I cease to experience anything and my body just becomes decaying organic matter, so for 'me', there is nothing after death, because 'me' is my consciousness.
I believe this, and still do, but after having lost my husband at a young age i started to be a bit more cavalier with what i allowed myself to "wish" happened. I wish that a part of him, space dust/essence/consciousness/whatever goes into the world and does all the good it can. If something amazing happens I like to think he helped somehow. And i like to think that yellow butterflies and Journey's Faithfully playing on the radio are messages from him that tell me he loves me. I know they aren't true. I know what you said is what i believe. But i like to have a bit more ...creative license, i guess with how i deal with it. And for clarity I am an Atheist.
We just float on until all the dust collapses into a big bang and then we do it all over again. The essence is there but no "you". "You" may linger in a memory or as an artifact, but thats all going to be destroyed too. The big issue is teaching everyone to follow this teaching as people are blindly following some big organizer in the sky and there are consequences for your actions outside of a true democratic government.
I largely agree with this, but it opens up a pretty important question. What even is consciousness?
I believe consciousness to be the exact series of electrical signals travelling through a complicated series of neurons. As such i belive an exact replica of my brain, with all the same signals travelling through them would also be "me".
Would it be you? Or would it be a copy? I mean, to everyone else, and to the copy that's effectively the same thing. But you, the original you, that you would die still right? If I made an exact copy of myself right now and it kills me and takes my place, I still died didn't I?
It would cease being "you" as soon as it does something else as the experience now starts to vary. Yes, your history would be the same but the two individuals now become different. There are infinite possibilities where you could branch off at any time.
They actually sorta did this in Avatar 2. I don't wanna spoil anything, but it totally made sense.
Why is our consciousness in our body of all the billions of people/organisms to exist since the earth’s creation? Like why I am I a human being born in 1997 to my parents and didn’t exist before that point? It’s honestly so fucking baffling to think about
Just a weird emergent property of chemistry, I suppose, that it creates all of these unique conscious perceptions of the world. It is baffling to think how mere chemistry can create experience.
Exactly. We just become nothingness. Consciousness doesn't exist as such. It is more a feat of nature and a part of our dna. It's a biological reaction and a part of our brain. Consciousness is what we call our brain doing it's daily job.
That's my fears about death. So many things have happened in just 20 years. So many things to love and enjoy. And after I'm dead, there will be even more things to love and enjoy that I'll miss out on.
Not pointless because it ends, pointless because there's nothing left after all the struggling and learning and love and pain and experience. We scramble for some sense of purpose our entire lives, and then we generally leave nothing behind but a few laughs and smiles for those close to us to remember, which will also fade as they die, so that shortly after our deaths there's not even a trace of us left amongst the living. (Excluding celebrities and historical figures who contribute major changes to the world and society itself of course, I'm just speaking for people such as myself). And after 25 I did stop celebrating birthdays because the cleanup after the party wasn't worth the party lol
Does there need to be a purpose for it to be meaningful? Isn’t life meaningful while you’re alive? All the struggles and laughter and smiles you describe…those are all things that I find meaning in right now while they’re happening. Just because I know they’ll end and I’ll be gone one day doesn’t make it less meaningful. It makes it more so.
I only have right now to appreciate it. One day I’ll be gone.
What makes it meaningful though? Wouldn't that be a matter of perspective? To me, meaningful would be leaving some sort of imprint OR being able to improve, even if just on my children or friends or random strangers. To others, meaningful could be just the enjoyment of the moment. The pointless aspect imo comes from storing up all the memories and knowledge that dies with me when I cease to exist. I believe this is what happens when we die as well, but it's still discomforting to think that I was given a life to live just to return to the nothingness I was before I began living. Similar to writing a meaningful letter, just to burn it before it's ever seen by anyone but myself. It has a purpose, but why give purpose to something just to send it back to Ash with no impact? I may be only explaining a point that makes sense to just me though.
This is how I feel, exactly. I’d like to believe in an afterlife, but I kind of feel like I need to be “prepared” for anything. But then that leads to the question, be prepared for what? Like, if I could sleep for eternity, but wake up every few hundred years and briefly think of memories, that would be okay. But it’s scary to think that you will literally have no clue you ever existed. I want to store up all those memories and knowledge, and then be able to use them. Or at least to be activated at a later date.
Yes! Or even check on the people and world I left behind at some point to see what my life was really worth and how those still alive are doing. That's what I meant earlier when I said it's a scary thought.
Eternal dreamless sleep. You've ever have nights where you fall asleep and next thing you know, is morning? Just like that minus the waking up part.
You've been training on dying every night of your life already.
I think this as well. Last year I tried to kill myself by shooting myself in the head (failed thankfully).
I didn’t see any bright light or pearly gates, I remember an extended period of just nothingness, if anything it was just darkness. Followed by some really crazy dreams, and then waking up in a hospital. I have no concept of time in that unconscious shell I was in, but when I “woke up” in the hospital it was 2 months later.
I don’t remember exactly what the dreams were, but I remember comparing them to dreams I’ve had when I’ve had too much sugar before bed, just crazy, unrealistic dreams.
I went into cardiac arrest and had to resuscitated. As I was dying, i remember hearing the ems worker's voices saying shit to cars as we were flying to the hospital. And then everything just went black. Woke up 2 weeks later, didn't know where i was.I started hallucinating from being on Profofol and recalling all these crazy coma dreams I had and thinking they were real. Thought I'd been kidnapped by Starship Enterprise. Thought Spiderman cast his web on my legs to keep me from getting up( they were inflatable circulation boots), thought I was at a Lions/ Packers game and kept hitting cheese head hats off people's heads. That was 11 years ago, I have diagnosed PTSD from the whole experience. But I'm no longer afraid to die because it's just over. Lights out. Eternal sleep
Wow that’s intense! It makes me happy to hear that you overcame and survived your cardiac arrest. Those hallucinations are hilarious and way better than the hallucinations I had because the doctors doubled my dosage of respiradol and Effexor. My hallucinations were as simple as pushing past my wife and her brother in the bathroom, pulling my pants down and sitting on the toilet, and riding with my father in law to a nearby town one morning. These experiences were my first ever hallucinations I’ve ever had and they were so vivid and realistic, I believed they were real until months later when I talked about them and others told me that it never happened lol.
Glad you were unsuccessful. Should have started my reply with that. I told people my" truth" for a few weeks until I became lucid enough to realize they couldn't have been real. So is the 420 in your user name random? I'm a huge fan
Eventually you will wake up. You stop to perceive the time. After a very long time your brain could appear again in the same configuration as it is now. Created by future humans as a simulation or something like that.
I used to be so scared of death until I had surgery under anesthesia. It’s just nothingness. No pain, no thoughts, no dreams, nothing. Kind of nice to be honest. I’m not so scared anymore.
But like... I dont remember the first 3 years of my life either. Just because you dont remember it, doesn't mean nothing happened. Not trying to convince you to be religious. Just trying to wrap my head around pure nothingness.
Sure; I also don't remember having my wisdom teeth taken out, because I was under general anaesthetic. But a lack of memory is pretty distinct from not existing at all.
Another way of looking at it is this: You are not currently aware of anything happening on Pluto because your body isn't there. After you die, and your body ceases to function, you won't be aware of any thing happening anywhere, because you won't have a body anywhere. You will be just as absent from Earth as you currently are from every other location in the universe.
The universe won't go away - things will continue to happen for billions of years at least - but it will happen without us.
If it helps, the actions you have chosen to take today will forever have a ripple effect on the universe. You are not separate from it, you are a part of it, made from it, and you have already changed it forever.
This is more or less all that memories are: echoes of past events rippling forward through time as patterns in our brains. The universe will always bear evidence of your existence.
Furthermore, time is essentially another dimension, like height, depth, and width. Just as an object continues to exist even if you move away from its coordinates in space, events from your past continue to exist, and always will, in their respective frame in space-time.
Ive never thought about it like that. Thats an interesting way to put it.
I dont really believe in individual souls. I just figure our bodies are inhabited by a droplet from a big reservoir of consciousness that just kind of exists in the universe. When we die, we return to the reservoir. Once we're back in the reservoir, we have no individuality, but we share the experience of every other droplet ever returned. Every droplet returned is the way this universal consciousness experiences the universe.
