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The Necessarily Secret Afterlife

7 years ago1,032 words

If science managed to prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that there was an afterlife of unconditional bliss awaiting us all when we died, could human civilisation continue?

The materialistic, 'realistic' view is that when we die, we're dead. Our bodies rot, and our minds - which are simply music the brain makes - cease to exist. We end in the same way a song ends; do songs have a continued existence after the music sinks into silence? Why should minds? This, of course, gives a lot of weight and value to our mortal lives. They're all we have.

Then of course there are the religious mythologies, with their conditional afterlives. Paradise for the nice, torture everlasting for the naughty. So live well! Behave! A carrot and stick to keep us moving, but still forever out of reach, taken necessarily on faith.

But many of the accounts of people who've 'died' and returned to tell the tale that I've read - Near Death Experiences - tend to paint the hereafter as a place of truly unconditional bliss, of boundless love, a chance to reflect on how life was lived with yourself as the only judge, and a feeling of belonging that passes mortal understanding. Rather than fading into nothing, death is like a swan emerging from a chestnut; limits fade, disappear, all answers are revealed and senses become more vivid, communication instantaneous and infinitely deep.

If there was such a state of existence after death, though, we could never know about it. Not because it's beyond the means of machines to measure it, beyond the material and as such out of the grasp of science, but because perhaps we knew before birth that coming in with all the answers would mean that the game simply wouldn't work. Who would endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune if they knew that what was to come transcends anything that earthly life could ever offer?

I've talked about this before, but I wonder whether the whole purpose of life is to experience what we in our eternally blissful state can't. We see the archetype of God as this tremendous, majestic, perfect figure worthy of our praise, but with omni-everything comes a kind of limitation that could even be worthy of our pity. God could weave universes on a whim, but could He ever feel the breeze on his face? Enjoy the pleasure of a tight hug from a loved one? God is forever on high, alone; much as His magnificent omnipotence eludes us, our mundane pleasures and pains elude Him.

I'm speaking sort of metaphorically here, but I do wonder whether there's some objective truth to the picture I'm painting. Perhaps we're all just God's many tendrils, exploring itself, its universes? Infinite fingers wearing some divine glove, each an extension of God with no direct awareness of the other fingers until the glove is removed. If this is making any sense. Maybe it isn't.

Perhaps Earth is a prism that filters our eternal bright white light into a rainbow of fragmented experiences? I've spoken of it like that more than once before, but it's because I feel it's fitting. White light could be called 'omni-light', as it contains all colours, but to see the individual colours and admire their beauty, you need to introduce limitations.

So perhaps life is all about limitations, about suffering, about either learning from that or simply experiencing that for the sheer sake of it. Perhaps there's no deeper meaning to it than the reason we eat a bar of chocolate, play a game, watch a horror film.

Christians have wrestled with the idea of an all-loving God who'd make a universe so full of cruelty; they blame Original Sin, the Fall, for it all. Atheists argue that since the world is such a horrible, unfair place, there can't possibly be a loving God.

But if we were indeed timelessly eternal, limitless beings, what lasting fear is there for us in mortal death? Do we fret over lives lost in video games? What does it matter to us if Mario runs off a cliff, gets exploded by a bomb? It's true that we don't feel that in the sense we'd vividly feel our real mortal deaths, but perhaps with enhanced technology we'd get to the point where we could. Where we could truly 'die' - and feel it! - in games, but we'd still choose to play them for the experience of it. Would we consider the makers of such things monsters, or would we thank them for the entertainment, the vivid embodiment?

If we knew, for certain, that 'Heaven' awaited us after death, murder would be a gift, suicide a certain relief. If we kept omniscience when we were born, we'd be so above the trials of the world that they'd cease to hold any meaning.

So it's not mysterious or contradictory to me how there could be an afterlife alongside a cruel world of suffering, or how we don't remember anything from before we were born. Perhaps other universes have different rules, where we do remember, or which are about uninterrupted hedonism simply for the thrill of that? (Though I feel that contrast is so important for appreciation to form; we'd take everything for granted if there were zero chance of it ever being taken away.)

I've fantasised about humanity discovering the nature of the 'soul' or afterlife in the near future, but I think that if we ever did, that'd be the end of us. Perhaps we'll never know for that reason. Or perhaps we're apparently alone in the universe because every other sentient species did discover that truth, and disappeared as a result of it? Perhaps that's the endpoint of civilisation? The conclusion of conscious awareness? To wake up from the dream we chose to dive into, to move onto another game.

Who knows. Things like this can only ever be speculation.

Rather than arguing with me why this isn't the case - I'm not interested in that at this point in time - here's a question: How would your life change if the announcement was made tomorrow that the afterlife is real and unconditional?