What happens when you die?
- This topic has 101 replies, 13 voices, and was last updated 19 years, 3 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Considering that we've been tackling The Meaning Of Life (TM), I figured, hey, why the hell NOT ask this question?
Ok, we're tackling "what happens when you die?" Do you believe you just stop? Perhaps some form of heaven or hell? Maybe reincarnation? Or do you hope to be welcomed into the arms of the Great Noodly Master, the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Let's hear it, folks.
Woo-hoo! First to comment! But anyway…
I don't *believe* that anything happens when you die, except that your heat dissipates and then you start to decay. (Which is why I plan to be cremated, BTW. I don't want to rot. I realize that I'll be dead and won't know the difference, but still…) Anyway, I hope that something better happens, but not being a person of faith, the likelihood of that happening to my eternal soul (life force, or whatever) is slim to none.
When I was little, my dad (an agnostic at best) said something about your energy being dispersed to the things around you when you die. So when he died (when I was 11), I had this sort of weird/whimsical notion of his spirit inhabiting his hospital bed at Kaiser Permanente. I think he must've been talking about the heat dissipation thing, but I have no way of knowing now.
Sometimes I wish I had faith. I kinda envy people who do. The idea of not existing anymore gives me the chills.
I find it kinda hard to appreciate that there is some place where most of humanity goes after death-either heaven or hell, since there is no realistic place in the universe it'd have to be a seperate dimension (according to my logic) which would just irritate me. Logically you'd also be stuck in the form of that which you died in, so I'd get to spend a whole eternity being old, or with limbs missing etc.. I'd personally feel sorry therefore for those that got caught in fires, an eternity as ashes would be rather dull.
But then like Colleenky I can not mentally cope with the idea that once I'm dead that's it, I mean I'd quite like to be a ghost and annoy a load of people. That would be fun… But I see no harm in believing there's something because if I'm dead I'm not going to complain if there isn't anything. Unfortunately with a topic like this I have a lot to say and often start to waffle-like this. So I'll stop.
I usually avoid these kinds of conversations because I don't have any solid point of reference to base my argument on. I know what I believe but since I have not died and come back to talk again, I can't really try to convince any one else I'm right.
Will we just sleep, perchance to dream? Are we just binary creatures, one or zero? We'll all find out eventually.There is no reason to think that anything happens after death. People *want* there to be something more, but that doesn't make it real. Billions of creature die every day, but you don't hear of too many people wondering if skin mites or krill go to heaven or not. Heaven is just a security blanket for people who are afraid of the (metaphorical) dark.
I had a long diatribe to write, but decided to put it this way:
We do indeed exist here and now in some sort of form. So, why not exist here or there or wherever in another form after this form ceases to be animated?
JoCoHead — no problem. You hypothesize that there may be something after death. Plan an experiment and find some empircal evidence to support your hypothesis. If you can't, then it has to remain a hypothesis (i.e. a guess, hope, etc.). Just wanting it to be so doesn't make it so.
While I did state the hope of existence alternate to this one, the main point of my statement was we exist temporically in our reality, so why not the possibility of another?
Mathematically, it is probable. What we seem to lack is the methodology to filter out this tempor's base frequency to be able to observe other tempors. Perhaps if we could penetrate past the radioactive shell (the beginning of time) at the outtermost reaches of our universe, we would have a view to pre-time or to other realities.
Perhaps, there is nothing (which is also mathematically probable). In which case we cease. Perhaps we experience brief bouts of conscious thought as our brain decomposes, but after that there is nothing.
"Just wanting it to be so doesn't make it so"
Not wanting it to be so doesn't make it not so. I haven't seen the definitive proof that there is nothing else so I choose to keep an open mind about it. There are alot of advances in science that have caused many scientific conclusions to be changed. I'll wait."I haven't seen the definitive proof that there is nothing else so I choose to keep an open mind about it."
You probably haven't seen definitive proof that there aren't leprechauns and unicorns and superheroes and lots of other stuff too, but people don't tend to keep the same kind of open mind about those topics (I suppose there could be a unicorn under my desk that hides every time I try to see him — I have no proof he *isn't* there).
