The question of what happens to us when we die is an age old question that will probably never be solved while alive. We might get to know when we have died, but we have no way of bringing that information back to the living. At least, not that we know of. For all the ghost stories, none seem to involved any spirit/ghost telling us what to expect after death. People through the ages have debated, argued and even fought over this and many theories exists for many different possibilities.
How do you envisage your after life’? Sitting on a cloud, living in some paradise or perhaps in hell and damnation. The imagination can go wild with 100 different ideas, but one thing these ideas have in common is that each one still requires the 5 senses we have in human (physical) form. How else can we perceive the bliss of heaven, paradise or the torment of hell in the way that most of us imagine it without our bodies. Of cause, when we die, we leave our bodies behind. That means our ears, eyes, skin(touch), nose and tongue. We also leave our brains which process our emotions (good and bad), which processes our senses, interprets what we think and makes our choices and defines how we perceive the world around us. We are always told that we can’t take it with us, but how many of us thought this might include our senses, our pleasure and our pain?
We are made up of these senses, thoughts and perceptions. We are the result of our collective thoughts and feelings as we travel through this life. Everything we are, we became through our senses and our brain. This is not to say that our spirit and or soul is not involved, but these, I believe, are still processed via our physical body. At least while we are alive.
Think also, about how we refer to ‘life after death’ or the ‘after life’. Both use the word ‘after’ and ‘life’. ‘After’ would indicates that there is ‘something’ after death. That there is an ‘end’ to life and therefore a beginning to something else. More importantly, we use the word ‘life’. Yet we define life as being organic, physical, grown and reproduced. Something that is alive – not dead. Yet we use this word to describe what happens after death. In short, we use the word ‘life’ to describe death.
So what are we left with when we die? How will we experience our imagined heaven or hell without these senses and body parts? What we tend to do is envisage a spirit, that sees, hears, feels and thinks just like our physical bodies do. Buy why should they? Why have a physical body if our spirit can do all these things? Why become physical? Surly, when we die, we become something completely different. Perhaps, even as some people believe, it’s just pure oblivion after death. Perhaps we become part of the collective and loose our sense of individuality. The point is that when we die, the likelihood of any of these senses is minimal as our senses use physical chemistry to operate. As a spirit, we will not have a retina for photons to strike and cause nerve reactions that are interpreted by the brain as sight. You have to remember that what we see is merely an interpretation of nerve impulses that have been activated by photos, fed down the optical nerve to the image centres of the brain and processed. No one knows what the world or universe actually looks like. If fact, it does not look like anything. Or, for that matter, feel, taste or sound like anything. We only experience our world around us by processing information in a common way which is a function of our brains. Think how differently a bat ‘sees’ the world. A bat has no concept of how we see things and therefore, how the bat perceives the world is completely different to how we do. The same goes for many other animals that see, smell, hear differently to how we do.
There are different reasons why we do imagine our ‘after life’ in a similar way to how we experience life in a physical body. Our ideas of what happens after death might be defined by religions or philosophies that depend on fear of what happens in the afterlife to control people in the current life. How can you project an idea of punishment or reward without using sensations we already know? And if not by religion, then by the mere fact that it’s almost impossible to imagine what happens after death any other way other than, say, oblivion. Much in the same way that we cannot handle the idea of the edge or end of the universe. Our minds cannot conceive of the end of the universe – there must be something on the other side of the universe. So is it the same for the afterlife, How can we perceive anything other than what we already know.
One of the points of this ramble, is that the likelihood of any similar sensations or method of environment perception after we die is very unlikely unless we acquire another body of sorts after death (such as re-incarnation?). In all likelihood, we will have none of our current senses. Perhaps we will have a different set of senses or a different way to process our afterlife environment.
One of the things that have become clear to me is that we have limited time to enjoy our physical senses and while we are alive, we should take full advantage of these sensations. Spend time to enjoy the taste of our food, the colour in the sunsets , the touch of your partners skin, the beautiful sounds around us. Even the unpleasant sensations we experience from time to time are only possible through our physical body and they can remind us just as well that we are physical, real and here right now. Enjoy being alive now because when you are dead, well, who knows.
If nothing else, ponder on what else could be waiting for us in the afterlife. How different could it be or how similar could it be. I guess that the answer to this would be tightly wrapped up in the meaning of existence – but that’s another discussion.
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