Afterlife theories

Restful sleep you never wake up from.

While I don't think there's anything scientifically to suggest that there is an afterlife, I have had a few encounters with things that suggest that something is out there even if it doesn't conform to expectations.

If there is an afterlife, I think the best portrayal of it has been in the works of David Lynch - something so different from our zone of comprehension as to be inexplicable during this life.

Lewis Carroll once compared his thoughts on the afterlife as being similar to the widening in scope that we experience after being born. That's a nice, hopeful take on the possibility.

There's too much evidence that it's not a matter of you you're dead, you're dead and that's it forever.

We’re released from this heavy, dense slow-motion world of few colors and gravity and hurled into a swirling chaos of light and color and shape that moves ceaselessly at a pace. Absolute explosion of sensory information. This is your vacation. You’ll miss it when it’s over and you realize how blissfully simple this world is.

Cessation of existence of existence and consciousness.

I've always had the thought that the afterlife is what you want it to be. You're surrounded by the people, animals, foods, entertainments, clothes, etc. that you love and anything can happen.

Pass the DMT, R4.

I try not to think about it. Probably nothing.

I like to believe that, somewhat like OP said, we get a glimpse of omniscience and we finally have all our questions answered. I’ll find out who killed JonBenet and I’ll get to apologize for all the wrong I’ve done, and there will be some sort of resolution. I don’t want to live on; I just want to KNOW.

R7 DMT is thought to be secreted by the pineal gland into the brain during the dying process...a flash of wonder.

So far the science says that when you heart stops, other parts of your body take longer to die. You brain lacking oxygen starts firing off neurons triggering flashes of color and memories locked in there by chemical nature of the memory. That's why people who have died and come back think there is an afterlife or that they have similar experiences of a tunnel to light. But it really just a process of your brain sparking out. So far that is.

I died. I rose about 3 feet above my body. My first thought was “I’m still me.” It’s really strange to be “me” and not in a body. It was a different me. The essence. All of the emotional baggage was gone. I could think very clearly. I could see without eyes and hear without ears.

I realized that this world is very heavy. The air is heavy, the clouds are heavy, everything is heavy. There is no weight where I was.

I actually didn’t care what happened to my body. You could have thrown it in a dumpster behind an Italian restaurant.

I knew that I could probably think myself somewhere. I didn’t move. I thought about being dead and got alarmed (cause I have a family) and then slammed back into my body.

No light and no tunnel.

[quote] There's too much evidence that it's not a matter of you you're dead, you're dead and that's it forever.

Link(s) please.

Sometimes when I get stoned I think about things like this. I like to think that your soul goes on to another life, and those of whom we are deeply connected with in this life, we may be connected with in past and future lives.

I think there’s more than just this.

The journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it: white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

The afterlife experience is probably much like the before life experience. If you enjoyed your experience before you were born, you'll probably find the afterlife similarly agreeable.

The mind is what the brain does. When the tissues die, the thought process and personality perish with it.

Don't want to believe it? Understandable - but think about the people who've become totally different persons as a result of a major injury to their brain. Who are no longer remotely like the persons they once were. Same thing can happen with major chemical changes. Take certain drugs, and while you're on them, you undergo significant personality changes.

When the change is permanent, what happened to the old 'you'? That person no longer exists. If you can lose yourself through injury or drugs, it's wildly optimistic to think it can survive death.

This thread comes up recurrently on DL, and it seems that 90% of the posters here are hardline atheists who love to remind us all that "there's nothing after this, you're gonna die and that's it!!!!!!!!" They might be correct, but I frankly think most of these people were bruised by religion as children and as a result equate it with any sort of spiritual thinking.

I am ultimately an agnostic, but I believe that denouncing the possibility that something happens to us upon death beyond human comprehension is feeble-minded. Death is the ultimate unknowable, the one mystery that has plagued humankind as long as we've been here. Sure, we could simply go out like candles, or something else supernatural could happen, but I don't know how anyone can be 100% sure of either possibility.

The main point of atheism should be that no one knows the truth about the existence of a supreme being or an afterlife, including the atheist. The evidence is lacking for either, but that in and of itself is not proof of anything. Call out the religious when they act like they have the answers, but don't claim that you, either.

R18 I agree with you. This is why I abhor the imperious brand of atheism that so many people subscribe to, and find most of these people to be just as insufferable as religious zealots.

We’re taught in this here and now to be 100 percent materialist. I find that pretty sad. It’s the effect of scientific study, but many scientists don’t limit their thinking purely to the physical, material world.

I write R4, and it was indeed inspired by an ayahuasca experience. I don’t expect anyone to understand or buy into the notion. I offer it though as an alternative to our options to today, which are “death is like the end of the Sopranos” or else “death is eternity in flames or else eternity in dewy clouds while angels pluck on harps forever and ever.”

Scientists right now at Johns Hopkins are studying consciousness via psychedelics. Beyond the “what is consciousness?” question, there’s also the question of what creates it. Is the brain a generator of our worlds, or is the brain a machine that processes, filters and tunes external stimuli like an antenna? Common understanding for a long time has been that the brain IS consciousness and that brain death is the end of being for all of us. Studying psychotropic substances, beginning with LSD and then progressing to MAOIs and SSRIs/antidepressants/antianxiolytics/antipsychotics, and then ayahuasca/psilocybin/iboga/marijuana/MDMA etc. has led to the discovery that some of the “hallucinations” perceived while on psychedelics are not imagined, but rather the effect of the psychedelics is to open the gates in neurotransmitters that usually filter out sensory (and other?) information flying around in the world and allow in more information—so the greater numbers of colors, movements, etc., are not necessarily “hallucinated,” but rather the versions that we see or otherwise detect are reduced to sensory inputs we can process and sort easily. In other words, we live in a world full of zillions of kinds of information that our brains *filter out* so that we can focus on our lives.

As a metaphor, you can’t watch all broadcast TV channels at one time. The visuals and the sounds would be overwhelming and it would have no meaning. And so your TV has an antenna that lets your receive all the information in the airwaves, and tuning it allows you to filter out all but one channel. In addition to serving as a sophisticated CPU for our bodies, the brain may also act like that kind of antenna/channel dial.

And when the brain breaks down but our energy remains, it is quite possible that our consciousness exists like the driver of a broken down car. It may exit the car and simply continue on. BUT without the antenna receiver and channel tuner, getting out of the car may be entering into a world that’s both immensely lighter/immaterial and also saturated in sensory information that our brains actually limit us from even imagining so that we can exist in this world.

These notions of mine are a combination of personal experience through ayahuasca and what I’ve read about burgeoning research into consciousness. I wouldn’t ever try to convince anyone that they should believe it. I do ask people to open their minds and consider that death for our consciousness may be the opposite of death and decay of our bodies, and it may reveal to us that in some ways, this life in this place was blissfully, comfortably peaceful, quiet, slow moving, reflective, and essentially a vacation from the hyperspeed reality that we’re bound to return to once the vacation is over.

I'm not particularly religious, but I am somewhat spiritual in a haphazard way. By that I mean that I think it's arrogant of humans to state unequivocally that what we can see/feel in the concrete world is all that's real. I'm not sure what happens after we die, but I do know that this world/universe is beyond the understanding of the human mind.

Just look at the evolving theories on multi-universes, to cite one example.

That said, I don't judge people on what they believe in or don't believe in, as long as they don't try to foist their beliefs on me or weaponize them against my lifestyle.

I wish I believed differently, but I think it's just an end. No magic, no lights, no sensory overload, you "fall asleep" and that's it - everything shuts down, and there is no more. All that's "left" of you is whatever your friends, family think of you until they quit thinking of you.

Theory: You’ll find out eventually what happens after this version of life. Don’t worry about it because it will happen in time and you have zero power to make it into what you want it to be, and you most likely have far too limited an imagination to conjure what it most likely will be.

My guess—which could be totally wrong, which I’m fine with—is that it won’t be anything at all like this world, and that is one reason why it’s beyond our imagination.

And one thing I absolutely believe: the mystery of it is a gift to us in the form of imagination. It fuels our dreams and our fears, and the unknown has been our motivation for coloring this world with creative and destructive belief systems, behaviors, works of art and so much more. If you think about how much of what is important to our lives is defined by mortality (nearly everything), then that’s a good opportunity to be grateful for the mystery of it and for me anyway it’s great motivation to reinvest in my imagination. We can think of absolutely anything at all, boundlessly, and yet we are in this restrictive culture now that tells us we shouldn’t. That’s the only thing about life that I find depressing: the opportunity to imagine and fantasize and dream has been deemed a waste of time, when I suspect it should be viewed as one of life’s greatest gifts.

R22 I agree in suspecting “no magic” there—because I think real magic here is essentially hacking into what’s “over there.” And I do believe it can be done.

The afterlife exists because R14 is JRR Tolkien posting from beyond the grave. Hello, sir! I've always wanted to meet you.

I so much wish I could spend the rest of my life talking to you about, well, everything, R20.

What happens when you die?

There is no freakin magic afterlife, when you die it's no different than what it was like before you were born.

Deep down everyone knows this, but it makes people feel better to believe nice sounding stories.

Love materialist know it alls. They’re the mirror image of religious extremist know it alls.

How is it you can think of someone far away and they end up calling yo Someone you haven't talked to in years?

If the brain was just tissue who is it able to communicate with people like that? You know what I mean. We've all had those weird coincidences.

I wouldn't believe that humans are made of stardust but it's scientifically true. Everything is.

I truly believe that if you didn't learn to be a decent human being, that you have to come back and try again. I think you come back as the person that will help you learn those lessons.

For example, I believe Trump will come back as the poorest refuge, fleeing for his life.

I mean, there has to be some resolution for those on earth today who have zero tolerance for people who aren't of their perceived social, financial, and genetic equal.

My theory: somebody owes me an apology. And when I say somebody I mean a lot of the western world and everybody on this board.

I don't think there's anything. It just stops. You may not even know it stops. Pretty few of us die within moments of a heart attack on a beautiful spring day in a meadow. Most of us are probably comatose or delirious or semi conscious at the end anyway.

I am pretty sure I would die of boredom, again, if eternity is one long church service.

If I am wrong, I figure God's a big enough man to give me pass.

I loosely believe in reincarnation and the whole we keep coming back til we learn our lessons and get it right.

I loosely believe in what Dolores Cannon has to say on YT.

R30 People have created a reasoning that explains away coincidences like that. Generally it goes like this: Cousin Sam blips in and out of your thoughts semi-regularly—say, 5,000 times over 10 years. One of those times, he calls you within 24 hours and you then believe there was a psychic connection.

This explanation is given too for people who see birthdays in digital clocks, etc.; psychologists say that we glance at clocks constantly and our minds filter it out until we see a number that has meaning to us, and then we think that every time we look at a clock, we see that number, when in reality we look at clocks every few minutes but don’t notice times that have no relevance.

The explanation makes logical sense, but it doesn’t work all the time in my experience.

Specifically, two unforgettable experiences involving my father’s mother.

1. When I was a child, after I was tucked in, around 9:00, I went downstairs and told my parents I wanted to talk to Grandma. They told me to go to bed. I insisted. Eventually they relented, found her number in the phone book, gave it to me, and I went to dial but there was no dial tone. I pushed a button, and my grandmother said my name and asked if I was there. She had called me because she was thinking of me—at 9:00 pm—and said she knew it was me dialing her. What’s especially odd is that this was not a matter of frequency. She lived in another state. I had met her only twice in my lifetime at that point and we only spoke on the phone on holidays and birthdays.

2. When I was in college and visiting my parents, I asked my dad how his mother was. He said he needed to call her because they hadn’t spoken in a long time. I hate talking on the phone and I could literally count on two hands the occasions in my lifetime when I was inclined to pick up the phone just to call someone. Anyway, I said I would call because it would be nice to talk to her. This time, my dad had her number memorized and I walked to the phone and picked up the receiver; he gave me the number, I pushed a couple of numbers and my grandma said my voice. Again, no dial tone. I picked up the phone just when she called, before the phone rang. She said she had been thinking about me and figured it was I who answered the phone—even though I was in college and rarely at my parents’ house.

Sometimes you have to twist logic into knots to create a reason-based explanation. Sometimes when that happens it’s OK to just accept that strange phenomena do happen in life.

Remember the what it was like for you a hundred years ago? That's what it will be like after you die.

Personally, I'm terrified of the idea of an afterlife, regardless of what it is. I'm glad that death is probably just a finite oblivion, a sleep that you don't wake up from. I want that nothingness after death, I don't want to have to continue after dying. Just let me rest, let it all end.

the forever of death scares me...I try to make the most of my life now

R17, I liked your comment a lot. Death is unknowable, and so is birth. How do we get here? Why and how does a cluster of cells grow to be such a complex being? Where does that come from? It’s a great mystery and I hope to understand it when I die. I’m the one who believes I’ll get an answer then.

R23, thank you for those thoughts. I hadn't thought about life that way.

There’s a Rumi poem that I believe is insightful, and which is substantiated by my ayahuasca experiences.

In sum, it says that each person is like a cup of water scooped out of the ocean. We can be individually described as a whole cup, a physical unit that exists on its own outside of the ocean and yet made of nothing other than the ocean. When we die, we are poured back into the ocean and exist as the ocean itself. We are never anything but its elements, we exist for a time apart from it as an individual expression and experience, and then we re-integrate and dissolve into the greater source. We’ll never necessarily “come back” as the same expression in a different package (strict reincarnation), but since there is only ever once source from which all individuals derive, when we return to the source we are reintegrated with ourselves, which is to say that we are reconnected with every individual. We are always being expressed in different individual manifestations.

This hypothesis/metaphor comports totally with the common “breakthrough” psychedelic experience of wholeness and oneness/interconnectedness, when people realize that their egos are artificial constructs, and that all people, all creatures and all things are alive and part of one connected living being.

Psychedelics are being used for end-of-life therapy because the phenomenal experience of oneness and transcendence of the life/death dichotomy is pretty much a rule among most people who take large doses of a psychedelic, and most of us who experience this phenomenon are comfortable reporting that the experience of that epiphany is “more real than reality.” It frames this life and this world in such a way that feels illusory or artificially limited.

We don’t have great language or paradigms of reality to explain what we haven’t been taught, but it may well be that life and death are not what they seem to us to be. There’s another philosophy that “my” life and “your” life and all of time are all simultaneous, alternate expressions of one consciousness. It’s a very difficult concept to contend with and even more difficult not to laugh off given the seemingly obvious and undeniable “we live and then we die” timeline we experience. But it may be that all of it is one blip, and in order to make sense of that blip, our brains break down all the information into a timeline, colors, textures, individuals and various classes of things so that we can process all the information. And then it pops like a bubble and we’re processing a whole different experience. And it also doesn’t really pop like a bubble because all of it is simultaneous, but we have to add linear time—this happens and then that happens—in order to process it all.

I'm trying my best not to think about it. It's really scary. Because I'm sure there's nothing after our death. Big and aloof nothing. People've been always trying to submit this existential fear - with their beliefs, but, unfortunately.

But I find some religious statement about the paradise very accurate. Like a total rest. It's really a rest.

Since I lost my mom, my best friend, two years ago, I am about 50 percent less attached to life. It’s really fascinating. I am much less anxious. The stakes for everything seem so much lower. My dad is getting older, I don’t have that many human connections in this world, I own more than I want, traveling isn’t that exciting for me any longer. I am only 41, but I feel like by the time I’m 70 I will be ready to move on. I don’t think that’s sad at all. It’s just...I did the thing and now I am ready to go. Thank you and have a good night.

R35 That's great but this person was someone I literally had not spoken to in years. Years. What a coincidence that they contacted me the same vicinity I started thinking about them. Years, really? After years of not speaking.

All I know is what I hope it will be. I nor anyone else knows what it will be. These resuscitation stories we've heard for years from people claiming they experienced the afterlife are simply not convincing to me.

The one thing I do believe strongly is that the electrical force that keeps our bodies alive has no source of energy. We don't have to plug ourselves into a socket every once in a while to recharge the batteries. So that electrical current must have a power source all its own. I believe when the body dies that electrical current does continue. What happens to it or where it goes, I just don't know.

Energy doesn't just disappear, so I think our energy just dissipates into the universe. No consciousness. Just peace.

I've never believed in it, but something odd happened to me in December. I suddenly thought of someone who gave me a big public hug in high school. So I googled him, never having thought of him in decades, and found he had died exactly ten years ago on the very day that I thought of him for the first time in decades. Coincidence? Yes, but if it wasn't coincidence, it would have had to be some force external to me which brought him to mind since I knew nothing about his death and neither did anyone else I knew.

R43 I understand how you feel. I'd say start experimenting with hallucinogens. Even looking at sick people in hospital doesn't get me jazzed up to appreciate life. I'd gladly give them my health and peace out if they would take it. I hope that reincarnation thing isn't real. *Get it right." Sounds like hell or something the devil would make up. *Now go to earth and keep having these awful experiences and learn to live with it and act like a decent human being." I don't know about that one.

Maybe the afterlife is so good this life doesn't even matter. All we have to do is be and life never really ends. There's a true home somewhere else and we're here for the experience and we're fine just the way we are.

My uncle ran a funeral home. He was a super-religious southern baptist with all its trappings, but even though this sort of thing is frowned upon, he always insisted that he sometimes saw orbs of bright light rise out of dead bodies and zoom away. The other baptists in the family consider that sort of thing to be blasphemous, or else they explain it as “the soul rising to the heavens,” but in these cases he didn’t ascribe that sort of meaning to him: he was just insistent and matter of fact that it’s a physical thing that happens when people die—some kind of light/electricity physically leaves the body and takes off as some kind of intact ball of light.

No matter what you believe it should give you comfort and more joy in the now. You know, while you are still alive. Fear of the future (of dying and what comes afterwards?) just creates a frightening future.

I believe that the cycle of life is a tiny part of my higher self exploring this realm. I am feeding it with data streams, during the state of sleeping, of my exploration, discoveries, experiences, and my focus on hopes and desires. And then joining the bigger part of me again.

R48 I've seen something similar.

^R49 I mean.

[quote] some kind of light/electricity physically leaves the body and takes off as some kind of intact ball of light.

I would think if that actually happens it would occur long before the body got to the funeral home, but rather would happen right at the time of death. Why would a body's electrical energy stay in a dead corpse for the time it would take a funeral home to pick up a deceased person?

The answer is obvious. Think of the year that you were born. Now subtract a year. Where were you? That is where you return.

Actually R35, your grandmother had caller ID--she was one of the beta testers

Theresa Cheung (who is actually a blonde British woman) has written many books about the afterlife

One thing you can be sure of. Anyone who makes money off writing about the afterlife is a colossal fraud.

R57 Or thoughtful, or imaginative. You can write about the afterlife as “this is definitively what it is” or as “here’s how to get into heaven, according to me”—in which cases I would agree with you—or else you could write “this is my experience” or “what if it’s this” or “research suggests it could be this,” etc., which all would be thoughtful discourse, not fraud.

Nope, IMO once someone starts making money off their opinions or their experiences you can bet they've exaggerated a lot of it.

R11, I've died a couple of times. The first time was similar to what you're describing. I floated up near the ceiling and saw my teenage body flopped on a sofa. It seriously looked for a moment like a rubber doll or something. Then I was back in my body, moaning.

The second time there wasn't exactly a tunnel, but I can understand how people describe it that way. I (my awareness, consciousness) was zooming toward a light in the far distance, and the darkness, which also had a lot of tiny lights in it, was passing by me so rapidly I can see how some people would describe it as black walls of a tunnel with a big light at the end and tiny lights making streaks along those walls.

I didn't get to the light, I was pulled back into my body, a much rougher experience than the first time. That time took longer for me to adjust back to being in a physical body, which had some problems from the situation that caused me to die in the first place.

Since then I've met many people who whose experiences went further and are much more detailed than mine. Some of them are very similar to each other, and some are very different.

I don't know what happened, but I have no fear of death, whatsoever. Even though I do have a healthy attitude about wanting to live as long as possible and make life as meaningful as possible, I just have no fear of death. I can't describe what I think happens, because I've known so many people whose experiences didn't align with each other. I just feel completely confident that death is something like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. It's a transition to something else and whatever it is will be good.

[quote]Think of the year that you were born. Now subtract a year. Where were you? That is where you return.

Look forward with interest to returning to my father's scrotum.

I don't think that's a good enough explanation, R10.

If it's just the brain hallucinating because of oxygen deprivation, why do those near-death survivors describe the same or similar things? They don't know one another. They haven't conspired to make their stories match.

People who have come back invariably talk about being disinterested in the body they've just left. They describe entering the tunnel with the bright light at the end. The ones who reach the light say they see their dead relatives waiting. They say they no longer fear death (like R60) and are more at peace with themselves. I've read some recounting how mad they were when they realized they were back in their mortal bodies. They were not pleased to have survived.

If they were all hallucinating, they should be seeing random and different things. Like people tripping on LSD and other psychedelics, they should be describing anything from giant insects, flying monkeys, talking ketchup bottles, whatever.

A brilliant lucid thoughtful post r20

“I (my awareness, consciousness) was zooming toward a light in the far distance, and the darkness, which also had a lot of tiny lights in it, was passing by me so rapidly I can see how some people would describe it as black walls of a tunnel with a big light at the end and tiny lights making streaks along those walls.“

I had a very similar experience during one of my ayahuasca trips. At some point, it felt like gravitation was getting stronger and stronger to the point of being crushing and it was very, very difficult to breathe. After a while when I thought, oh my God, maybe I am about to suffocate from this drug, it was if my body was a shell and cracked open. “I” launched “up and out” to...somewhere. From a point of feeling like I was being crushed and couldn’t breathe, suddenly there was zero resistance and I was being propelled forward and I wasn’t breathing at all—I was just there, entirely unencumbered. There was a blinding light off in the distance and I was heading toward it, but I didn’t have the feeling that it was my destination. Just being illuminated by it/seeing and feeling it in my presence was the purest ecstasy I have ever felt. If I tried to describe the feeling, it would certainly sound just like a sentimental “the tunnel of light” story. Anyway, I was out there for a long time, long enough to become accustomed to “swimming” among the shimmering silvery lights all around me in a black expanse. It was an utterly tremendous, uplifting, and honestly worldview altering experience. Other things happened after that, including at some point the realization that I was in a womb, warm and full of love but becoming constricted and pushing to make more room.

Objectively, obviously, it was a drug trip informed by DMT. DMT is made in the human brain for unknown reasons in tiny trace amounts and some scientists believe that it’s released during death, and some believe that spontaneous emission of it may be responsible for what people have historically reported as religious experiences, ecstatic experiences and even alien abduction experiences. In my case, I know exactly what the trigger was and I know I was under the influence of a mind-altering substance. And that does not take away the memory of having physically launched out of my body and gone elsewhere in another form. And more notably, I’ve integrated these and other experiences into my day to day life that has permanently altered my mood and my outlook and my feeling of gratitude for the better. The end effect is that it has made me settle on “it doesn’t matter if it’s a drug or a fantasy or an alternate reality.” It’s a memory of an experience that changed me for the better and restored a joy of life and a sense of childlike wonder. How can that be bad?

I find wicked that there's a chemical extinction in your brain that makes you feel like there's an afterlife even if there's not (floating over your dead body, meeting only dead people and not living ones, the tunnel, the light, etc.). Is that a hint for the livings that there might be something beyond or is just gratuitous? My only certitude is that there is no more pain, so it's always a win!

True R65. But if there is no afterlife there will be no joy in experiencing no pain for those who've suffered in life. I could only consider it a win if I'll be able to experience it after I die.

I'm firmly convinced that there's an afterlife. I have reasons for believing this which are related to many, many experiences I've had since I was a very young child. I'm not going to go into them here; I'll just say that they were startling and dramatic. I'm not trying to convince anyone.

[quote]r14 The grey rain curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it: white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

And there’s all the cupcakes you want!

And all the donuts!

[quote]R18 The main point of atheism should be that no one knows the truth about the existence of a supreme being or an afterlife, including the atheist.

No, dear. That is called agnosticism.

[quote]R18 The main point of atheism should be that no one knows the truth about the existence of a supreme being or an afterlife, including the atheist.

No, dear. That is called agnosticism.

Maybe you come to in the middle of a gang bang and realize that you zoned out because of the sensory overload. You wonder if you’ve died and gone to heaven. Or hell. Or heaven. Or both. And you can’t take it anymore...and yet you crave it all the more...

J'adore the poster whose first question, when faced with the infinite knowledge of the afterlife, will be "Who Killed JonBenet?"

My mom always said, “You would argue with God!”

And I always told her, yes, I would, if God couldn’t give me satisfying explanations.

This Taurus is stubbornly awaiting the debate of a lifetime.

I, like many, "died" in a ambulance. 3 minutes. That's long btw.

I was paddled and recovered.

There was no light or dead grandma.

When you're done, you're done.

My beloved pets who pre-deceased me will greet me at Rainbow Bridge.

^^ If my dogs aren't on the other side I ain't goin'

Im still waiting ng for my nasty narcissistic mother to contact me from the dead...if she cant do it, no one can

I think the afterlife is real.

If the brain is producing all the hallucinations-why? What evolutionary advantage is that? So people could come back and then be like, no I want to return to that wonderful place and kill themselves to get back there? It wouldn't propogate DNA, which is the point of survival.

It's not a release any other time. What about the conversations reported in other parts of the building? Does the chemical release give extra sensory hearing as well?

I'm sorry, atheists. I'm going with the people who have been profoundly changed and actually have died. You haven't been though it, you haven't died and come back. Your opinion is like describing a foreign country without actually having been there. I'm listening to the people who went there.

Answers would be nice but I doubt if we get any. I am afraid we go on, probably into reincarnation. It sounds really scary.

Why has no one asked MY opinion?

If Shirley is there, that's how you know you're in hell.

If Ted Danson is there you're in the Good Place.

if you're curious, read about DMT and hallucinogen experiences. People with intense hallucinogen experiences (high dose, not the tiny doses some use as an anti-depressant) seem to have an understanding of what death is like. they give hallucinogens to lots of people who are dying and it brings them great peace about moving on.

I had an experience in the OR. I was floating up and I heard the most beautiful music ever. I felt happy and peaceful when suddenly it stopped and I woke up to find the medical staff were shaking and slapping me. They said I scared them and by the looks on their faces, they weren't lying.

You get recycled in the holographic universe.

^ Like Princess Leia?

Cooooool!

I saw this story with my family on 20/20 or some TV newsmagazine like that a long time ago...a patient in a hospital clinically died. When they were revived, they said they had left their body and floated up to the ceiling and saw a sign on top of a high cabinet that said “The Popsicles are in bloom”—total nonsense. Except it wasn’t. Doctors who were intrigued by reports about out of body experiences put the sign up on top of the cabinet where no eyes would ever see it except by someone at ceiling height.

By the way, my mom, who died two years ago (she knew she was going to; she told me in the hospital, “I’m not getting out of here”) had an out of body experience when she was around 25. It wasn’t a near-death experience. She was lying in bed and then suddenly she was above herself. She saw herself and my dad lying in the bed and she “floated” to an upper corner of the room “like I was a flying eyeball, just looking around. It was kind of cool. And then I got back in my body because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to.” She woke up my dad and told him immediately and neither of them ever doubted it. (No, not drug induced.)

A book I read insisted there is another dimeision that we go into after death and it is like a school and people are disappointed, NO JESUS!

If you haven’t sinned all that much, you go to a deluxe apartment in the sky.

We all go to the Disco Place.

[quote]If you haven’t sinned all that much, you go to a deluxe apartment in the sky.

At least it got me out of the Cabrini Green.

R87 this is a commonly reported experience people have when they clinically die and are revived; there have been numerous cases of it. I remember Unsolved Mysteries profiled a man back in the '90s who had been struck by lightning, and was pronounced dead at the hospital. He awoke in the morgue, and was able to vividly recall specific details of what happened in the hospital room when he was pronounced dead—he remembered precisely what the doctors were telling his family, and where everyone was standing in the room. When he recounted it, he claimed he witnessed the entire thing from a bird's eye view, as though he were levitating above the room.

We are made up of the dust of stars, and to that we return. I think that's rather beautiful, and it helps me with my (very real) fear.

Well, whatever gets you through the night - - wishful thinking, or otherwise.

Thankfully I find life interesting enough without needing to invent some cosmic, mystical adventure to give it all meaning when it’s over.

I hope and wish there is something after because I want to see and be near my deceased family (and beloved pets). There would be no point to this "life" or existing in a physical sense otherwise. Some science has established that there could many incarnations of you living in any number parallel universes simultaneously. This consciousness we experience is only three dimensional, but it has been established that there are other dimensions that we cannot detect, like subatomic particles. They(or it) is there and exists, but we are not a part of that dimension.

We are consciousness, and consciousness moves where we direct it.

These experiences ppl have had is just the brain reacting to the circumstance. It has been duplicated w “The god helmet” and those ppl continue to swear up and down that they died. R61 -what a dumb comment. Are you 2 years old?

[quote]R96 I hope and wish there is something after because I want to see and be near my deceased family (and beloved pets).

And that’s how the whole concept of an Afterlife was first invented by cavemen.

We’re paralyzed by loss.

I think about this because, having been forced to spend my life with severe depression and anxiety disorder, I wonder, if I experience continuity of consciousness after death, does this ongoing torture come along with it, and if not, if it's magically fixable, what was the point of subjecting me to it in the first place? What happens to people with organic brain problems, like anencephalic babies or people with Down syndrome? If they're granted fully functioning ghost-brains after death (gee thanks), are they also given opportunities to exercise those brains, learn, establish new relationships where they can use their new capabilities, etc.? The more I think about it the more preposterous it is.

If a god wanted to torture you in life with misfortune or a disability, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t want to torture you in death, too. Sorry.

God’s not your friend.

The Dragonfly Story “In the bottom of an old pond lived some grubs who could not understand why none of their group ever came back after crawling up the lily stems to the top of the water. They promised each other that the next one who was called to make the upward climb would return and tell what had happened to him. Soon one of them felt an urgent impulse to seek the surface; he rested himself on the top of a lily pad and went through a glorious transformation which made him a dragonfly with beautiful wings. In vain he tried to keep his promise. Flying back and forth over the pond, he peered down at his friends below. Then he realized that even if they could see him they would not recognize such a radiant creature as one of their number.

The fact that we cannot see our friends or communicate with them after the transformation which we call death is no proof that they cease to exist."

R100, I feel ya. I’ve evaded the illness of depression, and find much joy in life, but the phrase “eternal rest” resonates with me. What if I don’t *wanna* anymore?

And there are plenty of people who I don’t want to spend eternity with, or even see, in the afterlife. Do we get our own personalized heaven?

[quote]R102 The fact that we cannot see our friends or communicate with them after the transformation which we call death is no proof that they cease to exist."

And the fact that we’re not talking dragonflies that make pledges to each other means your stupid fable has little to do with us.

Great thread

I like that dragon fly tale, and it makes perfect sense to me.

Wonderful thread. The dragon fly tale is great. Years ago a family member died a long and painful AIDS death. He saw his deceased boyfriend who was beckoning him to step into the light telling him that it would all be ok . This went on over his last several days alive and then he’d come to and we would watch some tv and then he would zone out again and tell me what he saw. He wasn’t medicated either as it was hospice and he couldn’t swallow or anything. Not deathbed delusions but real stuff and we laughed before he took his last breath. It was incredible. My jaw was hanging open. Then funny things happened where he let me know he was ok. This was not in my head. I’m a logical thinker but since then I have been at the bedsides of a few more deaths and have experienced things that I cannot even put into words. There is definitely something beyond this life. It’s like we go home to where we come from. We are probably meant to have amnesia on earth and to doubt and fear an afterlife as we know it . Or life on the earthly plain wouldn’t be as important. If we knew this was one big classroom and that home is in another dimension we wouldn’t learn the lessons that we need to grow as a soul as painful as they may be. It must be an extension of consciousness and the soul’s journey. That’s all I got. I’ll never comprehend but I do know that there is something and it’s beautiful and powerful .