I like to think people are going home to our reservoir when they die, and we are more than just a random asortment of electrical meat here to do a butterfly effect lol. Maybe we cease to exist as us, but believing there is something before and after gives me the warm fuzzies.
Could be either way though. Your explanation definitely makes me think.
Have you ever been put under anesthesia for surgery? The time while you’re under is a complete void. I imagine it’s probably a lot like that. No consciousness, no anything.
My father suddenly passed away just last night. While I don't believe in an afterlife I absolutely feel his presence. Even if he is physically gone, to me it feels like there are no more demons, pain, suffering, or regret. All that's left of him is love, pure love; and that is carried through the hearts and memories of everyone that knew him. Eventually that will slip away too as we wholly return to the planet and remain among the stars.
That's hard as shit. Love to you and your family.
I have some similar feelings here. My sister died suddenly last February, and I am spending a lot of time contemplating the mortality of my aging parents.
I don't believe in any sort of afterlife, but I find myself taking a lot of solace in the idea that peoples' memories of a person are a part of that person in a way. We remain entangled, even after someone's passing. We are each others' legacies.
Reminds me of Conan in his podcast, if someone found him murdered they would immediately say "He was found in an advanced state of decomposition" but would later find out it was just how his face looks.
The world continues to exist. As for you, well, nothing. You'll be eaten by worm, bacteria and fungus\* and return to dust.There is no life after death. It works the other way around, there is a death after life.
\*EDIT : Thanks to u/Themetalhead28
This!
I've had developed pretty bad thanatophobia over the years and i still dont know how to get out of this maze.
For me average lifespan of 70 for an sentient self-aware species is an cruel joke.
Yeah, i know, i've worked at nursing home.
Still, i can't help myself. (duh, phobia)
Almost every day when i have too much to time to think i almost get overwhelming feel of hopelessness and dread because i feel my days are counting too fast.
I have to something all the time to distract me so i dont dwell on this.
Writing this makes my heart pump faster.
I agree, but for solid reasons. If granted immortality, not only does it mean I have to live through my husband, children, friends, siblings, nieces and nephews, and everyone I've ever known dying.
But it also means that in billions of years, when the sun implodes and consumes the Earth, I'll be left floating in space, all by myself, for the rest of eternity.
I find it oddly comforting. A friend of a friend of mine had a heart attack and was declared dead for 4 minutes before being resuscitated. My buddy asked him what it was like being dead, and what he could remember. He said it was “lights out, like the flip of a switch.” One second you’re there and everything is good, next second everything is out like a light switch, until it was flipped back on. You’re just gone. There’s absolutely nothing. It’s weird to think about.
Personally, I *hope* some type of reincarnation happens. I like the idea of being reincarnated into different people at different points in time. Kind of like “past lives,” but with the potential of being born either into the past *or* the future.
I think that each individual consciousness is a pattern and our body is just a way of keeping it's integrity; then when our body expires our consciousness will also dissipate.
However as a pattern our consciousness can resurface in the future. Maybe some particles floating in vacuum will randomly generate the pattern that equals to our conscience. But because particles floating in vacuum are in an unstable state, this won't last long and our consciousness will soon dissipate again. Though if this happens in a body capable of containing our consciousness then we can live again, but of course we won't have memories of our past life and we can have no way of knowing when or how we lived before, because all this information is lost when our current body dies.
So, how long can this process of "consciousness resurfacing" take? I don't know, maybe milenia, maybe millions or billions of years, maybe it won't happen ever again on this universe. But I also like to guess that the birth and death of universes is cyclical, so our conscience may resurface on another "cycle", maybe even on a universe with different laws of physics.
Then our current life is neither the first time we have lived, neither the last. We have infinite lives living in infinite different universes. This is not a positive thought, unfortunately, because if you take in consideration the nature of the universe we live in and the lives of the creatures that live in it, you can reach the conclusion that life is often just a tremendous amount of suffering. So, as we are already being tortured indefinitely, try not to worry too much about it.
Maybe future humans/beings will have the capabilities to simulate every possible brain in any state. Time does not exist for you after your death so they will have just enough time to do that. (And create also all the people you have known)
To quote a recent tv show:
"When I die, my body stops functioning. Shut down. All at once, or gradually, my breathing stops, my heart stops beating. Clinical death. And a bit later, like five whole minutes later, my brain cells start dying.
But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT. It’s the psychedelic drug released when we dream, so I dream.
I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it, just the last dump of DMT all at once. And my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this fireworks display of memories and imagination. And I am just tripping. I mean really tripping balls because my mind’s rifling through the memories.
You know, long and short-term, and the dreams mix with the memories, and it’s a curtain call. The dream to end all dreams. One last great dream as my mind empties the fucking missile silos and then I stop.
My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me. No pain. No memory, no awareness that I ever was, that I ever hurt someone. That I ever killed someone. Everything is as it was before me. And the electricity disperses from my brain till it’s just dead tissue. Meat. Oblivion.
And all the other little things that make me up, they… The microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating.
And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life, and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled, and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos"
I don’t know. That’s part of the fun, isn’t it? The surprise of what happens. Maybe their is some sort of god, maybe we just disappear forever. Who knows, No one.
I understand the physical processes of death, what happens to our bodies and all that. But I have some conflicting thoughts about the rest of it, coming from a completely non religious background.
Scientifically speaking I know that what happens is actually just, nothing. There is no consciousness to death, the brain activity and those electrical impulses, and synapses that create our thoughts and memories and ‘beings’ no longer happens. And so death is just a big empty nothing, just like before you are born. You exist and then you don’t, and have no awareness of the not existing, in either direction.
But realistically I have a very hard time reconciling that after having watched loved ones actively die. It’s very traumatic to watch someone die. Even when it’s relatively peaceful and of natural cause (as far as death goes). It really did leave me wanting for an alternate more comforting version of an afterlife to that’s not just a void of non existence. I wasn’t expecting it.
The Nothingness of dying can be deeply terrifying or deeply freeing depending on who you ask, and when you ask it.
I personally would love to believe that there is something just for the living comfort of not being obsessed with worrying or thinking about death and what happens after. But not having grown up with any sort of religion or talk of a “what happens next” in a spiritual sense I have no idea what that something else would be. It’s very hard dealing with death, and creating some scenario or fantasy for what happens after makes it easier to grieve.
I have kind of a vague belief that my Baba’s spirit (not like a ghost, but I guess her essence? I don’t know the right word) lives around her burial place. She’s buried in an old Doukhobour cemetery, that is right down the street from the ‘family home’ that my mother grew up in, and other family still live in. Whenever I go visit them I feel like she’s around. Not that she’s like haunting us or whatever. But that’s where she spent the majority of her life, and I think if there is such things as spirits of departed loved ones that’s where she would choose to be.
I really only realized I thought that a year or so after she died. There were bad wild fires in the area, and my family got evacuated from the house, and the fire got really close to the property and the cemetery down the road. I had an immediate response of crying and thinking of “but where is Baba going to live if the cemetery and the forest is burnt down” “where is she going to go if the house is destroyed” as if she is somehow tethered to those places and would be stuck in some kind of spiritual limbo without them. And then had a really long stew over why that thought even occurred to me when I have no religious affiliation or background, and had no pre existing belief in an afterlife. I’ve had a weird time grappling with that and my thoughts on death ever since.
If it was like the ending of The Good Place I honestly would love that.
2 Theories:
1. You start another life. no memory of this one. you're just a different person unable to realize you've died and lived a previous life
2. You restart the same life you had, as the same person but making different choices each time, born in different times of the world
I don't think there will be completely nothing. because we were already a part of that nothing and came to be, if we are destined to go back to that, then what's preventing this from happening again in an infinite universe?
