Some thoughts about the afterlife
What do we mean by “the afterlife”? If we mean a continuation of the separate egoic personality that we identify with in this lifetime, with all of its memories, opinions, hopes and fears, then my own intuition, for what it’s worth, is that this does not continue in its present form. Consider the fact that our memory is imperfect even as to what we did yesterday or last week, and that our biases and opinions have evolved over time as we’ve grown older and, hopefully, wiser. Which version of “you” survives in the afterlife?
We may be tempted to say, “What survives is the last version, the person I was at the moment of death.” Okay, but do the rules of the afterlife allow for continued growth, or must we be frozen as, say, a gang member, a neo-Nazi, or a heroin addict? Do we bring all of our tribalism, animosities, bloviated opinions and petty conflicts with us into the afterlife, or do we leave them all behind?
Or we might say, “What survives is my best self, my idealized self, free of the impurities and sins of worldly life.” This answer implies a recognition that here, in this world, we’re leading a life that falls short of our own deepest ideals, and there’s room for improvement, and that maybe, in the afterlife, we might have a chance to become the person we always aspired to be.
Are we consigned to a place of eternal reward or punishment, depending on whether we subscribed to the right belief system and worshiped the right gods while alive? Or might we transmigrate into a new body, with no memory of the past, to experience the same lessons in new forms again and again, until we finally master them? And when we do master them, what then? Do we “graduate” to some other plane of existence, or perhaps come back as some kind of saint or guru, to guide other benighted souls through this vale of tears?
Only one thing seems incontrovertibly clear: nobody really knows, and the ones who claim to know contradict each other. Anything we say in response to this question reveals more about our current selves than the life to come. When thinking of the afterlife, we project our hopes and fears onto the future, and cling to some combination of the above ideas. Or perhaps we take pride in clinging to no hope at all, imagining that as "nonbelievers" we’re somehow better than all the riffraff who take refuge in fantasies.
What lies beyond the door of death is, as long as we’re alive, a mystery beyond our perception. That seems to be baked into the human condition. But what we can see, if we choose to look, is the effect of our beliefs on the way we act towards ourselves and the world around us. If we are doctrinaire and petty and unforgiving in this life, how might that be reflected in what we believe about the next? If we are brittle and fatalistic, does that prompt us to think that all that awaits is the grave and nothing more? And if we are selfish and cruel, perhaps we prefer not to think about the afterlife at all. Maybe our stance of disbelief is a just a convenient way of avoiding the truth about ourselves here and now.
Whatever you believe about the next life, try to be a little kinder, a little more caring, a little more considerate in the life you have now. If enough of us do that, perhaps we may yet escape the hell that we have made for ourselves. We may even succeed in creating a heaven on earth.
“It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than, ‘Try to be a little kinder.’” ~ Aldous Huxley