What about awful people like Pol Pot or Patsy Ramsey? Do they get to have a beautiful experience, too?

To me the bottom line is that death is inconceivable to us because life is all we know. Anyone who's lost a loved one and then had vivid dreams about them afterwards or saw or felt their presence somehow knows what I mean. So you can reason with yourself all you want but you're still going to see ghosts and get messages from beyond and look forward to seeing your people and animals again after you've passed over to where they are, wherever that is.

[quote]What about awful people like Pol Pot or Patsy Ramsey? Do they get to have a beautiful experience, too?

All I wanted from Heaven was a few first-place crowns without having to deal with a little sassmouth!

The lights/tunnel thing is EXACTLY like the start of Space Mountain with the pulsing lights. I was floating up on the ceiling, on my back but somehow able to see through my body - below me on the gurney - as the docs restarted my heart with the paddles. I guess it wasn't working quite as fast as they (and I) wanted it to, so I started down the tunnel but didn't get to the end because the heart muscle's action kicked in again. It's a chemical action of the brain as it shuts down, so I didn't get to see the destination, just the route. No Shirley MacClaine, no Uncle Morty, no entire cast of "Cats" on the other side. OTOH, they let me go home the next day.

Just as well. That was forty years ago and I'm still here. Happily, as I'd have missed a lot. Having had a tiny glimpse of what may lie beyond this plane of existence, I can wait to know for sure.

[quote]no entire cast of "Cats" on the other side.

So there is a God.

R111 Interesting. I’ve never been to Disney but I just watched a video of Space Mountain on YouTube and the way the tunnel lights flash very much resembles some of the pulsing geometric sequences I saw in my “breakthrough” ayahuasca experience.

Here’s a visual simulation I found. It doesn’t capture the living digital feeling of DMT experiences, but it’s a pretty good flat replica. Imagine moving through the white-light Space Mountain tunnel and then exploding into a place where something like this is happening in 360 degrees all around you. That’s what happened to me. It was terrifying in a way because it was like being on a nonstop rollercoaster that you can’t get off of. It’s what made me appreciate the simplicity and density of the “real world” we live in.

R111 Interesting. I’ve never been to Disney but I just watched a video of Space Mountain on YouTube and the way the tunnel lights flash very much resembles some of the pulsing geometric sequences I saw in my “breakthrough” ayahuasca experience.

Here’s a visual simulation I found. It doesn’t capture the living digital feeling of DMT experiences, but it’s a pretty good flat replica. Imagine moving through the white-light Space Mountain tunnel and then exploding into a place where something like this is happening in 360 degrees all around you. That’s what happened to me. It was terrifying in a way because it was like being on a nonstop rollercoaster that you can’t get off of. It’s what made me appreciate the simplicity and density of the “real world” we live in.

I don't believe in the afterlife but I did like the dragonfly story R102. That said, I do hope that when it's time to go, I go while I'm sleeping.

The unanswered question is, does the dragonfly really remember its life before the traumatic transformation? And if it does remember, then for how long before it moves on into the air?

I’ve heard so many stories about “knowing” young children who insist they have memories that are impossible, or who know things they couldn’t, or who interact with “imaginary” beings. I don’t believe-believe a lot—I accept being speculative and I am also skeptical about most things—but having said that, I have a strong inclination to think that when infants arrive into this world, they find all of it to be all-consumingly uncomfortable because it’s so entirely unfamiliar to them, and then they find everything sensory to be absolutely wondrous and wonderful, and then they begin to learn the rules of this world and the rules of humanity and as they adapt to that, they finally cross over into this plane and forget or suppress all their experiences of where they came from: the dragonfly that was circling and looking back into the water, unable to get back, and then eventually just accepted its new world and forgot where it came from. Until it’s time to return to create new life and finish its own. I really do think this metaphor is an apt one. And I do think this life, as long as it may be, is a chapter in an ongoing adventure story.

Good thread, bitches.

R11 types fat.

No one has ever actually produced a theory about what happens in the afterlife. None of these ideas has been tested in an unbiased manner. To prove such a theory, one would have to conduct verifiable falsifiable experiments. Apparently, the fist step in actually creating such a theory would probably involve dying.

R119 Do it and come back and let us know how it went.

Your molecules and atoms are returned to the universe.

That is all.

R120 -- Why would I? I'm not one putting forth mumbo jumbo.

The Afterlife

I wonder if we will be able to talk to all the famous historical figures like Washington and Lincoln in Heaven.

For your consideration

And so

I wonder if Jesus has updated his wardrobe to include scissor cut outs like all the teenagers doing their jeans these days.

I'm curious. I am fine with taking my last breath and "nada". We all will find out, maybe it is like some wild scifi adventure.

I quote Roger Ebert:

"The one thing people might be surprised about—Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.” I asked him, “What’s a hoax?” And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn’t visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can’t even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once."

I shall see you all in hell, darlings. x

I think my pussy will stink even more. Decomposition is a bitch.

Very interesting, R128. Delores Cannon, the past life regression practitioner, describes it much the dame way as Ebert.

All I know is when you hear psychics talk about the dead visiting, they often talk about how they work on the other side. My first thought is Fuck That! I don't want a job where I never get paid, and I cant even enjoy a good meal anymore. Sounds more like Hell to me.

[quote]I have a strong inclination to think that when infants arrive into this world, they find all of it to be all-consumingly uncomfortable because it’s so entirely unfamiliar to them, and then they find everything sensory to be absolutely wondrous and wonderful,

It's more like you just crapped and pissed your pants and you cant verbalize to that old Frau with milk glands to change your fucking diaper.

What happens to your voice when you stop speaking?

It doesn’t exist.

What happens to your mind when your brain stops thinking?

Same answer.

What happens after we die?

We rot.

[quote]"He wasn’t visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can’t even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once."

I've never read what R128 found before but I immediately knew this was referring to the "Akashic Records."

Which is a concept that existed long before any of us have.

[quote]What happens to your mind when your brain stops thinking?

You vote for Trump.

That was another revelation during my breakthrough ayahuasca experience: time could be called “an illusion” in the sense that everything is occurring at once, all simultaneously, and time is a kind of filter that arranges everything, laying events out like pages in a book. The book exists as one complete volume. There’s no past or present or future in the sense that it’s all always there. Our experience of it is from beginning to end, and we’re made to understand it only in those terms just as we’re made to sense, for example, the colors of the spectrum in a specific order even though they don’t really exist in that order—yet it’s the only way we can see them with our own senses.

So the book, as it were, that contains our entire set of life events, is always open to “the present.” No matter where we are, we are there on that page and that sentence. But the past and the future are already written there. We remember aspects of the past and sometimes a smell or a song will sort of cut straight through the pages and we’ll reexperience the past in the present moment—nostalgia, deja vu, fond memories. And sometimes we have flashes or memories of the future, which is always there, just in some pages ahead of where our consciousness believes is the present. Sometimes it presents, like a vague nostalgic memory of the past, as a vague memory of the future we call intuition or instinct. Sometimes a glimpse of the future (which is now) presents itself fully in present time, in the same sort of way a past trauma presents itself in the present among people with PTSD. We call this a premonition or a precognitive event. It’s a memory and not really that mystical of a thing if we consider that our whole entire story is already here, now, and our brains are just processing that story like a finger moving over the words in a book. We’re always where that finger is. Most people read from beginning to end. Some people skip around. Some habitually go back to reread what they’ve already read; these people are caught up in the past. Some dare to skip ahead and read snippets of what happens later in the story, and they read the information and have an idea of what’s coming, but the story is way too complex to be able to understand how and why the story landed there without the context. So our brains just choose to move along from beginning to end, and so your place in time is illusory but it has a clear and obvious purpose. The illusion is not bad. It’s not a trick. It’s a tool, a filter, something that serves as a means by which to process what would otherwise be too much information to make sense of all at once.

When I “fell” back into my body/my present/my life, which did feel like falling, I fell among shattered, refractory glimpses of disordered life events. If you imagine drilling a bit through a very thick book, and only reading the events represented by the words the drill cut through on each page, it was like that. All at once. It took some time to “fall” through those isolated events and it also all happened simultaneously, which feels like total chaos and madness but also more real than everyday reality. I suspect this is what Roger Ebert experienced before he said that life is an illusion. This is all story. Life is nothing more than endless, incomprehensibly complex stories emanating from one generator. Each of us is the protagonist in a story and also an aspect of its writer. Life does not function in the same terms—it operates in more limited terms because “the author” can necessarily only express itself partially in any single expression. And each expression is its own artform, with its own unique characteristics and limitations and qualities. Some of the works of art/stories are beautiful, some are macabre, some funny, some farcical, some utterly superficial. It’s all good in the end. It really is.

Best thread I've read in a long time.

A tangential point, but to those who say they hope there is divine justice after life for immorality and violence—that is definitely an illusion. There’s no objective definition of morality aside from “plays by one’s own culture’s rules.”

The essay linked here makes that clear by juxtaposing perceived “barbarism” of American Indians by European colonists. Europeans and Native American nations both practiced torture; however, neither understood the rules of one another’s warfare and allowable violence and as such, both sides saw the other side as unjustifiably violent. Iroquois people tortured in elaborate, ultra-violent ways, and that appalled Europeans—who tortured in elaborate, ultra-violent ways that they believed to be civilized.

To put it another way, like it or not, the US is founded in Judeo-Christian values. “Thou shalt not kill” is accepted by nearly everyone as the fundamental law of civility, and the rule of law is accepted by most of us (as evidenced in recent years, by fewer of us than many of us ever suspected) as foundational to the country. We have laws. Laws guide us. We obey them or else we pay the consequence.

Killing a person is the worst offense by law.

EXCEPT when it’s the most honorable act by law, such as when a war hero is awarded the medal of freedom ostensibly for demonstrably killing enemies.

The very worst crime a human being can commit is to kill a child. Everyday civilians all agree on this, even if not all agree on abortion rights because some don’t see unborn children as children. But either way, none of us would be accepted in our society—liberal or ultra-conservative—if we shunned a soldier who killed children of another nation. That kind of collateral damage is just that—not human life, but unfortunate consequence of fighting for good. (“For good” always means “for us,” and us can be anyone anywhere anytime.)

This all seems a bit semantic given that we have all integrated these rules as making sense in our worldview. But when we consider divine justice, this arbitrariness of good and bad reveals the notion of karma or heaven and hell to be solely political and to have no transcendent value or application. Because:

—In the US, if you kill, you’re a monster.

—Except if you kill as part of the military, in which case you’re a hero.

—In the US, if you harm a child, you’re a monster.

—Except if that child is collateral damage fighting for your country, in which case you’re good.

—Unless you decide that the afterlife maintains our political borders, then we have a big problem. Because we have a humanity of mostly law-abiding people who have abided by radically different laws. Just as we have to ask what monotheist’s “only god” is the real one, we have to ask what citizen’s rule of law is the real one. (You’re now thinking, well, ours is because it makes sense...)

