. I figure death is like that without the cup of tea at the end. If on the other hand there really is an “awakening” on the other side, I would like to request English Breakfast with two sugars…. and the nurse to be naked if thats OK.

  36. I maintain my belief in finito, yet, possibly paradoxically, much as the sight and smell of smoke remain after a fire has gone out, so remains a remnant of our energy as a postscript. Atmospheric spirits define for how long, our senses for the awareness thereof.

  37. Lots of skeptics and rationalists on this thread. I would normally consider myself in that crowd but once in a while I allow my metaphysical mind to ruminate on matters of death and existence. And on this occasion I’m going to wear my heart on my sleeve for once and stick up for the hopefuls who believe there’s ‘something’ beyond life but find it hard to define.

    Let me explain. I would say I’m skeptical, but I’m skeptical in a different way. I’m skeptical of anyone’s certainty of the objective, physical world. If you start from a position of that world being undeniable, then you unfairly put the onus on anyone vaguely ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ to prove the existence of something beyond that world.

    But what if you abandon that apparently rock solid conviction? What if I asked you to prove this objective world exists? What if I asked you to prove YOU exist and are not just a figment of my imagination?

    I know I exist. I think therefore I am. I remember those words from Descartes ringing true with me as a youngster, and I’ve never found anything more certain or unshakeable. Apart from The Beatles.

    I think therefore I am. But I don’t know that YOU think, I don’t know that YOU ‘are’.

    My belief in my own existence runs far deeper than my belief in any external world. Dreams and experiences can baffle me and collide with each other. The world often seems distant and unreal.

    So when someone talks as if it’s ‘obvious’ that the physical world is all there is (which is essentially what you are saying if you refusing to admit the possibility of an afterlife), it just sounds to me as if they are deluding themselves and missing the bigger picture.

    So don’t open your eyes. Close your eyes and feel the truth!

    This has been a public service announcement on behalf of Guru Cowslip.

  38. What if…
    What we know as our consciousness is just a particular configuration of the electrical charges of our particles (I’m talking subatomic here). Some of them may leave the configuration and get replaced or even augmented by other New-To-Us particle-charges as time passes. Some may go and not be replaced at all.
    What if when we “die” all it means is the charges cease to be configured in that particular way.
    The particles will still exist and have their electrical charges, but the configuration of charges that was Us will not.

    Deeeeeeeeep.

    • Well, Einstein’s model (yes, you can all stop reading now) says all your particles will continue to exist. The energy of those subatomic particles will continue unless they are influenced by external factors (for example radiation or, in layman’s terms, heat) to make them change energy state. If they didn’t, there would be a small nuclear explosion every time someone died.

      The only way someone’s particles would change state would be if they were radioactive and decayed, but that would happen while they were alive, too.

      I eat a banana every day, so my radioactivity levels are very slightly higher than some. Without looking it up, about a thousand bananas contain the same level of radioactive material as an X-ray. I went to the dentist last week, too – I’m surprised I don’t glow in the dark.

  39. I hate the thought of reincarnation. I worry I’d come back as somebody horrible, racist or unloved and that scares me.

    Heaven as a concept is difficult to imagine. Is it crowded? How do you find your loved ones? What if they’re not there? What would it be like waiting for your loved ones to come and find you? Is there a clique? My happiness isn’t the same as your happiness, so can we exist in the same Heaven?

  46. Nothing happens. At least, from the perspective of the recently deceased. My theory is that because humans are the only species (at least, which I know of) that is aware of its own mortality – and from a young age, we have attempted ways of coming to terms with our own deaths. So what if you die – if it means going to heaven, sitting on a cloud playing a harp all day and generally feeling peaceful and content, hell – kill me now!

  50. My heart stopped completely on several occasions without warning, causing me to black out, for various lengths of time. One minute l could be chatting, next l’m being helped from the floor by people looking worried. For me, nothingness. With my heart stopped, and blood no longer pumping, there was no white lights or signs. Then again, l’m still here, as my bodies own electricity always restarted my heart after an ever increasing length of time (I now have a pacemaker). Rather like being knocked out playing football and remembering nothing, that is what l think death will be like, and l’m happy with that. Other choices are available.

  51. Nothing. What part of yourself could go ‘anywhere’? You would need a continued consciousness in some form to experience that anywhere. A consciousness would need some form of vehicle or a container. Currently, while alive in this instance, that’s your brain.

    If consciousness doesn’t need a vehicle to continue then wow! Multiple dimensions! Great. But how would it traverse? I fervently doubt that any Homo sapiens ‘soul’ exists anywhere else except under a haircut or a hat.

  55. This thread sort of proves an afterlife, seeing it pop up in recently updated. And with Bri and Bellows jousting through a time space rip too. But most poignant, amongst the names of so many missing in action, was to read lovely old Phil Pirrip’s then musings. R.I.P., Buddy. What could you tell us now?

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