I'm not posting this to change anyone's mind or debate or to challenge my beliefs, but just wanting to share what I so far am estimating on my search for answers. My personal conclusions are reached personally, and I plan to keep them that way.
It's not a good argument to simply say that life is so strange and amazing that there just has to be something greater. So I'm going to say it differently, more detailed.
Thinking game. Would the universe exist if there is nothing conscious in it, absolutely nothing to perceive it? NO perception at all? Truly think about that.
And life. What exactly is this? A compilation of our physical senses at play? Maybe like quantum mechanics suggests as possible, consciousness observing energy creates material reality.
And what does death make life? If life is a temporary happening in which a part of the universe experiences itself on its level, simply a glimpse of somethingness coming from nothingness and then returning to nothingness, is it really somethingness? A few positive numbers in between two infinite binaries of 0's both before and after it.
I have for so long considered this as true, in fact I occasionally do still use that perception of death, and I've been mostly okay with it. I see it as peaceful, defining peace as the lack of conflict much like darkness is the lack of light, and cold the lack of heat. This isn't to say I don't fear death for other reasons.
But it makes no sense to me how there is a short, temporary awareness of these properties that exist around us. All of this experience, but what for? Just out of the blue? No real purpose behind it, just a side effect of the order of things? And this experience generates a series of questions about this experience, each relative to the experience. But they are inevitable. We watch this film once and then stop thinking about it once, and then there's no "for what", nothing happens after it.
After you watch a movie you probably think about it afterwards, you probably don't just watch it and then forget all about it and move on to something else, right? The same goes for life. I think of life therefore as a series of questions. During life, like during the movie, we are too thinking of it. But movies tend to have resolutions and answers within them, and if they don't they will have some sort of resolution by logic according to fellow viewers pondering the same questions. Life doesn't usually have this, death is sudden and most of the time unexpected. Unless at the last second all of these questions you ever had and never actually had answers, only suppositions, are answered, you just suddenly know everything before you go out and stop experiencing or even thinking in general, so it might as well be as if that last second of omnipresence didn't happen, that life didn't happen. It makes no difference, the experience is long gone and no longer processed by the experiencer.
Without an afterlife, you die with no answers resolved. And if you are to relate life to being a series of questions, then isn't life and death simply many questions unanswered.
I can't prove that life isn't just a natural process, in fact I think it is. I doubt there is any real purpose behind it, other than divine purpose which is pretty much just the way it effects the rest of existence by its existence, which I personally believe is a conscious purpose, but not exactly in the same way as a human-consciousness idea of 'purpose'.
It's just simply not likely to me that there's just a one, quick experience in a vat of un-experienced. Never to be expected before experience, and never to be remembered after experience. To the experiencer, post-experience, the experience is absolutely meaningless. This shouldn't matter, I admit that life doesn't have to have meaning. But this is meaningless on a whole other level. Not only value meaning, but existential meaning. Whether or not the experience happened, to the experiencer, post-experience, there is simply no relevance, no difference. It's indistinguishable because it simply returns to zero.
At least to me, this doesn't feel right. But I'm not saying that it's automatically wrong. Like I said, I still do apply this view sometimes, I still think it's rational in its own way. One example: The question can be reversed; if there is continued experience for the experiencer after death, then what is the point of physical experience? So basically in contrast to "If there's no life after death, what is the point of life?" it is "If there's life after death, what is the point of death?" Which in this case I usually extend the question to "What is death?" I think that both positions are rational: death is the end, and death is transition. But the latter seems more.... sensible. At least from an existential point of view. The former makes more sense from an ontological point of view, an end of an illusory individual person.
So what is experience like post physical death? I'd say it's best described as abstract. Because I believe in a universal soul that we all literally are, as well as all existence as one entity, aside from the illusion of separation, I think it's safe and perhaps this view makes a person really more comfortable with death, to consider death as disillusionment, a return to oneness.
I don't believe it is like a place, and I wouldn't say it is exactly a state of being, but instead it is being itself. The concept-self is removed from the world physically but remains abstractly. The consciousness and thoughts no longer exist, but there is a small splinter of self remaining, the true, deepest self. Which, to me, is synonymous with pure purity, or the universal consciousness I like to call Qi. So the experience post-life would be pureness in the best way of describing it.