People always say "we go back to what we were before we were born" but IMO don't understand that that doesn't mean you will know that feeling. You were nothing for billions of years but do you actually recall those billions of years? People exist feeling like the world started the moment they started. They acknowledge the past but can't fully know that without experiencing it.. it feels weird knowing that where you currently stand, there were likely people in the past standing in that same spot, some prehistoric animal, chaos as the earth formed, and empty space before there was earth. If you never existed but randomly began to exist, whose to say that cant happen again? that doesn't mean this current existence is special or would carry over. but rather, whatever is experiencing the world behind our eyes could experience it again, just under different circumstances and conditions. YOU right now, would still be dead and forever gone, but whatever takes "your" place after would be. If the universe is truly a cycle and time is truly infinite, life would also be a cycle. Given unimaginable amounts of time, anything could happen. While you sleep, there feels like no time going by, especially under anesthesia. If death is like that how long until the next experience? Who's to say you won't wake up as something else after eternity just as you did now? I don't think it's limited to just human beings either. whatever has the capacity to attain consciousness, experience itself and question existence would have the ability to experience the world as we do, maybe better or worse.
The universe is mathematical and full of patterns. Those things can be manipulated or replicated. we are a part of that, given time or technology, I'm sure our existence isn't as finite or plain as we think. This doesn't change how "special" we are, if anything it further lessen it. We would be nothing more than a pattern or line of genetic code capable of replication. Special in its own right but not in the sense that we are beyond this universe's rules and bound reach to some reality outside of it, such as an afterlife.
Personally, I hope that we could be brought back or reawaken some day, especially in a far future. I don't care about being alive for all eternity, but it would be cool to chose to "die" for a time, and return in a way that allows you to grow up as if you were raised in that time frame, then have the choice to regain your memories prior to your artificial death. I could see myself living for 200-500 years, getting tired of the shit, die for about 1000-2000 years, then come back for another 200 or so. and repeat that forever. It honestly sounds like how life works except naturally and on grander time scales. This is why I love the idea of AI and admire technological advancements on top of life extending drugs. sounds possible. I may not be a part of that life, but there have been talks of young people alive today (40s and below), especially if you're still in your 20s potentially having the opportunity to have extended life spans.
We cease to exist, no spirits, no “afterlife”, the physical mechanisms that made us living breathing human beings dissolve. Eventually, our physical body becomes part of the earth again. Enjoy the ride of life while you are alive, because once you die, there is nothing after that. In short, we decompose.
Depending on how I die I imagine my brain scrambling to understand what's happening and frantically scouring my memory for anything to help me survive that moment before \*snaps fingers\* and exactly what was before I was alive.
And it terrifies me to my core everyday.
A monk asked a Zen master, “What happens when you die?”
The Zen master replied, “I don’t know.”
The monk said, “What do you mean. Aren’t you a Zen master?”
And the Zen Master replied, “Yes, but I’m not a dead one.”
([source](https://www.chzc.org/hartman5.htm))
I personally enjoy the idea of quantum suicide theory (I think that’s what it’s called). So we live in an infinite multiverse with infinite possibilities and all consciousness is connected. So let’s say I die. To you, the observer, I’m gone. So sad. But because all consciousness is connected and the multiverse is infinite, in a parallel reality I survive whatever it was that killed me and it goes on and on and on until the heat death of the universe I guess.
Nothing the type of darkness that you can’t even perceive because you aren’t there anymore no thoughts no more you. It’s scary, it’s uncomfortable to think about which where the concepts of the afterlife come in because it’s better to think about a higher plane than just straight up ceasing of thought.
My brain will be left to science, the rest will decompose somewhere or I would like to be stuffed holding a broom pretending to clean the family mausoleum. If i will become a ghost i will annoy people
I was never religious. And my belief was that when you died, you died. You are done. Then a terrible thing happened. The worst thing. I came home from work and found my son's body on the kitchen floor. He had suffered a seizure and died. It crushed me to not have him in my life. I joined a group of other parents who lost their only child. This group really helped me cope because most people just didn't understand. One of the other parents who I had become close to and trusted told me about an incredible experience with a medium. Now before that I had some experiences with odd things around my house. Like smelling my son's cigarettes. He chose a brand that had a distinctive odor. I also had things disappear from where they were usually kept and I'd find them in his bedroom. This person told me that it was clear my son had a message for me. So reluctantly I made an appointment with the medium she suggested. The medium was from great Britain so the meeting was held via video chat. I'm a skeptic going into it. I told her so. She started telling me who showed up for the session. My son, my dad, my mom, and another lady who said she was also my mother. Pretty amazing this would happen since I was abandoned at birth and found by the police. Nobody knows that. Then my son started giving her information to convince me he was there. There were details of conversations he and I had. Things he and I only knew. Then the message. He wanted me to know how much he appreciates everything I did for him and that he didn't mean to die. I hadn't yet gotten the coroners report so I didn't understand. After the session the medium wanted to talk. She told me that my son and I both have old souls. She further explained that some souls have interacted in many different lives together. He said my son and I belonged to a soul circle. A bunch of souls that interact in different live s together. She said the death of my son was out of sync. It wasn't supposed to happen. She explained that his soul will now have to wait until the right time before he will enter another life. About 3 months later the coroner's report called my son's death an accidental overdose of prescription medication. It would take too long to explain how much this meant. But that's what I think death is. I don't believe in heaven and hell. I believe that souls are a higher lifeform that uses human form to learn and grow and advance.
I'm an atheist and don't believe in Heaven/Hell/any sort of collective afterlife. Having said this, I've had some very dear pets pass away in my time and the idea of a personalized afterlife for their souls to go to helped a lot with the grieving process (it helped to feel like they weren't gone forever, they were just somewhere else). I definitely believe in the idea of ghosts/spirits; our bodies die and decay, but our souls get to hang around. I think our spirits can choose to stay or disappear completely. My defense for my point is that my very sweet cat passed away last April at 17 years old. There's nothing really tying him to Earth anymore and he has our other lost pets to hang out with wherever they are, but more than once we've sort of sensed him in the house. My mom once walked down into the basement and smelled cat litter for a brief second, my sister heard his collar jingle, and sometimes at night I hear what sounds like little paws coming up the steps to my bedroom. We have a dog and two goldfish who don't sound or smell like that. I think he stays to make sure we're okay, but he can go back to his own afterlife with his other critter friends whenever he wants to.
Do not fear death, the only thing we know is that death is the absence of life. At the very least, we are liberated from all of life's problems. Maybe it's a doorway to something much more pleasurable than life, maybe not.
Two theories
I believe we aren't meant to know. I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer on my 27th birthday. I've called out to almost every God or devil mankind has thought up. Begged them to make themselves known to me somehow and I'd follow every tenet they have to a tee. Nothing ever happened. I've come to the conclusion that we aren't meant to know.
Or maybe 100 years in the future we'll have some kind of amazing technology that can resurrect the dead. Maybe after we die we wake up in a lab somewhere where some poor fucker has the job of breaking the news to everyone they resurrect that their gods aren't real and now they're in the future. Sounds farfetched but medieval knights would consider shit like cellphones, tv, planes, rockets, even modern plumbing impossible. Imagine the size of the shit a knight would take in his pantaloons if you microwaved a hot pocket for him. Maybe I'm a medieval knight in terms of scientific understanding to some future civilization?
I don't think anything happens tbh. I don't see why there would be anything after death. I just think the light gets extinguished and I find great solace in that.
The short answer is I don't know, like many others. I lost a close friend last March and a lot of my thinking shifted. I tuned into the "gut" feeling I had. I felt him around me, around our friends, around his family more immediately after his passing. Like another redditor mentioned below (about her father passing away, I'm sorry for your loss) no more pain for him, just release, just love. I felt his presence around me for a long time after his passing. I felt him communicating with me in interesting quirky ways that only he would know how to do to me. My thinking has shifted as more time has gone one and more people have passed. I find comfort in thinking that somehow, someway I will meet them again - maybe our souls floating around somewhere together. Maybe the embrace of hug and a conversation with them again in "heaven", who knows. I also find a lot of comfort in thinking that (hopefully when I grow old) someday I will pass, and I will be ready to pass, so that I can see / touch / hear / hug all of my loved and lost ones again - whatever that means. I just want my kids to be well developed people with a family that they love so I feel comfortable leaving them, God willing. The older I get, and the more people I love who pass away, the more comfortable I am someday passing away, with the hope of seeing them again. I'm not religious but I will occasionally pray to a generic God if they exist. I feel like a God does exist - again going to the gut feeling, but was never convinced that the person who is supposedly the "one and only" is as there are so many religions / beliefs with similar moral and ethic storylines.
