Whether there is an afterlife or not, this is the life we are in right now and might as well make the best of it. We ought to live good lives towards ourselves and others, not in anticipation of afterlife rewards or punishments but simply because of plain mutual benefit. In other words, let's try to be happy and spread the feeling around while also caring for the happiness of future humans.
That being said, it is fun to speculate on the possibility of afterlife and these are my thoughts on the subject. I would be concise if I could but it's impossible due to the complexity of the matter. We are dealing with the
nature of consciousness. This is heavy stuff and it's at the very core of what we experience as ''life''.
First of all, I think there is a problem when we objectify the ''soul''. What I mean is that those of us who do believe in afterlife tend to say that ''part of us'' will survive death, that we are more than just a body. But we are at a loss to explain how this ''part of us'' actually functions. What is a soul made of? Is it material? When it comes to this type of belief, you can't blame scientifically inclined people for being skeptical. As far as science understands it, consciousness arises out of brain activity. Once the brain shuts down, so does consciousness and all that comes with it (perceptions, thoughts, feelings, memories).
So the afterlife believers end up believing in a part of us that is either too subtle or complex for science to detect, but nonetheless concrete and real, OR the soul is viewed as something fundamentally
immaterial in which case science cannot detect it because it only deals with concrete objective
material reality which IS detectable. In that case, the world is divided in two,the material and the immaterial, which is a very platonic view of things.
From what I understand, this dual view of reality (material vs. immaterial) has dominated our spiritual culture for a good part of our history. In the middle ages, most people understood this world as being a mere shadow of God's kingdom, a testing ground where our souls were being challenged to become pure and ready for the ''real'' immaterial reality of Heaven... or Hell. Obviously, some people still think like that.
But then, something very different happened with the Enlightenment. Science slowly but surely rose out of mystical and religious beliefs and started viewing the surrounding material world as THE ultimate reality...
In a way, there was a complete reversal. At first, the reality of the soul was viewed as being the ultimate reality, with matter just being a shadow of the immaterial, and then science started viewing the material world as being the ultimate reality with the immaterial being a sub-manifestation of what was
really real (thoughts arise out of brain activity and not the other way around)
This can be summarized as a subject-object duality. Science tries to deal with
objective reality. It deals with things that you can call ''IT", that our senses can perceive or at least that a machine can detect.
The problem with this is that science tends to cast aside the whole subjective dimension of reality, the consciousness part. If I am watching the stars in a beautiful clear night sky and I start crying because I feel overwhelmed by such beauty, the best science can do is describe the brain wave activity that is parallel to my subjective experience. But it can't describe the feeling in scientific terms, because the feeling is not an object... it's a subjective state of affairs.
One of the main problems I have with science is that it usually seems to reduce all subjective experiences to its objective counterpart (brain activity),
as if one was more real than the other. But I think this is a flawed view of reality. The way I understand it,
consciousness is simply the brain viewed from the inside. Consciousness is what it feels like to
be a brain (and the body that comes with it) and this subjective experience of being a brain is as real as the brain itself.
Subjective and objective reality are two sides of the same coin. Reality becomes distorted when you favour one side to the expense of the other. If someone is living through a depression caused by a chemical brain imbalance, it makes sense to treat the depression with medication. But if a depression has as its root complex and deep unresolved emotional issues, then it only makes sense to tackle this by untangling the emotional knots through a therapeutic process which deals with the subjective reality of the spirit. What I'm trying to show with this example is
how both sides (subjective-objective) of reality are equally important and real.
What does this all mean in terms of consciousness and death? It means that consciousness IS the subjective part of reality. Consciousness is reality viewed from the inside while the objective world is reality viewed outside of consciousness.
Subject-Object
Inside-Outside
You can't have one without the other.
Science can't exist without the subjective experience of thinking. But thinking, at least in human terms, cannot happen without a human brain. It's a package deal.
That means that if consciousness survives human death,
then it ceases to be human. Human consciousness functions through the brain and we can't escape that fact. Once the brain and body expire, so does human consciousness.
But the optimist side of this is that once you can view consciousness as simply being the interior dimension of reality (the subjective-inside part of it). Then one can start seeing how consciousness actually is a universal reality. It's everywhere because it's inherent in reality. ''Consciousness'' is the word we chose to describe how this reality manifests itself in human terms, but with a little imagination and an open mind, we can see how consciousness can actually be a spectrum and that it is a reality everywhere, in everything.
A tree
is conscious. There is such a thing as the subjective experience of being a tree. It's just that we can't imagine it because we are not a tree. And one thing is for sure, tree consciousness is profoundly different than human consciousness. But to state that a tree has no subjective experience of being a tree is just plain human arrogance if you ask me. To say that consciousness is exclusive to humans is the spiritual equivalent of thinking that the Earth is at the center of the universe.
I see my own human subjective experience as a drop in an ocean of consciousness. When I die, I will simply dissolve in the bigger picture.
Nothing really ceases to be.
But everything changes.
(Most of this is deeply influenced by Ken Wilber, and American philosopher.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber
