all my life i've found the concept of an "afterlife" hard to grasp. oftentimes I feel like if I was a firm believer in one I would be more scared of dying... I most often have the overwhelming need for there to be nothing after this. does anyone here have a firm unwavering belief that there is an afterlife? does it keep you away from finally ending your life or does it draw you into it?
I must admit that sometimes I do hope there is a place I can go, especially when I think of my plans to do it alongside someone i love very dearly. an afterlife with her would be so nice....still, I just grow so tired of life as it is now. the possibility of there being anything after this makes me feel like I'm doomed to never be at peace.
I (as well as anyone else living) can't say for certain whether or not there is an afterlife but if there is I assume it's similar to dreaming. One can hypothesize that if such is the case our brain death could transcend space and time and what could amount to a few minutes in this world could stretch on for an eternity afterwards. We'd have branching paths we could take and such would go on forever. I personally desire nothingness though and who is to say that our current lives aren't just dreamt up by our brains themselves in an effort to imagine what it would be like to live.
If you have a person who is born into a coma with no functioning senses or reaction to stimuli I'd imagine such would be quite similar.
But if there is a heaven/hell or reincarnation oh boy... there is no "winning" for us then as we are put into a cell for eternity that is filled with supposed bliss or suffering (neither is desirable after a few thousand years) or are stuck in an endless loop of death and rebirth.
Deep down I believe there is likely something pulling the strings because what are the odds of us even existing in the first place on a planet in a habitable zone in our galaxy with a one of a kind moon that has sentient creatures littered throughout it. I'm not so sure it's the type of "god(s)" we envision though by any means. For all we know we could just be some entities hobby and we are each but a single spec of clay that makes up a ball and to die is to return to the jar we came from only to be reused again as desired for fun.
Because if you take a step back and look at things none of our singular lives truly mean anything and in the grand scheme of things George Washington will be of no more worth than a homeless person on the streets, all have a small part to play and after 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000, etc years who will honestly know any of us existed and if they did it wouldn't matter because we'd be gone and so would the ones who came across what we left behind after that, and so on.
A legacy means nothing, saintly and/or heinous acts mean nothing, hell... this planet will eventually turn to glass before being enveloped by the sun and then later on the sun will perish, then the galaxy, eventually the universe.
Then in countless eons another universe will begin and die, and so on and so forth.
If there is an afterlife I can imagine such would end up being quite crowded over time so such would have to be beyond the constraints of space and time as we know them and even if each of us is the equivalent of a single notepad txt document worth 1kb of space not even a 1,000,000,000,000 etc TB hard drive would be able to hold everything. This means that we likely aren't living in a "matrix" but who is to say some all-powerful entity/entities can't bend the laws as we know them and create pocket dimensions within pocket dimensions that stretch on for infinity?
Reincarnation also seems flawed by default because as the population increases but there could possibly be soul "nurseries" or a factory that fashions them so you can't truly discount such.
Really, anything is possible but as for my personal belief...
I think that there is an afterlife where there is an endless self-contained dreaming state powered by it's own "soul" as a battery, our life and experiences (good and bad) could charge such and then after we CTB and are put into maintenance mode the amount of energy use is so ridiculously low that we can experience this forever and with time dilation being a thing and the human condition being filled to the brim with imagination there is a lot of subject matter to cover. Maybe once we burn through everything after countless millennia we run out of energy and then everything just ends in a similar fashion to our universe, a vast majority of inconsequential filler with occasional bursts of excitement before the inevitable downturn and a final light show before the curtains close.
Really, there could be anything. I personally wish for nothingness though but if life has taught me anything there is always something going on behind the scenes but it's never quite what you'd expect.