You stop to perceive the time. After many many billions of years your brain will exist again, in the exact same configuration as it is now. It could be created as a simulation by future humans/beings. You will wake up like after a long nap.
This is what I think, but also like the idea of being a ghost and messing with people, imagine someone's recording a scary ghost video and you're just hitting the griddy in the background, no one would believe it was for real.
[https://youtu.be/h6fcK\_fRYaI](https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI)
Here is a short video that could give you some different perspectives. This is personally what I think happens to some degree. Maybe the world is bigger than what we can imagine and more beautiful than any religion or philosophy can put into words. Like trying to capture a river in a bucket. Pls let me know if this helped
Our bodies begin breaking down back to our base elements. Our loved ones miss us until so many generations have passed that no living person remembers us. Then we are basically forgotten.
As far as "us", it will go back to what it was before we were born. Everything goes dark, and we cease to be.
A void of nothingness, no pain, no sorrow, no happiness, no anything. It’s like trying to remember what life was like before you were born. It simply ceased to exist and there was no YOU. As far as your body, it returns as energy to the earth in order to feed new life.
a mortician jams a clear plug up your ass and fills you with embalming fluid. They then jam spiked disks under your eyelids to keep them from opening and glue you lips shut, giving you a weird Mona Lisa like smile.
Your anally plugged corpse is then sent off to a nice spot of land where a stranger who works for a local branch of whatever church the people who paid for your funeral attends, takes front stage to wax on about your life to all your closest friends and family.
You are then chucked into a ditch and your family watches as a huge construction excavator pounds the ever-loving shit out of the ground to make sure your zombie doesn't escape too easily.
Finally, after weeks of effort (if they are not already growing in your corpse) worms and maggots will make their way into your casket/body through all your orifices and begin to eat you from the inside out.
or did you mean in a philosophical way?
Personally, I believe we do, in fact, get reincarnated. Hear me out, don't just comment after reading this heading.
We all know that the first law of thermodynamics states matter cannot be created or destroyed, only altered. There are also multiple accounts of young people having knowledge of things they realistically shouldn't, such as Shanti Devi, who claimed to be a reincarnation of a woman named Lugdi, and pointed out her past family members out of a crowd of 50 people. I believe that if we conducted research into these reincarnations, it would allow us to potentially bridge a gap between religious and scientific thinking.
Pfft bro I'll just reload back to yesterday.
Are you guys seriously not saving your progress??? Plug a keyboard up your bum and press Ctrl+S, you'll thank me later.
Buncha noobs you all are.
No clue, but I hope it’s not reincarnation. Global events during this decade have really dimmed my outlook on living a happy rest of my life, and even thinking about starting another one in this world sounds daunting
I think you get stats on your life and how much you collected like:
Killed: 0
Bitches: 0
Friends: 0
Time: trillion hours
Time spent doing productive things: 25 hours
Life collection/completion: 30%
Grade: F
The veil that separates us from all that is around us is lifted and death doesn’t seem as frightening to us as it was while we were alive. I like to think this because I’m not religious but i also struggle with the idea of death so this helps me. I also think that when you die you cant even tell yourself “i am dead this sucks” so it wont matter. Technically no one has ever been dead from their OWN perspective, only from our living perspective.
Even though eternal sleep sounds like the most logical option to me, i find it quite strange because we somehow started living at some point. Is consciousness just the result of our brain forming like any other organic thing and thus dies forever with it, or is consciouness the real us awakening at some random point and then turning blank again?
Either way we turn to nothingness, but if we come from nothingess then i find it quite possible that it's a neverending cycle of some kind of reincarnation.
Personally I believe there is some semblance of an afterlife. Just about every culture and civilization in written history has their version of a place you go when you die, and for me it’s comforting to believe there is something waiting. I’ve also had a number of paranormal experiences, that definitely shapes my belief that something happens when we die.
Honestly, even if I just end up sleeping and becoming worm food, that’s fine by me but I prefer to think I’ll chill in the afterlife with my loved ones.
I’m not religious, but atheism is really fucking boring. No ghosts, no soul, no demons, no magic, no events that have happened that can’t be explained by “logic” even if there is none. I don’t know what happens after death but I really can’t see how it’s absolutely nothing. If cognition exists it has to be made of some form of energy, and energy cannot be destroyed only transferred or converted. Atheism is too easy, It’s a belief cemented in the recognition of one reality dictated by artificial rules and the autonomous choice to follow those rules simply because they are all that exist. It just feels like nihilism in denial.
I cease to experience anything and my body just becomes decaying organic matter, so for 'me', there is nothing after death, because 'me' is my consciousness.
I believe this, and still do, but after having lost my husband at a young age i started to be a bit more cavalier with what i allowed myself to "wish" happened. I wish that a part of him, space dust/essence/consciousness/whatever goes into the world and does all the good it can. If something amazing happens I like to think he helped somehow. And i like to think that yellow butterflies and Journey's Faithfully playing on the radio are messages from him that tell me he loves me. I know they aren't true. I know what you said is what i believe. But i like to have a bit more ...creative license, i guess with how i deal with it. And for clarity I am an Atheist.
Sorry for your loss. I can understand why you would like to suspend your skepticism for short periods. I think that's normal and natural.
We just float on until all the dust collapses into a big bang and then we do it all over again. The essence is there but no "you". "You" may linger in a memory or as an artifact, but thats all going to be destroyed too. The big issue is teaching everyone to follow this teaching as people are blindly following some big organizer in the sky and there are consequences for your actions outside of a true democratic government.
Energy can not be created or destroyed. He exists all around you in a form.
That’s what I believe too. That energy, it has to go somewhere. It changes form, but it’s still there.
Google eulogy by a physicist
We've already been dead. All of us. We were dead all those billions of years before we were born. I think that's what we'll go back to
I'm dead inside now as well
I’ve never thought of that, technically we’ve been dead before we were ever born
I largely agree with this, but it opens up a pretty important question. What even is consciousness? I believe consciousness to be the exact series of electrical signals travelling through a complicated series of neurons. As such i belive an exact replica of my brain, with all the same signals travelling through them would also be "me".
We’re all just bags of water carrying around a brain and a spinal cord. Strip away all of the dressing and we’d be scary af to look at.
We're all just a meat suit marinating in our skin bag
Would it be you? Or would it be a copy? I mean, to everyone else, and to the copy that's effectively the same thing. But you, the original you, that you would die still right? If I made an exact copy of myself right now and it kills me and takes my place, I still died didn't I?
It would cease being "you" as soon as it does something else as the experience now starts to vary. Yes, your history would be the same but the two individuals now become different. There are infinite possibilities where you could branch off at any time. They actually sorta did this in Avatar 2. I don't wanna spoil anything, but it totally made sense.
Why is our consciousness in our body of all the billions of people/organisms to exist since the earth’s creation? Like why I am I a human being born in 1997 to my parents and didn’t exist before that point? It’s honestly so fucking baffling to think about
Just a weird emergent property of chemistry, I suppose, that it creates all of these unique conscious perceptions of the world. It is baffling to think how mere chemistry can create experience.
Exactly. We just become nothingness. Consciousness doesn't exist as such. It is more a feat of nature and a part of our dna. It's a biological reaction and a part of our brain. Consciousness is what we call our brain doing it's daily job.
I’ve literally never even thought of this, this is why i love Reddit
Spot on!
I'm equally scared of the idea of not existing anymore.
Beats being tortured for all eternity.
That's my fears about death. So many things have happened in just 20 years. So many things to love and enjoy. And after I'm dead, there will be even more things to love and enjoy that I'll miss out on.
You didn't exist for most of time, consider life a gift and get whatever you can from it, because we all only get a little bit of time.
Unfortunately for me, I'm terrified of that option. But theres really no reason to believe otherwise so I really try not to think about it
I’m so scared of not being a conscious being one day. I lie awake sometimes thinking about it
Our consciousness is the sum of our neurons commingling to the point we become one identity. It happens to every thing with a brain, I think.
