What do you think happens after you die?
This is a question I have pondered so many times throughout my life and my answer has definitely ranged from one extreme to another.
The first belief I ever had about what happens after I die was definitely taught to me by the United Methodist Church I attended as a kid. There, I was told that if I believed enough in Jesus Christ and confessed all my sins to his Father that I would go to Heaven and be able to enter its pearly white gates.
For years I strived to serve Jesus, as it was imparted upon me at this church and in the Bible I read. I also did my best to live this “sin free” life because I wanted that reward of going to a great resting place that would last for eternity. But somewhere along the lines I stopped believing in this and started going in the exact opposite direction. If I were to pinpoint where that most likely started to happen, it was probably when a revival church I had joined told me that I wouldn’t go to Heaven if I continued to live a life of homosexuality.
It was hard for me to believe that all gay men and women were sinners and that God would send every homosexual to some place other than Heaven when they died. That revival church told me it was Hell I would go to if I didn’t repent and stop living my “lifestyle”. But frankly me trying to accept what they told me was putting me there already. That’s most likely why I didn’t think twice when I went to more of a hedonistic way of living for a number of years after that.
Addictions would become the thing that mostly consumed me during those hedonistic years. While they did, I floated to the opposite extreme in what I believed would happen to me after I die. I began to assume that this was the only life I had and that I needed to make the best of it. What that translated into for me was living selfishly more than not. Unfortunately, that only led me to having a lot of anxiety, depression, and other health issues. And in all honestly, all of that only grew worse as I continued to believe there was nothing beyond this life. That’s only because that belief gave me a serious lack of hope and without that quality, which I think is essential for each of us, all I wanted to do was numb myself with addictions. Thankfully the pain of me living this way long enough eventually lead me to my discovery of meditation and it was through meditation that my belief in some type of an afterlife returned, along with renewed hope.
My meditations revealed to me the possibility of reincarnation and having lived multiple lives. I proceeded to read more and more on this subject until I became convinced that there must be something more than just this single blip on the radar of life. In recent years, this feeling has only continued to intensify and nowadays what I believe will happen after I die is a combination of Christian and Buddhist philosophies.
So do I still believe that I’m going to become a pile of bones or ashes in a grave one day? Or do I still believe that I will spend the rest of my life in some eternal place of ecstasy?
The answer is no to both.
What I actually believe now will happen after I die is that my energy (or my soul if you wish) will go to some temporary place of rest where I can reflect upon the lessons I learned, and didn’t learn, in this life. And when that period of reflection is over, I also believe I’ll have the ability to come back and live another life with different conditions, so that I may learn new lessons, or even master any old ones I hadn’t fully grasped yet.
Who knows, maybe I’m way off from what truly happens after I die. Regardless, I’m just glad I still have hope that there’s at least something beyond this life, because without that, I know my life would be quite miserable. Thank God I don’t feel that way anymore…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
Isn’t what you think about the after life taken from the Zen teachings? Not that it matters where it came from, it’s what you believe. Jane and I both believe our souls come back in another life to progress in our life teachings that we either learned or not. I firmly believe I have lived numerous lives have no idea what the next one will be, but I also believe it won’t be the worse of lives. Such as being re encarnated as a bung beetle. lol Talk to you soon
I guess that is very Zen now isn’t it??? Lol
I have been all over the range on this topic, too, Andrew. I have gone through everything from a very Catholic exclusivist version of heaven and hell to a universalist version of it, to a very Gaia-like image of our energies being absorbed into the the world and becoming a part of the life force of it. And then back again (although going never so far back as to agree with the Catholic view, ever again).
I find some joy in reincarnation, because I see so much recycling in the universe. My scientific side says that something of us goes on, somewhere – because I “believe in” the conservation of matter and energy (that neither can be created or destroyed, merely transmuted). I also believe that we are never actually dead to this world until we are forgotten – that even when our names and places are forgotten, the good we do lives on in the lives of those we help, even if we are not recognized by name in them. But my exposure to evangelical Christians has also informed my beliefs – the idea that “we can get so Heaven-minded that we are no Earthly use to anyone.”
I am not nearly so fearful about death as I once was – although now that I have a loving relationship, I have a lot more to “lose” in death than I did when I was single, solitary, celibate, and uncommitted. I love the image of death as “taking my light into the next room.” And I also believe, at some level, in a form of euthanasia – that everything, even humans, have a shelf-life, and that living in misery is far worse than dying. Stephen Hawking proves that one’s life can be limited in some ways, and vastly rich in others – but if I am consigned to be unable to communicate, to live in some sort of vegetative state, or in agony, then just let me go on.
There’s probably a blog post or two on this topic still inside me. Thanks for making me think of it.
Stephen Hawking is a good example! Thanks for your enriching comments and I agree that having a partner, it does make one think more about the afterlife and such.