(Cont. from R140)

—So in the divine realm, since you’ve been good, you’ll be reunited with your loved ones, including your father who killed people in Vietnam or Korea or the European theatre. Because the afterlife recognizes that the law is OK with *that kind* of killing. But of course, Donald Trump will pay a dear price in the afterlife for fucking his daughter and fueling racist culture and tweeting rude things. No, that makes no sense. I’m sorry. It just doesn’t, even if you pull out the old, “I believe it’s intention that counts.”

—Some totally demented serial killers have good intentions according to the moral codes they write themselves. Catholic clergy who systematically rape children and cause them lifelong psychological damage probably believe they are honoring a timeworn system of law and order that is somehow good—they were acculturated in that system in most cases. It’s arbitrary.

I was cultivated in the system of thought that everyone else in the US was. I think murder and all kinds of violence including sexual and emotional abuses are evil, and I think that because I have a kind of empathy that tells me I wouldn’t want any of that to happen to me or anyone I care about. I still live in a world where warfare is celebrated and we are told to thank people who dedicate their lives to killing supposed enemies—including civilians, pretty much at their discretion—for their “service.” I think that’s pretty twisted logic.

Based on my experiences, I think we are here for experience. Adventures, opportunities to explore all our senses and to follow our imaginations and so on. Al of us. We all follow and clear individual paths. And when it’s over, I think we probably feel exhilarated and thrilled in the way we do after an unbelievably thrilling movie or novel or piece of music. When you experience those, you appreciate all of the aspects that make them so thrilling, including the good and the bad, the pain and the pleasure—just the experiences. I think that’s what life is. When you close the book of life, I’m sure you want to share the story with everyone, but you don’t think about divine revenge for the characters who tormented the protagonist. You understand that every good story needs valorous, honorable heroes and also reprehensible villains. You realize that an endless series of good fortune and pleasures is devastatingly boring and empty, and that you have to be devastated sometimes to feel enriched. That’s what life is. It’s everything that makes a moving, thrilling, provocative, enigmatic work of art. It is to be experienced at least once. And then onto new experiences.

These highly intelligent nuggets of wisdom is what keeps me coming back to the DL. I appreciate all who have posted here.

Has anyone seen any good afterlife movies?

The only one I've seen is Defending Your Life. O think that's much more plausible than Constantine or What Dreams May Come.

Eric Roberts as Danion Brinkley

Thanks R144

*are what

not is what. Sorry, brain fog today.

My dad was my absolute best friend & he passed away five years ago. I believe that he has contacted me after he passed. I’m not religious nor insane.. but I don’t believe that this physical life is all there is. I know it’s not.

^I agree. Things have happened to me since my husband passed, that cannot be explained.

Like r148 not getting fucked?

Some of you might enjoy this documentary on Amazon called “I’m Dead - so, now what?”

[quote] There is definitely something beyond this life. It’s like we go home to where we come from.

We call that Annwn, or ‘The Summerlands’ & ‘The Otherworld’. It’s the land of eternal youth where the Gods live alongside our deathless souls. We get to return there when we die, to live in bucolic paradise until we are sent back to Byd (Earth) again by the Gods to develop a skill or a quality necessary to existence in the Otherworld.

This is the reason that ancient Brythonic peoples celebrated death and mourned birth.

Elizabeth Taylor NDE when she died while shooting Cleopatra

Anyone else feel like they would rather go to the light instead of work?

Great song on the topic

People always talk about how, when you die, you are reunited with those who loved you and whom you loved.

But what if you lived a life where no one really loved you, and you never had a chance to love anyone?

[quote]Elizabeth Taylor NDE when she died while shooting Cleopatra

That was just Richard Burton's dick.

I❤️R155

I imagine you just lie there while maggots feast on your brains. Not painful, but not pleasant either.

R155 they say you're welcomed by people you knew in other lives.

"But what if you lived a life where no one really loved you, and you never had a chance to love anyone?"

I'm sure you will be received with love.

"But what if you lived a life where no one really loved you, and you never had a chance to love anyone?"

You’ll hate this—but you’ll realize that you actually are connected with others anyway.

"I just watched a video of Space Mountain on YouTube and the way the tunnel lights flash very much resembles some of the pulsing geometric sequences I saw in my “breakthrough” ayahuasca experience."

While this will be hard to believe, I swear it is true. My cousin and I were at Disneyland (is it a coincidence that it's the happiest place on earth?), and we had an out of body experience on Space Mountain. I can't remember what time of year it was, but we were at Disneyland maybe an hour before it closed. AND THERE WAS NO ONE IN LINE ON SPACE MOUNTAIN!!! This is not just unusual, it is spooky. We went on Space Mountain TWELVE TIMES IN A ROW!!!. There was no one else in line. Whether or not this was supernatural or not, it was unusual to say the least. After the first ride we asked if we could just stay in the car, and they said no, you have to go back to the entry and go in again. WHICH WE DID, ANOTHER ELEVEN TIMES!!. Screaming as we ran back again and again through the line. We were told we were weird. But fuck, Space Mountain with no one else on it? If that ain't proof of Jesus,...

I don't know if the afterlife is like this, but I'd like to believe it is. Unlimited rides on my favorite roller coasters.

When did you go to Space Mountain? What time of year? That is very unusual.

You don’t exist anymore, like all that time before you were born.

Mttr of fth. Wht do you blve at the tme of yr dth? Prhps all tht brn actvty is crcial prt of it all. Mnd bdy sprt. Wht hppns whn bdy gs cput?

Are you in intensive care?

Do you need help??

So will Jeffery Dahmer be united with to boys he loved? Or ate? The two are not mutually exclusive.

What if it’s like Oz, except you get there and find out you’re a Munchkin? Or a flying monkey?

R165 Here’s an afterlife theory: buy all the vowels before you go.

Here's a link to a YouTube video of two women who made an agreement with a family member that if she died, she would visit them in the form of a cardinal. This video shows them outside with the bird that wouldn't leave them for an extended period of time. And this is after they had already spent about 10 minutes inside with the bird before trying to release it outside.

Why do people think “sleep” results?

Sleep is a reduction of sensory activity, not the complete and permanent deprivation of it.

[quote] What if it’s like Oz, except you get there and find out you’re a Munchkin? Or a flying monkey?

Or a brick?

R170 two winters ago, the morning before my mother arrived at my then-workplace to tell me my sister had just died the sky outside turned suddenly black with unforecasted clouds of rain and howling wind, so I raced outside to grab the shop sandwich board. As I lifted the board to carry it indoors, I noticed that a large resplendent cock-pheasant lying dead beside it. Now, this was in a country town where it’s not unheard of for hunters to leave dead birds and rabbits lying around publicly, but carcasses are typically left hanging on phone poles & wires or in trees on verges (where foxes can’t get them) and not on a pavement in the middle of a town high street. I puzzled over it for hours as the storm passed over, until my mother walked in crying before closing time and hugged me without saying a word. Then I knew.

R173 You didn't have to be mean.

Any other good afterlife movies?

I enjoyed that one with hot Eric Roberts.

R170 Two similar animal phenomena in my family, nut without the “I’ll return as...” promise.

The first was when my family dog died. My family was devastated. We got him when I was five and he was 16 when he died, so I for one didn’t know life without him. Anyway, a few days after he died, my dad was mowing the lawn and a rabbit slowly walked into the middle of the yard and sat there. And sat there. My father’s yard is pretty big and he mowed the entire thing except a small square right around where the rabbit sat. It didn’t move despite the noise of the mower and my dad telling it to leave—so he just left it alone. It sat there for a couple more hours and my mom said, “It’s Sam. He’s letting us know he’s OK.” I felt bad for her wishful thinking.

Three months later, my mother’s father died. A couple days afterward, I went outside to take the trash bin that my parents kept beside the garage to the curb. A dove was on the ground, just sitting next to the dumpster. The bin makes a loud, hollow sound when it rolls and the bird should have been scared away but it just sat there looking at me. So I went inside and told my parents and we all agreed that it was probably hurt and we were worried a cat or a fox would attack it. I got a little box from the garage and approached the bird, talking to it and kind of gently sweeping my foot around to get it to fly away but it just stared at me. So finally I squatted next to it, still expecting it to fly away. It didn’t. I figured it was definitely injured and so I gently touched it—no reaction—and then I squeamishly, gently put my hands around it to put it in the box. It flew away. It wans’t injured. I was honestly a little annoyed and I went inside and told my parents. The next day, my dad came in and told us there was a dove in the rafters of the garage, and he had been trying for 20 minutes to shoo it away with a broom so he could close the garage door. My mom said, totally matter of factly, “leave it alone. It’s Daddy telling us he’s OK. The bird eventually left. My dad has been in that house for 20 years and it’s the only time a bird was ever in the garage.

So those are my two animal experiences.

My father had one more a couple years ago, after my mom died. (But not with my mom...trust me, I’ve looked out for signs from animals and have not seen any.)

One of my dad’s friends from the Navy died months after my mom did. He went to the graveside funeral. He said his friend’s wife was blubbering uncontrollably until, suddenly, a dove dove straight down out of the sky and landed on her shoe. It shook her out of her crying and she kicked her foot all around and the bird just kept fluttering and insistently resting on her foot. She started laughing and everyone else laughed because it was so bizarre and absurd. Then the bird jumped off her foot and down into the grave and sat on top of the casket and paced around. And my dad’s friend’s wife gasped and said, “it’s him! He’s letting me know he’s OK!” My father was choking back tears when he told me this story, and it’s only the third time I ever remember him crying like that.

My partner’s father died last month. He was a big, burly Jersey guy - not at all the sentimental type. My partner wasn’t close to him really. Anyway, last weekend we were sitting on our balcony and this larger than normal Monarch butterfly landed on his leg and just sat there for minutes, before proceeding to flutter and climb all over him. It even walked all over his face and on his head. It was on him for well over five minutes. After if flew away, my partner looked at me and said “my Dad?” - and he is not the type with any interest in the afterlife or visitations. Anyway, thought I would share.

I found the whole concept of "reuniting with our love ones" is a bit selfish and sound nothing but a wishful thinking. I'm sure our love ones have someone else for him or her to be with rather than just with us for eternity.

I would love to meet my grandma again but I think she would rather be with her own parents or her siblings.

I think "reuniting with our loved ones" is them just saying hello and helping you crossover R178.

Who said you're expected to spend eternity with them?

(I'd personally want to go find James Dean and finally tap that ass.)

[quote] but I think she would rather be with her own parents or her siblings.

In all the literature written on this topic and in the many tales recounted by people who have had NDEs, I’ve never heard anyone say that when you die you become conjoined with your relatives. According to those accounts, the next world is quite different from this one.

Nothing happens apart from you die. I imagine at best (and least) it is like going into a deep sleep meaning you do not know you exist and feel nothing. When I think about it, I mildly freak and therefore avoid thinking about it. Those who think they are going to heaven or some such nirvana and have no fear of it I envy. I don't seem to have any more confidence in that than I do catching Santa on my roof on Xmas eve. I sure would like to see all my kitties and doggies and friends I have outlived- but somehow, I think I stand as much chance of that as seeing an Easter bunny. It sure makes me wonder what it's all about and where I came from in the first place- I guess ultimately I came from a biochemical reaction originally, billions of years ago and like all life, I am mostly a vastly complicated biochemical phenomenon- just one among trillions at that.

Because all your thoughts and consciousness are electrochemical synapses in your functioning brain, when your brain stops functioning and dies all thoughts and all consciousness must end forever. There is simply no mechanism for them to continue. I understand the deep desire for your life to continue somehow, but these fantasies just cannot be true. Face the facts, delusional ones.

My father had a really terrible death. Some time after, I dreamed that he called me on the phone. I said “Dad! How is it there? ”

He said “Oh yeah, it’s really great. The food is good, and the women here... aaah!” And he made the little chuckle he’d do when he was mentioning anything a little risqué.

It was probably just my subconscious comforting itself, but I’ll take it.

R181 and R182, I've had a couple of experiences that tell me otherwise. They do give me comfort. I'm sincerely sorry you haven't had something similar.

It doesn’t matter enough to argue about. When it happens you’re all in, no matter what you speculate. It could be all blackness forever or less than that. You might meet a god or gods. You might be playing a harp in hellfire forever or riding a pegasus on a rainbow made of Skittles. Speculation should not be off the table. It’s life’s greatest mystery. But to bark at people that consciousness is *definitely* only an electrochemical reaction based on science when science calls consciousness a mystery and speculates endless theories about it is a really misinformed kind of argument. That’s just as patently false as saying that Jesus wrote the Bible in English for Americans. Just totally ignorant of reality and definitely not a basis for argumentation.

I back you up most ardently R184. People like us know what we've experienced. We do not doubt, and we are most grateful. Therefore, we experience even more as time goes by.

My brother told me this story about a month ago. He’s a very pragmatic sorta guy, owns his own business and level headed. Our mom died in 2017.

So, he’s watching TV before bed and just relaxing (I asked if he fell asleep and he said emphatically no)

All of sudden, he smells a perfume my mom wore back in the early 60s. Very drug-store strong perfume.

He gets up and start trying to see where the perfume smell is coming from. He eventually gave up and went to bed

The very next morning, an old childhood friend from the early 60s called him and told him his mom died.

We both thought that it was our mom coming to him the previous night to tell him

R187 I have two secondhand stories like this.

One of my mom’s best friends was awaken as a child by her grandmother, who kissed her and then left the room. In the morning she asked her parents why Grandma was there last night and they said she wasn’t. And then of course they found out immediately thereafter that her grandmother had died that night.

The other is closer to home. My dad walked into the bathroom at work (DC) and saw his father there. He was confused and called out to him (“Pop?!”). His father walked into a stall and—he wasn’t there. That night, his mother called and told him his father had died earlier that day.

Reminds me of this story from Reddit:

"...My father tells me this story of my childhood every once in a while:

When I was around six years old, my dad's best friend committed suicide. We'll call him "Joe" for the sake of the story. Obviously, it was a very rough and emotional time for my dad. Joe was my dad's best man at his wedding, the one guy who was always there for him. After my dad got married, he and my mother left Joe and the town they were in to start a life outside of the town they grew up in. After years of moving around California, my family eventually moved to Utah, where my father worked for a successful internet business. Joe stayed behind in Washington. Because my family were so far away from their old life with Joe, there wasn't a lot of foresight/warning that Joe intended on ending his own life.

Joe's sister apparently had been blaming Joe's wife for her brothers suicide. Joe and his wife drank a lot of booze, and probably as a result, fought a lot. My father always said that they were a passionate couple; yes, they would fight often, but he hardly knew two other individuals who were so completely in love. For this reason, he didn't believe it.

A few days after Joe committed suicide, his widow called up my father sobbing about how she thought it was her fault. After about an hour of trying to console her, he told her "If there was a way for me to talk to Joe now, I guarantee you that he would tell you that he loved you, and that it wasn't your fault that he ended his life." Crying, she still didn't believe him, but she thanked him for the kind words and let my father go.

My dad was obviously distraught after that long, hysteric conversation. He had been down in his office for a while, and he decided to come up and check on his kids while making a pot of coffee to take his mind off of things. We were all supposed to be napping, but he thought he'd peek his head into our rooms to make sure we were safe/maybe try to have a little smile or brightness added to his day.

Sure enough, when my dad got to my room, I was fast asleep on my bed. He went to my brother's room, and he was also sleeping. Finally, he checks on my sister, who is sleeping as smugly as an angel. He decides to go back towards my room and into the kitchen to make some coffee.

As he walks by my room, he notices a whimper. He turns around, and enters my room, where he finds me weeping. I was five years old, so the way I was crying seemed odd to him. Normally a five year old would cry drastically over dramatically. I wasn't. I was just sitting on the side of my bed, weeping.

My dad enters my room and says "Matty, whats up? Why are you crying?"

It's then that I stop crying for a moment, look up at him with teary eyes and say "Rick, it's not her fault. I love her. It's not her fault."

With that, I stopped crying, rolled over back onto my bed, and fell swiftly back to sleep.

Needless to say, my dad shit his pants."

If you wake during REM sleep and continue to be in REM for even a fraction of a second you're likely to see the creepy figures (and I mean CREEPY) that surround you but you can't perceive in your waking life. They'll look like people but that's only because you can't actually perceive them as they actually are.

This thread is too metaphysical for me.

[quote]My dad walked into the bathroom at work (DC) and saw his father there. He was confused and called out to him (“Pop?!”). His father walked into a stall and—he wasn’t there. That night, his mother called and told him his father had died earlier that day.

From glory hole to glory!

My cousin died in a violent car crash when I was 15 years old. He was very close to my older sister and her then best friend who are about 5 years older than I am.

My understanding is he had to stay late at work. When he left it was dark. It was ice raining, he went through a tunnel, slid and hit a guard rail between 4:30 and 5 AM. Unfortunately something happened with the car, a fire occurred, the car exploded & the body was burned beyond recognition. No one knew that at the time or that he was out that late coming home from his job. It took a while for the police to put it all together and contact his parents.

My sister was asleep when it happened and when she woke up that morning she called her best friend because she had the "strangest dream."

Her best friend told her that she was going to call her (my sister) because she also had the "strangest dream."

I was in her room bugging her at the time because that's what little siblings do!

My sister said that she and (we'll call him Ryan) were at a club dancing together like they always did. Then when she "woke up" he was next to her bed, exited her room, waved goodbye and went downstairs. She wasn't scared though she was "happy" & went back to sleep right after. Her friend said that she too had a dream that she and Ryan were sitting outside together watching fireworks. They hugged and he went home. They both started screaming! Not a serious scream but one of those happy, "OMG!" things.

Hours later we got a phone call from his grandmother that he had passed. Everyone was completely devastated.

I remember thinking and saying out loud, "wow I guess you said goodbye to everyone you were close to." We weren't that close because of the age difference but he always spoke to me when I saw him before he and the older kids ran off or I was off to the side while he and the older kids did things.

Then of course that night, I had a dream that I was leaning on a balcony outside of our home where I always did my people watching, he appeared behind a blind corner, smiled, looked up at me and said "Hey Val, take care of yourself and tell your sister I dropped by." He then went over to his house, entered and I woke up at ... 4:45 AM.

I think our souls linger in the thin place between the physical and the spiritual for a few weeks, to make contact if desired with those who are 'open and available,' then our spiritual energy is assimilated into the universal unconsciousness.

R194 When my mom died two years ago, a friend of a coworker who fancies herself clairvoyant told my coworker that my mother won’t move on because I was so distraught. It was an agonizing and surreal experience. She went into the ER after falling because she was so weak from unexplained chronic diarrhea. She was only 66 and I didn’t expect the worst to happen at all. It was a new calamity every other day and then she ended up in the ICU on a respirator. And then she was “actively dying.” They allowed her to go home and they told us it would be “hours or days, but probably hours.” Six days of lying there without any machines and she finally was gone. Nothing will ever compare to that nightmare. The hospice nurses were all very sweet but they also seemed confused and by the end somewhat impatient because of how long it took her to stop breathing. They all really thought it would be a few hours. Anyway, my coworker’s friend said my mom was too worried about *me* to leave, and that even after she left her body she wouldn’t move on with where she needed to go next. Which probably sounds like a lot of moms, but it *definitely* sounds like mine. If she had any say at all, that is without a doubt what she would do.

R193 aww good ol Ryan coming through!

The other night I had a dream I was complaining about someone who had money problems. My dead stepfather showed up and explained something very calmly, that instantly made me feel ok. It felt like it was really him.

Dreams are nice.

I think that the only thing that changes when you die is that you can't move any parts of your body. You still experience what is happening to you, and what goes on around you. The upside is that, at your viewings and funeral, you get to hear people say nice things about you. On the other hand, it's bad news if you die during some kind of medical procedure or rescue and, once you're dead, they don't take particular care about how they repair you. Autopsies are particularly arduous. And cremation is probably rather unpleasant, though the feeling of having your ashes scattered is probably some kind of rush.

^^^ ^^^ ^^^ Fanciful imaginations. Just because you can construct after-life scenarios does not make them real. The imagination can conceive lots of things. But let’s not confuse our fever dreams with what we can know about reality. One is ahead of the game in this life if one can keep a firm grasp of the facts and be critical about believing all the garbage out there.

"believing all the garbage out there." - yea, garbage like you?

Stupidity punishes itself. Go for it. It’s a free country.

[R14]: Thank you, Professor Tolkien.

Though yours is a lovely description.

[quote]R192 I think our souls linger in the thin place between the physical and the spiritual for a few weeks, to make contact if desired with those who are 'open and available’

I see. So all those loving friends and family who were grieving throughout the centuries but were never contacted simply weren’t “open and available”.

They’ll feel just SWELL, reading that.

[quote]R189 Reminds me of this story from Reddit:

Oh, god. Here we go - -

[quote{R189 I think that the only thing that changes when you die is that you can't move any parts of your body. You still experience what is happening to you, and what goes on around you. The upside is that, at your viewings and funeral, you get to hear people say nice things about you.

Do you feel the worms eating you, later? Or the bears, if it’s out in the woods?

I think our personalities are gone but our soul transcends. I think our soul knows our personality much better than our personality knows our soul.

R204 I only brought it up because it involved possession. Obviously if a thing doesn't interest you you can create your own thread about that which does instead of lamenting mine. That's logical enough, right?

My mother used to talk about how she felt her grandmother was protecting us sometimes, and I hope it is true. That we could be a protective influence on the people we love who are still alive.