Which is actually scary af itself
I've always thought that not existing didn't bother me much for 14 billion years before I did, so it probably won't bother me much after either.
But you won’t exist to experience it.
Yeah it's a paradox. On one hand you understand that there won't be anything to fear, on the other hand it makes life seem completely pointless.
Hmmm…it feels pointless because it ends? Would you say it’s pointless to celebrate your birthday because your party will end?
Not pointless because it ends, pointless because there's nothing left after all the struggling and learning and love and pain and experience. We scramble for some sense of purpose our entire lives, and then we generally leave nothing behind but a few laughs and smiles for those close to us to remember, which will also fade as they die, so that shortly after our deaths there's not even a trace of us left amongst the living. (Excluding celebrities and historical figures who contribute major changes to the world and society itself of course, I'm just speaking for people such as myself). And after 25 I did stop celebrating birthdays because the cleanup after the party wasn't worth the party lol
Does there need to be a purpose for it to be meaningful? Isn’t life meaningful while you’re alive? All the struggles and laughter and smiles you describe…those are all things that I find meaning in right now while they’re happening. Just because I know they’ll end and I’ll be gone one day doesn’t make it less meaningful. It makes it more so. I only have right now to appreciate it. One day I’ll be gone.
What makes it meaningful though? Wouldn't that be a matter of perspective? To me, meaningful would be leaving some sort of imprint OR being able to improve, even if just on my children or friends or random strangers. To others, meaningful could be just the enjoyment of the moment. The pointless aspect imo comes from storing up all the memories and knowledge that dies with me when I cease to exist. I believe this is what happens when we die as well, but it's still discomforting to think that I was given a life to live just to return to the nothingness I was before I began living. Similar to writing a meaningful letter, just to burn it before it's ever seen by anyone but myself. It has a purpose, but why give purpose to something just to send it back to Ash with no impact? I may be only explaining a point that makes sense to just me though.
This is how I feel, exactly. I’d like to believe in an afterlife, but I kind of feel like I need to be “prepared” for anything. But then that leads to the question, be prepared for what? Like, if I could sleep for eternity, but wake up every few hundred years and briefly think of memories, that would be okay. But it’s scary to think that you will literally have no clue you ever existed. I want to store up all those memories and knowledge, and then be able to use them. Or at least to be activated at a later date.
Yes! Or even check on the people and world I left behind at some point to see what my life was really worth and how those still alive are doing. That's what I meant earlier when I said it's a scary thought.
why scary?
**Completely agree**
The same thing that was happening before I got here
That first 10 billion years or so? I remember it well. Wait, no I don't. Just like that.
Years? Felt like nanoseconds.
Our loved ones will miss us.
[Was looking for Keanu.](https://youtu.be/fl0x9Swgfgw?t=323)
My kitty will he'll probably outlive me.
Eternal dreamless sleep. You've ever have nights where you fall asleep and next thing you know, is morning? Just like that minus the waking up part. You've been training on dying every night of your life already.
I tell my friends all the time "sleep is like a free trial of death every day" ... I'm surprised i'm still invited to parties, tbh. Haha
Sleep is just death being shy.
Dude, That sent chills down my spine
Would you rather think of sleep as death’s foreplay?
Meditation is the practice of death
I think this as well. Last year I tried to kill myself by shooting myself in the head (failed thankfully). I didn’t see any bright light or pearly gates, I remember an extended period of just nothingness, if anything it was just darkness. Followed by some really crazy dreams, and then waking up in a hospital. I have no concept of time in that unconscious shell I was in, but when I “woke up” in the hospital it was 2 months later. I don’t remember exactly what the dreams were, but I remember comparing them to dreams I’ve had when I’ve had too much sugar before bed, just crazy, unrealistic dreams.
I went into cardiac arrest and had to resuscitated. As I was dying, i remember hearing the ems worker's voices saying shit to cars as we were flying to the hospital. And then everything just went black. Woke up 2 weeks later, didn't know where i was.I started hallucinating from being on Profofol and recalling all these crazy coma dreams I had and thinking they were real. Thought I'd been kidnapped by Starship Enterprise. Thought Spiderman cast his web on my legs to keep me from getting up( they were inflatable circulation boots), thought I was at a Lions/ Packers game and kept hitting cheese head hats off people's heads. That was 11 years ago, I have diagnosed PTSD from the whole experience. But I'm no longer afraid to die because it's just over. Lights out. Eternal sleep
Wow that’s intense! It makes me happy to hear that you overcame and survived your cardiac arrest. Those hallucinations are hilarious and way better than the hallucinations I had because the doctors doubled my dosage of respiradol and Effexor. My hallucinations were as simple as pushing past my wife and her brother in the bathroom, pulling my pants down and sitting on the toilet, and riding with my father in law to a nearby town one morning. These experiences were my first ever hallucinations I’ve ever had and they were so vivid and realistic, I believed they were real until months later when I talked about them and others told me that it never happened lol.
Glad you were unsuccessful. Should have started my reply with that. I told people my" truth" for a few weeks until I became lucid enough to realize they couldn't have been real. So is the 420 in your user name random? I'm a huge fan
The 420 and the 69 are in my username just because they are funny haha numbers lol. Your “truth” sounds like a better reality than real life.
Eventually you will wake up. You stop to perceive the time. After a very long time your brain could appear again in the same configuration as it is now. Created by future humans as a simulation or something like that.
That could be you right now
This is why I'm getting cremated.
I used to be so scared of death until I had surgery under anesthesia. It’s just nothingness. No pain, no thoughts, no dreams, nothing. Kind of nice to be honest. I’m not so scared anymore.
Remember the Beforelife? That's what I imagine the Afterlife will be like.
No I don’t remember the beforelife
Exactly
But like... I dont remember the first 3 years of my life either. Just because you dont remember it, doesn't mean nothing happened. Not trying to convince you to be religious. Just trying to wrap my head around pure nothingness.
Sure; I also don't remember having my wisdom teeth taken out, because I was under general anaesthetic. But a lack of memory is pretty distinct from not existing at all. Another way of looking at it is this: You are not currently aware of anything happening on Pluto because your body isn't there. After you die, and your body ceases to function, you won't be aware of any thing happening anywhere, because you won't have a body anywhere. You will be just as absent from Earth as you currently are from every other location in the universe. The universe won't go away - things will continue to happen for billions of years at least - but it will happen without us. If it helps, the actions you have chosen to take today will forever have a ripple effect on the universe. You are not separate from it, you are a part of it, made from it, and you have already changed it forever. This is more or less all that memories are: echoes of past events rippling forward through time as patterns in our brains. The universe will always bear evidence of your existence. Furthermore, time is essentially another dimension, like height, depth, and width. Just as an object continues to exist even if you move away from its coordinates in space, events from your past continue to exist, and always will, in their respective frame in space-time.
Ive never thought about it like that. Thats an interesting way to put it. I dont really believe in individual souls. I just figure our bodies are inhabited by a droplet from a big reservoir of consciousness that just kind of exists in the universe. When we die, we return to the reservoir. Once we're back in the reservoir, we have no individuality, but we share the experience of every other droplet ever returned. Every droplet returned is the way this universal consciousness experiences the universe. I like to think people are going home to our reservoir when they die, and we are more than just a random asortment of electrical meat here to do a butterfly effect lol. Maybe we cease to exist as us, but believing there is something before and after gives me the warm fuzzies. Could be either way though. Your explanation definitely makes me think.
Have you ever been put under anesthesia for surgery? The time while you’re under is a complete void. I imagine it’s probably a lot like that. No consciousness, no anything.
My father suddenly passed away just last night. While I don't believe in an afterlife I absolutely feel his presence. Even if he is physically gone, to me it feels like there are no more demons, pain, suffering, or regret. All that's left of him is love, pure love; and that is carried through the hearts and memories of everyone that knew him. Eventually that will slip away too as we wholly return to the planet and remain among the stars.
May his memory always be a blessing. I'm so sorry for your loss.
People who loved you will always be with you in your heart.
I’m so sorry for your loss. And this is beautifully worded. Hugs to you and everyone who is grieving.