In every other area of human experience, people demand some kind of verifiable proof before they'll accept a premise, but in the case of religion and death, they'll cling to the weakest of unsupported ideas, just because it feels better to do so. If, after applying the scientific method we all learned in elementary school, the best someone can do is, "well, I just believe it anyway", then we have to call that what it is — willful pretending.
"There are alot of advances in science that have caused many scientific conclusions to be changed."
Absolutely, and when those advances happen and the body of evidence we have to evaulate changes, then we can come to a different conclusion. But doing so without the evidence is a little weak, IMO.
In all forms of science, there is a bias towards what is measurable. By measuring those things and then basing our theories on scientific manipulation of those measurable phenomena, we end up with scientific data of all kinds that gets slanted even further in the direction of the measurable.
Extension of measurability almost always leads to new theories and theories that explain more and more. The development of lenses that extended our vision further in space and deeper into nature by allowing us to perceive smaller organisms led to huge developments in cosmology and medicine.
To me, the biggest problem about the after-death theories is that they are based on too-strong gullibility on the one hand, and too-strong skepticism on the other. There's a lot of unexplained data in the middle that lacks adequate measurement tools to build theory with. All the eastern medical traditions that build on the basic notion of the chi life force (ayurvedic medicine, acupuncture, and so on) are sort of sidelined, even though there's a certain amount of evidence that they work very well for some physical conditions.
I personally think that it makes sense to listen to the people who have done the most intensive study of death for the longest time with the best thinkers, which at this point I think means the Buddhists, especially the intellectual branch of buddhism, namely Tibetan buddhists. There's an American psychologist who's been immersed in Buddhist traditions, but who has done a lot of work relating buddhist teachings to western psychological findings — look up Ken Wilber and see what you think of his stuff.
He's representative of people who are studying living consciousness — stuff at the edges of ordinary thinking — as a way of exploring the possibility of post-life consciousness and other related questions.
Woah, woah, hold the phone everyone.
Telling someone to "prove it" in this thread… well, that's contrary to the original idea of the post, which was to just have people share what they feel. Noone said "prove it" for The Meaning of Life (TM).
So, yeah, everyone share what they feel, give your reasons if you want, but no saying "you're wrong" to someone else or "prove it" or being confrontational. People should feel free to write what they feel or believe w/o fear of repercussion. (Now, if someone WANTS to get into a friendly "prove it" debate, that's different, but noone should feel like they're being attacked for it.)
Gle3nn, I'd love to hear what you believe. That was the point… share your thoughts. You don't have to be able to back it up. It's just your thoughts.
Ok, my turn.
What do I think actually happens? I have no idea. I asked one of my Jewish friends once what Judaism teaches about this and he said, "they teach 'we'll find out when we get there'." I fell in love with this idea. So, yeah, honestly, I don't know, and I'm not hung up trying to figure it out. I don't really care, in many ways. I'll find out when it happens.
What would I *like* to have happen if I could get my way? I'd like to simply not exist anymore. Seriously. I've been through a lot in this life and it would be nice to not have to keep on existing. No heaven, no hell, no nothing. Just simply not consious or not existing.
However, I do have to tell this one story. I decided to give blood once, but I was dumb and stayed up all night the night before and barely ate anything. (It was college.) They started taking the blood out and I started feeling weird. And then I passed out. But that's not how I experienced it. All I knew is that the next thing I knew, I could feel that I was coming out of some deeper unconscious state and that something was horribly wrong. And then I hit the "coming out of sleep state" and then I came out of it completely. But I was aware at the state that was deeper than the coming out of sleep state that I was previously in an even deeper state because I could sense that I was. And that the state was deeper than sleep and that I had no memory or experience of that state. You know how when you've been sleeping you have the sense that you've been sleeping, even w/o the dreams? Yeah, this was deeper than that. This was as close to *not existing* that I've ever felt.
And I've always had a sneaking suspicion in retrospect that THAT's what it must feel like to die, to be dead. Not existing.
And, you know what? If that's it, I could be ok with that. Seriously. I know my memory will live on in the minds of others, I know my words will still be around after I die (the Internet's full of them, I've got a diary, etc.)… I'm perfectly ok with my consiousness simply not existing anymore.
- The topic ‘What happens when you die?’ is closed to new replies.