If there is anyway I could turn into a ghost, I'd be delighted. I'd rattle my chains and spook all the assholes who pissed me off during my lifetime.

R208 I haven’t felt like she protects me from oncoming trains or falling anvils or anything, but having lost my mom two years ago, I feel her presence with me all the time. I’ve always heard people say that and I always interpreted it to mean “you’ll always have sweet memories.” Nope. It means you get a sense that the person is actually right there with you sometimes. I’ve discussed this with a lot of people and many of the older people in their 50s and 60s are like, “yeah, that’s what it means. My mom and dad are with me all the time.”

It’s not worth debating what sort of mental manifestation or ghostly visit it could be. It’s a thing a lot of us experience and no explanation to support it or reject it could change it. It’s incredibly reassuring and comforting and sanity-preserving and so people are welcome to dismiss it as a coping mechanism—doesn’t matter. The presence is there.

I really don't care what other people believe, but I find it curious when they insist they "know" what happens after we die. I'm kinda with Stephen Fry when he spoke about this on QI:

"Anybody who tells me what happens to me after I'm dead is either a liar or a fool, because they don't know!"

A friend of mine is very spiritual and believes there is something afterwards. He says he will prove it to me after he dies, but when I press him on how he is going to prove it to me, he becomes evasive.

Yeah, let's believe a bipolar man with an ax to grind against religion over all the profound, life changing experiences people who actually have died have had.

I'm not going to believe Stephen Fry just because he says so over the work of Dr. Raymond Moody. It's comforting to dismiss everything, but by his own admission, Mr. Fry doesn't know everything either. I'm going to venture a chance there's something going on that people don't really understand as of yet.

Even if Stephen Fry was correct, he's an absolute asshole to tear the crutch of belief from some people. Especially those soon facing death who don't have his power and money to ease the pain away and only have nice, comforting beliefs.

One constant in life I've noticed is how angry people get when you don't blindly accept their belief in what happens after we die. If it was the certainty they say it is, surely they should be confident about it, but instead they become furious. And I'm not talking about being rude to them, but after simply saying something like: "I don't think there's anything after death". It's almost as if they don't have the courage of their own convictions.

There are those who they those are stupid for believing, and there are those who think those are stupid for NOT believing, so there you go.

Source is God and God is Source and that God being a super-natural God. Faith is the evidence of things hoped for though not yet seen.

These debates demonstrate how human nature expresses itself in opposite ways.

Religious extremists claim to know exactly what happens, based on religious storybooks. They know how to get to their variation of the good place and how to avoid the bad place. And they know they are among the few who will live happily ever after but fear they won’t. They believe anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs is an absolute fool, choosing a false belief system over truth.

Atheist extremists claim to know exactly what happens, based on scientific textbooks. You live, you die, there’s no avoiding it. Anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs is an absolute fool, choosing a false belief system over truth.

Agnostic people in the middle sometimes are not any different. Some believe that not only do they not know what happens, if anything, but that no one can know what happens—and anyone who doesn’t share their belief that no one can know is a fool, choosing a false belief system over truth.

I opt into a different belief system, which is that every one of us lives in a world that we co-create. We literally live in different worlds together because we interpret shared information and experiences in extremely different ways. Most conflict comes from people interpreting experiences and information in different ways and then battling over why the other person doesn’t understand what is plainly there. As far as I am concerned, Billy Graham, Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, the Pope and the crackhead up the street are all right. They live in their own worlds. What does that have to do with mine when we talk about post-earthly reality? They can all scream at one another and call one another fools. Every one of them believes he is the one with the obvious explanation. It’s kind of funny when you think about how vastly different and yet how exactly the same they all are.

In my experience of life, I have lived in different versions of reality myself. I had tremendously different views as a child, and then as an adolescent, and then in young adulthood. My reality will keep changing. When I took ayahuasca, I was for a time in different realities, some that felt schizophrenic, that can’t even be communicated, and I brought a touch of that back with me. I believed in Santa Claus as a kid, and then I insisted on forcing that belief for a time when it was taken away, and so I can’t condemn people for believing in a Santa-type God or anything else. I’ve learned my perceptions of myself in the here and now can be wildly, wildly different than others’ perceptions of me—or even my own when I see a photo or video or hear a recording—and I am *inside me all the time* and if I can’t get a clear idea of who I am, then how in the world could I presume to have a clear view of anything else I only encounter in passing? It’s impossible.

I think what we know and believe in this moment is what there is, and for some it’s absolute—yet as time passes every single one of us lives in new and different worlds as we evolve. The world of a child is not the same as the world of a horny teen or that of a bedraggled older person. A sudden tragedy may shift a lifelong feeling of faith to a sudden realization of a purposeless mechanical life, or vice versa, and in those moments, those perceptions are true and incontestable to us. We can’t settle ourselves on reality in the here and now, but paradoxically we do know what is real to us in the here and now and all of us make the assumption that this, here and now, is a clearer understanding of what we thought before. We’re all right given where we are and when. Just where we need to be. Ultimately, everyone really does live a similar essential experience now and then now and then now and then now and then now, in the present, while worrying about the future. We build stories around the present to explain it to ourselves and others and we all know what we believe is what makes the most sense, even when we know we don’t know. It’s an interesting phenomenon to me.

I had a friend I was very close to for some years. She moved away to Minnesota and we hadn't seen each other since, though we still occasionally spoke by phone and wrote to each other. She developed terminal cancer, and called me a week or so before she died. "I'll try to let you know when I pass," she said. Some days later, my phone rang at 4:30 in the morning. It only sounded one ring, but of course it woke me up. I picked up the phone and there was only a dial tone.

Later that day, a mutual friend called to say that my friend had died during the night.

It may have been pure coincidence, but it did feel a bit uncanny.

If I die, I will try to get Aaron Schock’s masturbation video clips to flash on air during one of the presidential debates or the Superbowl, whichever is timed more closely to my demise. So keep watch for that!

I'm with R33. My only real fear of the afterlife is an eternity of boredom. Though would not want to come back as a cow somewhere in India either. Give me a hit of DMT then blissful darkness and my consciousness is switched off.

I've had dreams of the dying process. Kind of like passing out but your're aware that you're on your way out. A feeling of relief too. Then I wake up.

i certainly don’t know. Mostly I worry about suffering while I’m dying. And who I’ll be leaving behind. Whatever happens after isn’t a huge concern to me.

[quote]So all those loving friends and family who were grieving throughout the centuries but were never contacted simply weren’t “open and available”. They’ll feel just SWELL, reading that.

Not long after a close friend of mine died I had a vivid dream that I spoke with him. The last time I saw him he had been desperately ill and looked very much moribund, I mean really dreadful to see. In the dream I was amazed and delighted to see how well he looked, with all his sparkle and affability restored, just as he was when he was alive and in good health-- in fact the best I had ever seen him. I told him so and he smiled. He explained that he felt so much better now. I asked him why he didn't come visit me before. He shook his head. "It's very difficult," he said. "Very difficult."

I haven't dreamed of him again, but ever since that dream I feel like he's happily occupied with whatever it is that he wants to do and not just hanging around somewhere mournfully waiting to see me again.

[quote]I've had dreams of the dying process. Kind of like passing out but your're aware that you're on your way out. A feeling of relief too. Then I wake up.

I've had these dreams too! Only, minus the "relief" part. There's always a momentary sense of fear/dread.

In my dreams, I've died in a car crash, plane crash, explosion and building collapse (this one was the scariest as I was trapped in some kind of dark stairwell and I could hear the building above me collapsing down towards me).

In all four instances, I was aware of the fact that "this is it, the moment of death", and I wondered for a fleeting moment what would happen next. Then I woke up in my bed, heart pounding.

[quote]So all those loving friends and family who were grieving throughout the centuries but were never contacted simply weren’t “open and available”. They’ll feel just SWELL, reading that.

There are plenty of people in this thread and elsewhere who have said they don't believe in an afterlife or get downright angry when someone suggests it exists. Can you imagine being a relative and trying to visit one of them? They may not believe it is you or just ignore you entirely. Some people really aren't "open."

R220's story reminds of a story from another visitation thread when a woman's mother told her, "It's as difficult for me to see you as it is for you to see me."

I'd like to think if there is an afterlife, while I'd visit my family from time to time I would probably find other things to do if there are other things to do. If one of them was sick or going to die I'd probably hang out with them until they did.

R222 that was me! The clarity of that dream has never faded.

I added this to a past thread - I think it was the one about the couple who bought a vacation house, ghosts included. I'll add it here as well, though this is just one of lots of super-natural experiences:

Woke up from a nap about 3pm and went to the bathroom on the other side of my bedroom wall. Along the very short walkway to the bathroom, the downstairs in open to the upstairs. I looked down and saw a woman walking through the dining room doorway and into the kitchen through that doorway. I saw her for 2-3 seconds as I made my way to the toilet to pee. I thought it was my room mate and I said two things to myself when I saw her: "She's home early" and "DAMN! She went and bought a WIG?!!" I took approximately thirty seconds to pee, rinsed my hands in the sink, then went immediately down the steps to talk shit about the wig in a jovial way. I found that the house was completely empty and no one was here but me and the dog. When I realized I had just seen a spirit, my whole body began vibrating with euphoric energy for just a few seconds. It's true, I am not mistaken, I saw her. What I never bothered to come back to that thread to report was that a few days after posting on that thread, I was in the exact spot where I saw her walking from the DR to the kitchen, and I thought about seeing her again, smiling to myself. As soon as I had the thought, the electric doorbell speaker plugged into the outlet on the wall under the steps began playing a song - it's not supposed to do that, and of course, no one was at the door to ring the button. It was then that I told her "So long as you come from a place of love and light and mean only good, then you're welcome to stay. If you're coming from a place of darkness and meaning harm, then you gotta get the fuck outa HERE!" hahaha I've had no problems.

Plenty, and I do mean there are PLENTY of good reasons to believe.

In 1989, after my mother’s funeral in Florida, I returned home to DC. Shortly thereafter, I was in my living room and I could smell the perfume that she always wore. Because of her illness, she hadn’t been in my house for several years before she died. A week or so later I had a dream in which my mother, dressed in all white, appeared to me in my parents’ bedroom. I was shocked and confused at first because her presence was so real. When I realized what was going on, I asked her what heaven was like. Her reply has stayed with me as vividly as it had been 31 years ago: “More beautiful than you can ever imagine.”

She appeared in one more dream about a month or so later dressed and looking like she had from those pictures when she was in her twenties. We didn’t speak verbally, but communicated by thought, and I remember thinking, that’s the way we would speak from now on. I subsequently read in the NDE accounts that communication on the other side is thought-to-thought not verbally.

Nothing since then. But frankly, I suspect that is because while I needed the visits from my mother, I don’t need any additional ones. I firmly believe that our earthly existence is not the end, but simply a part of the journey. I can’t recall where I read this, but someone suggested that we are not human beings who occasionally have spiritual experiences, but rather spiritual beings who are having human experiences.