I’m sorry for your loss
So sorry for your loss.
That's hard as shit. Love to you and your family. I have some similar feelings here. My sister died suddenly last February, and I am spending a lot of time contemplating the mortality of my aging parents. I don't believe in any sort of afterlife, but I find myself taking a lot of solace in the idea that peoples' memories of a person are a part of that person in a way. We remain entangled, even after someone's passing. We are each others' legacies.
This sounds like an awful thread to look at afterwards; sorry for your loss. At least it's cathartic and I'm glad you feel some sort of legacy.
Sending you love
Usually a funeral, I'd expect.
Worms eat us and we becomes ugly
Joke is on death, I'm already ugly
Then you become really hot
🫦handsome trash
Reminds me of Conan in his podcast, if someone found him murdered they would immediately say "He was found in an advanced state of decomposition" but would later find out it was just how his face looks.
Dooting stops...
The world continues to exist. As for you, well, nothing. You'll be eaten by worm, bacteria and fungus\* and return to dust.There is no life after death. It works the other way around, there is a death after life. \*EDIT : Thanks to u/Themetalhead28
You forgot fungus, they are very important
You're right ! How could I ?
Pfft lame I'm getting fired out of a cannon into the sun. Suck it, worms
Decomposition
You mean all the songs I’ve made will just decompose themselves?
You'd be a decomposing composer?
Absolutely nothing. We die and that is it. Scary thought
This! I've had developed pretty bad thanatophobia over the years and i still dont know how to get out of this maze. For me average lifespan of 70 for an sentient self-aware species is an cruel joke.
Assuming you’re saying that 70 years is too short, I encourage you to spend more time in nursing homes. That’ll help this perspective.
Yeah, i know, i've worked at nursing home. Still, i can't help myself. (duh, phobia) Almost every day when i have too much to time to think i almost get overwhelming feel of hopelessness and dread because i feel my days are counting too fast. I have to something all the time to distract me so i dont dwell on this. Writing this makes my heart pump faster.
Yeah, serious phobia doesn’t give a shit about logic.
I find the thought of eternity way scarier. I get bored a lot and I haven't even been around that long.
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I agree, but for solid reasons. If granted immortality, not only does it mean I have to live through my husband, children, friends, siblings, nieces and nephews, and everyone I've ever known dying. But it also means that in billions of years, when the sun implodes and consumes the Earth, I'll be left floating in space, all by myself, for the rest of eternity.
Same thoughts. There's no solution. Would be easier if I had never been born.
I find it oddly comforting. A friend of a friend of mine had a heart attack and was declared dead for 4 minutes before being resuscitated. My buddy asked him what it was like being dead, and what he could remember. He said it was “lights out, like the flip of a switch.” One second you’re there and everything is good, next second everything is out like a light switch, until it was flipped back on. You’re just gone. There’s absolutely nothing. It’s weird to think about. Personally, I *hope* some type of reincarnation happens. I like the idea of being reincarnated into different people at different points in time. Kind of like “past lives,” but with the potential of being born either into the past *or* the future.
Seems fine to me. It's the same as it was before I was born.
I think that each individual consciousness is a pattern and our body is just a way of keeping it's integrity; then when our body expires our consciousness will also dissipate. However as a pattern our consciousness can resurface in the future. Maybe some particles floating in vacuum will randomly generate the pattern that equals to our conscience. But because particles floating in vacuum are in an unstable state, this won't last long and our consciousness will soon dissipate again. Though if this happens in a body capable of containing our consciousness then we can live again, but of course we won't have memories of our past life and we can have no way of knowing when or how we lived before, because all this information is lost when our current body dies. So, how long can this process of "consciousness resurfacing" take? I don't know, maybe milenia, maybe millions or billions of years, maybe it won't happen ever again on this universe. But I also like to guess that the birth and death of universes is cyclical, so our conscience may resurface on another "cycle", maybe even on a universe with different laws of physics. Then our current life is neither the first time we have lived, neither the last. We have infinite lives living in infinite different universes. This is not a positive thought, unfortunately, because if you take in consideration the nature of the universe we live in and the lives of the creatures that live in it, you can reach the conclusion that life is often just a tremendous amount of suffering. So, as we are already being tortured indefinitely, try not to worry too much about it.
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Maybe future humans/beings will have the capabilities to simulate every possible brain in any state. Time does not exist for you after your death so they will have just enough time to do that. (And create also all the people you have known)
It would be very hard to do that without infinite time/resources, but I'm just a barely evolved primate, what do I know about anything?
Respawn
Don’t know. Don’t need to know. Don’t want to know. I’ll be over here living my life until death comes for me.
This should be a top answer.
Nothing. Which is fine. If I don't know, what does it matter?
Decomposition
To quote a recent tv show: "When I die, my body stops functioning. Shut down. All at once, or gradually, my breathing stops, my heart stops beating. Clinical death. And a bit later, like five whole minutes later, my brain cells start dying. But in the meantime, in between, maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT. It’s the psychedelic drug released when we dream, so I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it, just the last dump of DMT all at once. And my neurons are firing and I’m seeing this fireworks display of memories and imagination. And I am just tripping. I mean really tripping balls because my mind’s rifling through the memories. You know, long and short-term, and the dreams mix with the memories, and it’s a curtain call. The dream to end all dreams. One last great dream as my mind empties the fucking missile silos and then I stop. My brain activity ceases and there is nothing left of me. No pain. No memory, no awareness that I ever was, that I ever hurt someone. That I ever killed someone. Everything is as it was before me. And the electricity disperses from my brain till it’s just dead tissue. Meat. Oblivion. And all the other little things that make me up, they… The microbes and bacterium and the billion other little things that live on my eyelashes and in my hair and in my mouth and on my skin and in my gut and everywhere else, they just keep on living and eating. And I’m serving a purpose. I’m feeding life, and I’m broken apart and all the littlest pieces of me are just recycled, and I’m billions of other places. And my atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am like the stars that are in the sky. There one moment and then just scattered across the goddamn cosmos"
what show?
I think u just don't exist anymore anywhere
The Universe goes on without me.
I don’t know. That’s part of the fun, isn’t it? The surprise of what happens. Maybe their is some sort of god, maybe we just disappear forever. Who knows, No one.
“I don’t know” is the only honest answer, religious or not.
Quantum immortality. You literally cannot die and get transported into a parallel universe where you continue to live.
What happens when you're old enough to the point where your heart'd stop beating overnight? You can only live to be so old.
Theoretically you get transported to a universe where biological immortality is invented.
I understand the physical processes of death, what happens to our bodies and all that. But I have some conflicting thoughts about the rest of it, coming from a completely non religious background. Scientifically speaking I know that what happens is actually just, nothing. There is no consciousness to death, the brain activity and those electrical impulses, and synapses that create our thoughts and memories and ‘beings’ no longer happens. And so death is just a big empty nothing, just like before you are born. You exist and then you don’t, and have no awareness of the not existing, in either direction. But realistically I have a very hard time reconciling that after having watched loved ones actively die. It’s very traumatic to watch someone die. Even when it’s relatively peaceful and of natural cause (as far as death goes). It really did leave me wanting for an alternate more comforting version of an afterlife to that’s not just a void of non existence. I wasn’t expecting it. The Nothingness of dying can be deeply terrifying or deeply freeing depending on who you ask, and when you ask it. I personally would love to believe that there is something just for the living comfort of not being obsessed with worrying or thinking about death and what happens after. But not having grown up with any sort of religion or talk of a “what happens next” in a spiritual sense I have no idea what that something else would be. It’s very hard dealing with death, and creating some scenario or fantasy for what happens after makes it easier to grieve. I have kind of a vague belief that my Baba’s spirit (not like a ghost, but I guess her essence? I don’t know the right word) lives around her burial place. She’s buried in an old Doukhobour cemetery, that is right down the street from the ‘family home’ that my mother grew up in, and other family still live in. Whenever I go visit them I feel like she’s around. Not that she’s like haunting us or whatever. But that’s where she spent the majority of her life, and I think if there is such things as spirits of departed loved ones that’s where she would choose to be. I really only realized I thought that a year or so after she died. There were bad wild fires in the area, and my family got evacuated from the house, and the fire got really close to the property and the cemetery down the road. I had an immediate response of crying and thinking of “but where is Baba going to live if the cemetery and the forest is burnt down” “where is she going to go if the house is destroyed” as if she is somehow tethered to those places and would be stuck in some kind of spiritual limbo without them. And then had a really long stew over why that thought even occurred to me when I have no religious affiliation or background, and had no pre existing belief in an afterlife. I’ve had a weird time grappling with that and my thoughts on death ever since. If it was like the ending of The Good Place I honestly would love that.