Hope this makes sense.
It's not a good argument to simply say that life is so strange and amazing that there just has to be something greater. So I'm going to say it differently, more detailed.
Thinking game. Would the universe exist if there is nothing conscious in it, absolutely nothing to perceive it? NO perception at all? Truly think about that.
And life. What exactly is this? A compilation of our physical senses at play? Maybe like quantum mechanics suggests as possible, consciousness observing energy creates material reality.
And what does death make life? If life is a temporary happening in which a part of the universe experiences itself on its level, simply a glimpse of somethingness coming from nothingness and then returning to nothingness, is it really somethingness? A few positive numbers in between two infinite binaries of 0's both before and after it.
I have for so long considered this as true, in fact I occasionally do still use that perception of death, and I've been mostly okay with it. I see it as peaceful, defining peace as the lack of conflict much like darkness is the lack of light, and cold the lack of heat. This isn't to say I don't fear death for other reasons.
But it makes no sense to me how there is a short, temporary awareness of these properties that exist around us. All of this experience, but what for? Just out of the blue? No real purpose behind it, just a side effect of the order of things? And this experience generates a series of questions about this experience, each relative to the experience. But they are inevitable. We watch this film once and then stop thinking about it once, and then there's no "for what", nothing happens after it.
After you watch a movie you probably think about it afterwards, you probably don't just watch it and then forget all about it and move on to something else, right? The same goes for life. I think of life therefore as a series of questions. During life, like during the movie, we are too thinking of it. But movies tend to have resolutions and answers within them, and if they don't they will have some sort of resolution by logic according to fellow viewers pondering the same questions. Life doesn't usually have this, death is sudden and most of the time unexpected. Unless at the last second all of these questions you ever had and never actually had answers, only suppositions, are answered, you just suddenly know everything before you go out and stop experiencing or even thinking in general, so it might as well be as if that last second of omnipresence didn't happen, that life didn't happen. It makes no difference, the experience is long gone and no longer processed by the experiencer.
Without an afterlife, you die with no answers resolved. And if you are to relate life to being a series of questions, then isn't life and death simply many questions unanswered.
I can't prove that life isn't just a natural process, in fact I think it is. I doubt there is any real purpose behind it, other than divine purpose which is pretty much just the way it effects the rest of existence by its existence, which I personally believe is a conscious purpose, but not exactly in the same way as a human-consciousness idea of 'purpose'.
It's just simply not likely to me that there's just a one, quick experience in a vat of un-experienced. Never to be expected before experience, and never to be remembered after experience. To the experiencer, post-experience, the experience is absolutely meaningless. This shouldn't matter, I admit that life doesn't have to have meaning. But this is meaningless on a whole other level. Not only value meaning, but existential meaning. Whether or not the experience happened, to the experiencer, post-experience, there is simply no relevance, no difference. It's indistinguishable because it simply returns to zero.
At least to me, this doesn't feel right. But I'm not saying that it's automatically wrong. Like I said, I still do apply this view sometimes, I still think it's rational in its own way. One example: The question can be reversed; if there is continued experience for the experiencer after death, then what is the point of physical experience? So basically in contrast to "If there's no life after death, what is the point of life?" it is "If there's life after death, what is the point of death?" Which in this case I usually extend the question to "What is death?" I think that both positions are rational: death is the end, and death is transition. But the latter seems more.... sensible. At least from an existential point of view. The former makes more sense from an ontological point of view, an end of an illusory individual person.
So what is experience like post physical death? I'd say it's best described as abstract. Because I believe in a universal soul that we all literally are, as well as all existence as one entity, aside from the illusion of separation, I think it's safe and perhaps this view makes a person really more comfortable with death, to consider death as disillusionment, a return to oneness.
I don't believe it is like a place, and I wouldn't say it is exactly a state of being, but instead it is being itself. The concept-self is removed from the world physically but remains abstractly. The consciousness and thoughts no longer exist, but there is a small splinter of self remaining, the true, deepest self. Which, to me, is synonymous with pure purity, or the universal consciousness I like to call Qi. So the experience post-life would be pureness in the best way of describing it.
Hope this makes sense.
