June 21st, 2010
A question posed by a friend today: "Any thoughts on life after death"
A while back I expressed my rather bleak views on the subject of life after death. And there's no point in revisiting those dismal "that's all that there is" thoughts again. Besides, there's something about the moments of dying that may or may not be a subset of the afterlife: Those near-death experiences that people report (a lot of people, apparently; maybe one in eight or more!) They are able to describe what doctors did and said during their attempts to revive the patient. So how to describe that one?
Speaking strictly as speculation, and not with any amount of belief (or disbelief):
If we start to "let go" of our consciousness and can see and hear what the doctors are up to while we drift away, then maybe that experience is just the beginning of our afterlife ... a representation (sort of like how a dream looks, feels, smells real but isn't) as we drift off to the next life. It's not just a hallucination, it's a visual, aural, etc. representation of the consciousness leaving our body and going off to the collective consciousness of the next world. It may be a journey through another dimension, which is not a physical "up", "down", or "sideways" direction--it' s like folding in on itself to another "place" which isn't reall a place at all. The fact that we can see and hear from above our own bodies is just our brain's way of making sense of the move through the other dimensions; since our senses are designed for only three dimensions, moving through another one can only be represented metaphorically ... so we imagine ourselves "rising above" our bodies as a way of representing our move to the "next level" of existence.
There are many instances where our minds hint at pre-existing knowledge of these other levels of consciousness. Almost as a latent, hidden understanding of the universe. An example from my own life: There are times when, upon waking up groggily in the morning, my intuition tells me that if I want to sleep some more, I only need to move from the current layer of existence to another one, and relive a stretch of time--say, the last 2 hours--in an alternate reality (waste it, apparently, by catching a bit more sleep :) ) It seems so casually obvious to my mind that I can't claim originality for inventing a half-decent plot to a science-fiction novel. It seem a lot more like this concept rolls off the intellectual tongue so effortlessly that it just must be true ... as true and intuitively understood as thoroughly as the concept of gravity, physical space, the inertia of my own body, etc.
I mean, when it comes so naturally to my mind it must be somehow ... natural, shouldn't it?
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