My own experience. I was gravely ill in 2004 and in the hospital where I very, very briefly died. When I regained consciousness, I was told about having died for a very short period of time. I don’t recall any light or deceased relatives, friends, or pets. However, in the days following, I had the strangest feelings of having reexperienced emotions from when I was a young kid. It is hard to describe, but when I thought about something like Halloween and Christmas (this occurred in October). I felt about those things much as I had when I was a kid of 8-10 years old.

Great thread.

So, what happens to monsters like Hitler, Pol Pot, Ted Bundy?

Do they get the good after-life experience too?

R221 Good grief! Those are some nasty nightmares.

The Life Quiz, Episode 7: The Woman Who Talks to Spirits

At 55:00 they talk about what happens when you die.

R226: No, the evil don't, according to famous psychics who've published books. These psychics have an interesting take. Unaffiliated with each other, they say the same thing: that this world is a temporary school of hard knocks, a negative plane of existence to test the soul, because the afterlife is in another dimension and has no negativity.

They write in their books that when we die, good souls return to a place we would describe as heaven. Evil souls aren't allowed there. Evil can't be rehabilitated; they can't become good. So, evil souls reincarnate back to earth, over and over, because this is their only home. Earth really is a kind of hell. Hitler, Bundy, et al. get to wreak havoc again in a new body, a new life.

Just an interesting side fact: Most serial killers and schizophrenics were raised in religious households.

Encouraging some to believe in mystical, unseen forces doesn’t end well.

A high school friend of mine lost her only son, who was living in Southeast Asia, four years ago. Today, she missed the ferry to Brooklyn by five minutes. While she was waiting for the next ferry, a woman with a slide guitar played two pieces of music in succession — both of which had been played at her son's memorial service. Today also happened to be the four year anniversary of the last phone call she had with her son.

When I read this from her today, I thought it was relevant to this thread.

Reality is stranger than fiction r231. Hope she found some solace.

I just watched a Lucille Ball, Lucie Arnaz, Carol Burnett interview with Dick Cavett. Lucie was 19.

Interviews are awkward, they've always been awkward. Why do we do this to people just because they're famous? Anyway, now Lucie is 60 something and Dick and Lucy are dead and Carol is in her 80s.

I can't cope with death. We're going to fucking die. There they were just chatting away and fast forward. Bam. They're old or dead. There's just got to be something else. Oh Lord, oh please sweet baby Jesus in the sky floating through the galaxies let there be something else! Oh God, oh God!

Don't let that fucking bitch ass athiest be right. Especially since they were so unpleasant and never were friendly anyway. Don't let those mean unfunny people win!!!

I think that she did, R232. Several of our friends and I told her that was no random coincidence. I mean she missed the ferry by a few minutes, and there was a woman standing there who began playing two songs from her son’s memorial service, and this occurred on the fourth anniversary of the last day that she spoke to her son.

I am not dead. This is how rumors get started. Shut up bitch!

People who are aware, go to the otherside and go to school, then what? Probably folks are re incarnated, some are some aren't. I will probably have o be a rich Republican and it will kill me.

Maybe it’s something like [italic] Defending Your Life, [/italic] with Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep. You can see previous lives in the “Past Lives Pavilion.”

[quote] I wonder if we will be able to talk to all the famous historical figures like Washington and Lincoln in Heaven.

I hope so, r124, cuz I'd LOVE to dish with Cleopatra.

"You die, you're dead, and that's it" seems the most logical.

Yeah, it's the most logical when you don't know and understand who and what you really are....

Or when you don't just spew quasi-mystic bullshit rather than admit that you don't know.

Who says we have to die anyway? As to what happens, you just die there's nothing after it. I'm sort of Nihilistic that way. You just cease to exist. Nothing goes on after the point. There's no heaven or hell. No dio or el diablo.

You Die. The End. I do agree, however, that it's probably more comforting to believe some of the fantasy stories, and I don't blame those who do.

Has anyone on DL read Life after Life? What do you make of all the experiences these people who have floated outside their body, went through tunnel, all that jazz?

Has anyone themselves ever had one of these experiences? I don't mean a scary close to fatality incident. I mean a real, heart stopped and you went somewhere else and came back. (I would be more inclined to listen to what you had to say over the conjections. After all, you've been dead.)

R244 Dude. Read this thread from the beginning before asking. People have posted dozens of personal experiences like that.

WHERE r245?

I see the ones about a bird and dreams but which ones are you referring to?

R244, R246: Look at R11, R60, R62, R75, R87, R88, R93, R111, R125, R126, R152...some personal, some reporting the experiences of others

And then clean your contacts or something....

Thanks R247 but my question goes beyond that and asks how they feel about it!

I am so jealous I didn't get to have one. It seems like they're mostly left with a profound sense of peace. It's just not fair. Why couldn't I have died and gotten over my depression. Why did they let some people get to die and not others. Praying and praying and praying to die and come back of course I guess. I just don't understand why when those who are running the death scheme up there would let some people die and not everybody die it just doesn't make any sense at all. I wish they would just let more people die and have these experiences so it would be a commonly accepted reality. But it isn't. The people who actually do have these experiences come back to talk about it and nobody really believes them so they kind of like just shut down. Or if a faction of them do believe them then they're just kind of regarded as nuts or mistakes or fringe lunatics. Or easily believing people that need something to believe in. But nobody ever really talks about the jealousy that can occur. Like why did you guys get to die and get that glimpse into heaven?? Actually I guess in the movie Heaven Is For Real they talk a little bit about that jealousy with the character played by Greg Kinnear.

anyways just not fair It's just not fair It's just not fair.Life is a very sucks I get why athiests just want to be like f*** the s***. I can't wait to die and never come back because this world just sucks and I'm over it I'm over it. I'm over the f****** after Life too. Everything is a problem even expressing your feelings of frustration is a problem. So f*** it f*** it and f*** it.

I read on the Internet someone’s aunt came back as a ghost, so I BELIEVE IT!!

Boy o boy - they get really, really uptight with those who believe in such things, don't they? Hmmm - I wonder why....

R248 Take ayahuasca or a breakthrough dose of psilocybin. You don’t have to be jealous. Go find the experience. It’s worthwhile.

LSD can make you see things, if that’s what one craves.

For the rest of us, the here and now is textured enough, without seeking out a fantasyland.

These questions and experiences are my favourite thing to discuss. I love hearing the stories. I have to and need to believe there's something after because I need to be with my mother again. There's still that lingering doubt though. Are the dreams and signs really her or imaginings. The thought of my mother not being here anymore in any form and realm makes me feel a sadness to a point of numbness. I'd love to come across a real psychic that some people have had experiences of, that were spot on.

I'm consumed by too much and wish I had the courage to take a leap of faith and end it all with a chance I could be with my mum again. I have no way to get dmt or ayuhauscha.

It's so obvious--once you die, you are reincarnated as a small animal with a relatively small life-span, just to show you humility. After that, your soul is taken on a spaceship to a nearby galaxy where you are given wisdom that will never exist on earth. You're flown back and your guiding alien will find a couple having sex so that they can implant your soul in the resulting zygote. Unfortunately, this is the iffiest part of the process, as many of those zygotes don't take. The alien sticks around in order to re-implant you in another zygote if need be. However, once the alien returns home, you are on your own. If you make it to birth, then your new life begins. If you die in the last stages of pregnancy, you go back to being a small animal and the process repeats itself. If, however, you are aborted, you are sent to the planet of aborted babies. There you will be instructed in different things, such as martial arts, cooking, dancing, and video production. Once you have completed this course, you will be sent back to earth to be implanted (by a different alien) into a zygote in the process of being created as a result of rape. Your next step depends on what happens next (i.e., if the mother gets an abortion, you go back to the aborted babies planet or if she lets you be born you get another life.). It's all pretty simple--Occam's razor. And when you think about it, it's hard to get behind any of those other ideas of what happens when you die.

The US government (& others) are doing incredible research in various areas & whistleblowers are talking (some secretly to a select few).

The video below is well worth watching in its entirety but if you are only going to view part of it, then I recommend starting at 25:00 & watching until the end.

It's very telling about what they are finding out there. I hope it helps you fill in some of the missing blanks that you might be dealing with.

No tunnel for this woman during her NDE =

That woman that probably killed her kids with that man, the woman found in Hawaii, well her bf was an author of a book about near death experience books.

There was an NDE doctor Melvin Morse who was arrested for abusing his stepdaughter. Apparently he was waterboarding her to induce an NDE.

Don't go too crazy with it.

While afterlife is the stuff of fairytales, I’d like for it to look like Lauterbrunnen. A small chalet with an ever-burning fire place. An endless supply of books and Scotch. No boredom, no challenges. Just eternal bliss.

R256, Hey Google "What religion is Dr Mary Neal?"

Dr. Neal is not only an outstanding speaker she is an outstanding Christian woman. She touched many, many lives with her message

I'm not surprised she saw heaven, or that she wrote books, and does a speaking tour about her experience.

What are they R190?

Last night I had a weird dream. We're all alone. Or God is lonely, all alone so split itself up and made different worlds for fun. When you die, the secret is you find out it's all really just you. You can go under and play the game again.

Not sure how much I like that. It's nice we can believe whatever we want. Buddhism, Agnostic, Catholic whatever.

R262, I've started to wonder if we essentially aren't living in some kind of game, or folly, or experiment. It doesn't mean that what we're experiencing here as humans isn't important to us as souls or greater/larger beings, but I can't wrap my head around much of a purpose for making this place happen to begin with, other than folly or experimentation or perhaps some kind of study. I imagine the human experience is potentially one of many different experiences that we're able to undertake when we exist in a more astral plane. For some reason I imagine jars on a shelf, and if you look closely in each jar, there's a universe, and when you want to, you can open the jar and go into it for a flesh and blood experience. Almost like going off to college or on a great vacation. I have this feeling that spirits or souls see this Earthly realm is a bit of a thrill. A novelty in some way. I'm not sure but it's something I think about. I've had a few experiences in my life to show me that there is indeed something beyond - I absolutely believe it due to these few experiences - so trying to make sense of the bigger life beyond this one, when I feel/know that it exists, it a mind-bender.

Very interesting, R263

R263 Rumi has a similar metaphor, except sort of in reverse. Instead of you jumping into a jar, you are the jar. Or, actually in his metaphor, you are a cup of water lifted out of a vast ocean. You’re self-contained and independent from the ocean once you are separated from it—but you are made out of it. You develop your own little ecosystem and your own independent experiences as a cup of water, for a time, and then at some point, the cup is poured back into the ocean and you reintegrate with everything. You lose the form you had, but your experiences are introduced to the practically infinite source from which you came.

Valuable, totally sensible scenario, R265

Bump