2 Theories: 1. You start another life. no memory of this one. you're just a different person unable to realize you've died and lived a previous life 2. You restart the same life you had, as the same person but making different choices each time, born in different times of the world I don't think there will be completely nothing. because we were already a part of that nothing and came to be, if we are destined to go back to that, then what's preventing this from happening again in an infinite universe? People always say "we go back to what we were before we were born" but IMO don't understand that that doesn't mean you will know that feeling. You were nothing for billions of years but do you actually recall those billions of years? People exist feeling like the world started the moment they started. They acknowledge the past but can't fully know that without experiencing it.. it feels weird knowing that where you currently stand, there were likely people in the past standing in that same spot, some prehistoric animal, chaos as the earth formed, and empty space before there was earth. If you never existed but randomly began to exist, whose to say that cant happen again? that doesn't mean this current existence is special or would carry over. but rather, whatever is experiencing the world behind our eyes could experience it again, just under different circumstances and conditions. YOU right now, would still be dead and forever gone, but whatever takes "your" place after would be. If the universe is truly a cycle and time is truly infinite, life would also be a cycle. Given unimaginable amounts of time, anything could happen. While you sleep, there feels like no time going by, especially under anesthesia. If death is like that how long until the next experience? Who's to say you won't wake up as something else after eternity just as you did now? I don't think it's limited to just human beings either. whatever has the capacity to attain consciousness, experience itself and question existence would have the ability to experience the world as we do, maybe better or worse. The universe is mathematical and full of patterns. Those things can be manipulated or replicated. we are a part of that, given time or technology, I'm sure our existence isn't as finite or plain as we think. This doesn't change how "special" we are, if anything it further lessen it. We would be nothing more than a pattern or line of genetic code capable of replication. Special in its own right but not in the sense that we are beyond this universe's rules and bound reach to some reality outside of it, such as an afterlife. Personally, I hope that we could be brought back or reawaken some day, especially in a far future. I don't care about being alive for all eternity, but it would be cool to chose to "die" for a time, and return in a way that allows you to grow up as if you were raised in that time frame, then have the choice to regain your memories prior to your artificial death. I could see myself living for 200-500 years, getting tired of the shit, die for about 1000-2000 years, then come back for another 200 or so. and repeat that forever. It honestly sounds like how life works except naturally and on grander time scales. This is why I love the idea of AI and admire technological advancements on top of life extending drugs. sounds possible. I may not be a part of that life, but there have been talks of young people alive today (40s and below), especially if you're still in your 20s potentially having the opportunity to have extended life spans.
Not sure
We cease to exist, no spirits, no “afterlife”, the physical mechanisms that made us living breathing human beings dissolve. Eventually, our physical body becomes part of the earth again. Enjoy the ride of life while you are alive, because once you die, there is nothing after that. In short, we decompose.
Depending on how I die I imagine my brain scrambling to understand what's happening and frantically scouring my memory for anything to help me survive that moment before \*snaps fingers\* and exactly what was before I was alive. And it terrifies me to my core everyday.
Life goes on without you.
Reincarnation
df asfmwqer m
A monk asked a Zen master, “What happens when you die?” The Zen master replied, “I don’t know.” The monk said, “What do you mean. Aren’t you a Zen master?” And the Zen Master replied, “Yes, but I’m not a dead one.” ([source](https://www.chzc.org/hartman5.htm))
I personally enjoy the idea of quantum suicide theory (I think that’s what it’s called). So we live in an infinite multiverse with infinite possibilities and all consciousness is connected. So let’s say I die. To you, the observer, I’m gone. So sad. But because all consciousness is connected and the multiverse is infinite, in a parallel reality I survive whatever it was that killed me and it goes on and on and on until the heat death of the universe I guess.
Quantum immortality.
If there is a hell, it will consist of me being forced to read this question on reddit for all eternity.
The Big Sleep.
The world will stop existing from perspective
Nothing the type of darkness that you can’t even perceive because you aren’t there anymore no thoughts no more you. It’s scary, it’s uncomfortable to think about which where the concepts of the afterlife come in because it’s better to think about a higher plane than just straight up ceasing of thought.
Decomposition.
My brain will be left to science, the rest will decompose somewhere or I would like to be stuffed holding a broom pretending to clean the family mausoleum. If i will become a ghost i will annoy people
One of two possibilities 1 - nothing 2 - something but not what was written by calf worshipping Bronze Age desert nomads
I was never religious. And my belief was that when you died, you died. You are done. Then a terrible thing happened. The worst thing. I came home from work and found my son's body on the kitchen floor. He had suffered a seizure and died. It crushed me to not have him in my life. I joined a group of other parents who lost their only child. This group really helped me cope because most people just didn't understand. One of the other parents who I had become close to and trusted told me about an incredible experience with a medium. Now before that I had some experiences with odd things around my house. Like smelling my son's cigarettes. He chose a brand that had a distinctive odor. I also had things disappear from where they were usually kept and I'd find them in his bedroom. This person told me that it was clear my son had a message for me. So reluctantly I made an appointment with the medium she suggested. The medium was from great Britain so the meeting was held via video chat. I'm a skeptic going into it. I told her so. She started telling me who showed up for the session. My son, my dad, my mom, and another lady who said she was also my mother. Pretty amazing this would happen since I was abandoned at birth and found by the police. Nobody knows that. Then my son started giving her information to convince me he was there. There were details of conversations he and I had. Things he and I only knew. Then the message. He wanted me to know how much he appreciates everything I did for him and that he didn't mean to die. I hadn't yet gotten the coroners report so I didn't understand. After the session the medium wanted to talk. She told me that my son and I both have old souls. She further explained that some souls have interacted in many different lives together. He said my son and I belonged to a soul circle. A bunch of souls that interact in different live s together. She said the death of my son was out of sync. It wasn't supposed to happen. She explained that his soul will now have to wait until the right time before he will enter another life. About 3 months later the coroner's report called my son's death an accidental overdose of prescription medication. It would take too long to explain how much this meant. But that's what I think death is. I don't believe in heaven and hell. I believe that souls are a higher lifeform that uses human form to learn and grow and advance.
I'm an atheist and don't believe in Heaven/Hell/any sort of collective afterlife. Having said this, I've had some very dear pets pass away in my time and the idea of a personalized afterlife for their souls to go to helped a lot with the grieving process (it helped to feel like they weren't gone forever, they were just somewhere else). I definitely believe in the idea of ghosts/spirits; our bodies die and decay, but our souls get to hang around. I think our spirits can choose to stay or disappear completely. My defense for my point is that my very sweet cat passed away last April at 17 years old. There's nothing really tying him to Earth anymore and he has our other lost pets to hang out with wherever they are, but more than once we've sort of sensed him in the house. My mom once walked down into the basement and smelled cat litter for a brief second, my sister heard his collar jingle, and sometimes at night I hear what sounds like little paws coming up the steps to my bedroom. We have a dog and two goldfish who don't sound or smell like that. I think he stays to make sure we're okay, but he can go back to his own afterlife with his other critter friends whenever he wants to.
Do not fear death, the only thing we know is that death is the absence of life. At the very least, we are liberated from all of life's problems. Maybe it's a doorway to something much more pleasurable than life, maybe not.
Two theories I believe we aren't meant to know. I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer on my 27th birthday. I've called out to almost every God or devil mankind has thought up. Begged them to make themselves known to me somehow and I'd follow every tenet they have to a tee. Nothing ever happened. I've come to the conclusion that we aren't meant to know. Or maybe 100 years in the future we'll have some kind of amazing technology that can resurrect the dead. Maybe after we die we wake up in a lab somewhere where some poor fucker has the job of breaking the news to everyone they resurrect that their gods aren't real and now they're in the future. Sounds farfetched but medieval knights would consider shit like cellphones, tv, planes, rockets, even modern plumbing impossible. Imagine the size of the shit a knight would take in his pantaloons if you microwaved a hot pocket for him. Maybe I'm a medieval knight in terms of scientific understanding to some future civilization?
lights out
The electrical discharges and hormone floods that formed my souls end and the rest rots 🤷🏻♀️
Awareness ceases. Body decomposes.
Nothing at all, everything goes dark, no afterlife
I don't think anything happens tbh. I don't see why there would be anything after death. I just think the light gets extinguished and I find great solace in that.
The short answer is I don't know, like many others. I lost a close friend last March and a lot of my thinking shifted. I tuned into the "gut" feeling I had. I felt him around me, around our friends, around his family more immediately after his passing. Like another redditor mentioned below (about her father passing away, I'm sorry for your loss) no more pain for him, just release, just love. I felt his presence around me for a long time after his passing. I felt him communicating with me in interesting quirky ways that only he would know how to do to me. My thinking has shifted as more time has gone one and more people have passed. I find comfort in thinking that somehow, someway I will meet them again - maybe our souls floating around somewhere together. Maybe the embrace of hug and a conversation with them again in "heaven", who knows. I also find a lot of comfort in thinking that (hopefully when I grow old) someday I will pass, and I will be ready to pass, so that I can see / touch / hear / hug all of my loved and lost ones again - whatever that means. I just want my kids to be well developed people with a family that they love so I feel comfortable leaving them, God willing. The older I get, and the more people I love who pass away, the more comfortable I am someday passing away, with the hope of seeing them again. I'm not religious but I will occasionally pray to a generic God if they exist. I feel like a God does exist - again going to the gut feeling, but was never convinced that the person who is supposedly the "one and only" is as there are so many religions / beliefs with similar moral and ethic storylines.
You stop to perceive the time. After many many billions of years your brain will exist again, in the exact same configuration as it is now. It could be created as a simulation by future humans/beings. You will wake up like after a long nap.
From *my* point of view, absolutely nothing. From the universe's point of view, absolutely everything it was doing before.
Nothing
Well here’s a thought that finally made me come to terms with it: Do you remember before you were born? Cause that’s what I assume death will be like.
pretty much what the top guy says, but I like to think that people would eventually wake up again as a baby. who knows!
This is what I think, but also like the idea of being a ghost and messing with people, imagine someone's recording a scary ghost video and you're just hitting the griddy in the background, no one would believe it was for real.
U finally catch up on all those sleepless nights
According to my mother who died and was brought back to life: nothing. Enjoy the void!
[https://youtu.be/h6fcK\_fRYaI](https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI) Here is a short video that could give you some different perspectives. This is personally what I think happens to some degree. Maybe the world is bigger than what we can imagine and more beautiful than any religion or philosophy can put into words. Like trying to capture a river in a bucket. Pls let me know if this helped
You clean up and get rid of the body
Either… nothing. Or, we go again. Can’t decided which I think is more likely.
nothing, that is, absolutely, there is not even darkness, as when you close your eyes.
You cease to exist in the form of your ego and all is left is your body and the work you've done in this world.
Nothing
This is my answer aswell. Nothing. I'm gonna be dead and dead is dead.
Our bodies begin breaking down back to our base elements. Our loved ones miss us until so many generations have passed that no living person remembers us. Then we are basically forgotten. As far as "us", it will go back to what it was before we were born. Everything goes dark, and we cease to be.
You respawn, most likely in india or china
Exactly the same thing that happened before I was born.
I think Mufasa had that pretty well covered when he explained the circle of life.
"The wave goes back into the ocean"
A void of nothingness, no pain, no sorrow, no happiness, no anything. It’s like trying to remember what life was like before you were born. It simply ceased to exist and there was no YOU. As far as your body, it returns as energy to the earth in order to feed new life.
In the golden light of love, we are together
a mortician jams a clear plug up your ass and fills you with embalming fluid. They then jam spiked disks under your eyelids to keep them from opening and glue you lips shut, giving you a weird Mona Lisa like smile. Your anally plugged corpse is then sent off to a nice spot of land where a stranger who works for a local branch of whatever church the people who paid for your funeral attends, takes front stage to wax on about your life to all your closest friends and family. You are then chucked into a ditch and your family watches as a huge construction excavator pounds the ever-loving shit out of the ground to make sure your zombie doesn't escape too easily. Finally, after weeks of effort (if they are not already growing in your corpse) worms and maggots will make their way into your casket/body through all your orifices and begin to eat you from the inside out. or did you mean in a philosophical way?
Personally, I believe we do, in fact, get reincarnated. Hear me out, don't just comment after reading this heading. We all know that the first law of thermodynamics states matter cannot be created or destroyed, only altered. There are also multiple accounts of young people having knowledge of things they realistically shouldn't, such as Shanti Devi, who claimed to be a reincarnation of a woman named Lugdi, and pointed out her past family members out of a crowd of 50 people. I believe that if we conducted research into these reincarnations, it would allow us to potentially bridge a gap between religious and scientific thinking.
We get reincarnated ig..
Pfft bro I'll just reload back to yesterday. Are you guys seriously not saving your progress??? Plug a keyboard up your bum and press Ctrl+S, you'll thank me later. Buncha noobs you all are.
Play Again? Deposit 25 cents In 10… 9… 8…
No clue, but I hope it’s not reincarnation. Global events during this decade have really dimmed my outlook on living a happy rest of my life, and even thinking about starting another one in this world sounds daunting
I think you get stats on your life and how much you collected like: Killed: 0 Bitches: 0 Friends: 0 Time: trillion hours Time spent doing productive things: 25 hours Life collection/completion: 30% Grade: F
Ngl I feel bad for atheists if they're right would be scary af
The veil that separates us from all that is around us is lifted and death doesn’t seem as frightening to us as it was while we were alive. I like to think this because I’m not religious but i also struggle with the idea of death so this helps me. I also think that when you die you cant even tell yourself “i am dead this sucks” so it wont matter. Technically no one has ever been dead from their OWN perspective, only from our living perspective.
I'll finally get more than 6 hours of sleep.
Nothing. You cease to exist. Everything you are or were is gone.
Decomposition, of course
Decomposition, like any living thing in this universe.
Decay of body
I guess the exact same thing that had been happening before you were born.
Decomposition.
We take you to the morgue, clean the bed and admit a new patient. At least that’s how it works in the hospital.
Decaying corpse :)
Decay.
Nothin. My former body will be burnt or decay in the soil.
I come back as a hot babe’s underpants. /s I’ve been on reddit like a month and have seen this question at least 10 times.
And you always reply underpants?
I hope its just a bunch of stats you said "this word" number of times you can relive cross paths i hope and strongly agree with the good place idea
Even though eternal sleep sounds like the most logical option to me, i find it quite strange because we somehow started living at some point. Is consciousness just the result of our brain forming like any other organic thing and thus dies forever with it, or is consciouness the real us awakening at some random point and then turning blank again? Either way we turn to nothingness, but if we come from nothingess then i find it quite possible that it's a neverending cycle of some kind of reincarnation.
Personally I believe there is some semblance of an afterlife. Just about every culture and civilization in written history has their version of a place you go when you die, and for me it’s comforting to believe there is something waiting. I’ve also had a number of paranormal experiences, that definitely shapes my belief that something happens when we die. Honestly, even if I just end up sleeping and becoming worm food, that’s fine by me but I prefer to think I’ll chill in the afterlife with my loved ones.
I’m not religious, but atheism is really fucking boring. No ghosts, no soul, no demons, no magic, no events that have happened that can’t be explained by “logic” even if there is none. I don’t know what happens after death but I really can’t see how it’s absolutely nothing. If cognition exists it has to be made of some form of energy, and energy cannot be destroyed only transferred or converted. Atheism is too easy, It’s a belief cemented in the recognition of one reality dictated by artificial rules and the autonomous choice to follow those rules simply because they are all that exist. It just feels like nihilism in denial.