Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,
To be we know not what, we know not where.
JOHN DRYDEN, Aureng-Zebe
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Death is coming for you. Every single moment that passes by brings you one moment closer to the end of your existence on this planet.
Death is something that’s on my mind very often. Not in a morbid and creepy way where I linger on it unhealthily, but I think about it nevertheless. Death is the one thing that awaits all of us. No matter what course your life takes, one day you're body will cease to function and your brain will shut off and the person that you currently are will never exist in this time and place again. Death used to scare me a lot. Not only did I feel that I had so much left to do and so many things yet to experience, but I was afraid of the millions of horrible ways in which one could die. Will the trigger that shuts down my body be a knife to an artery? The pavement to my skull? A cancer in my blood? A defect in my heart? A long drawn out battle with leukemia? That part of death still frightens me. But I suppose the manner in which you die has more to do with life than it does death.
I don't think people talk about death nearly enough. Sometimes it almost seems to me that everything we do is some inane subconscious distraction from the fact that we’re all going to die one day – some of us screaming. It seems that because death is a universal given, we don't have to worry about it much. Yet. Because I'm at a point where I'm okay with the idea of my own death and I've come to peace with it, I feel like I need to get my thoughts about the grim reaper off my chest and talk about some of the post-life possibilities that are on the table. So let's talk death.
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The first thing about the end of your life to be accepted is that what happens to consciousness after death is a giant question mark. You can have your own pet hypothesis about what happens after death, but at the end of the day, you really have no clue what awaits us. If you think you know with absolute certainty what happens to your consciousness after you die, let me rob you of that illusion because you're full of shit. In order to talk about death in an honest way, you have to accept the fact that we all really have no clue how the hell this universe works. We have 11 dimensions that run alongside our own. Reality is a series of vibrations on the subatomic level and there is quite possibly an infinite amount of universes deep down in every atom, and an infinite amount of universes in a sea of infinite universes that form the atom of a larger universe, infinitely upward forever. We know some very rudimentary laws of how some of the universe operates. But we really have no clue what all of this is. And we definitely don't know what happens to us after we die. The universe, as we discover, keeps getting stranger and stranger than our wildest dreams and mythologies can even begin to approach. The sooner you can let go of this false sense of post-mortem certainty, the sooner we can deal with our own mortality in a realistic and more fulfilling way.
Since dying is like being led to a black hole and getting pushed through and we have absolutely no idea what's on the other side, I'm going to let my imagination take over and run through some possibilities and flights of fancy inspired by scientific, religious, and philosophical ideas, as well as just stupid crap that came out of my head.
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Nothing happens. In this possible scenario, after death the consciousness that is me, you, and every Homo sapien that has ever lived experiences nothing. The hunk of living tissue that was our brains shuts off and chemical reactions stop. Your physical body decays, and the consciousness that was once you experiences nothing forever and ever. I think this scenario is the most likely considering that everything we know about consciousness stems from the physical matter that is our brains, and at this point in time, there's no concrete evidence to suggest otherwise. But once again, we know next to nothing about the big questions of the multiverse, so we don't know for certain. Another possibility…
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Theoretical physics postulates that the universe that we know is only one in an infinite sea of universes. In this sea of infinite universes, there is a one where every single eventuality here on earth is realized. There's a universe out there where everything is the same, and you're wearing a red shirt instead of a blue. There's a universe where you're married to Elvis Presley, where the Nazis won WWII, where you don't exist, and instead one of your siblings is living your life, ad infinitum. Physicists say this theory eliminates time travel paradoxes. If you were to travel to the past, you'd be traveling to the past of one of these other parallel universes, affecting their timeline and not this one, as nature doesn’t allow time paradoxes.
What if when you die, you're jacked out of this universe and placed into one of these other universes and you get to live your life over again, with no previous memory of the life you lived in this universe? Perhaps in this new universe, situations arise that are very similar to your experiences in your previous incarnation, and this is the deja vu phenomenon.
Maybe you don't even come back as yourself, but as another person?
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DMT, short for Dimethyltryptamine, is a psychedelic drug that's found in all plants and mammals, including humans. As we’ve begun to study DMT and its effects, we're discovering that its release in our brain plays a part in nocturnal dreams, religious experiences, near death experiences, and meditation highs. People who are given concentrated doses of the drug all report going through a similar experience.
They describe leaving their body and seeing it tethered by a cord of light below them as they begin to float higher and higher until they are above the earth. As they float through the cosmos, they hear soaring ethereal symphonies that swell into storming seas and they begin to see things which they have a hard time describing. Fractals of light fly past them as they see stars and nebulae and neutron star explosions. They begin to pass through tunnels of light, and they report seeing ethereal otherworldly creatures sometimes appearing as reptiles or “mechanical elves” that impart to them wisdom. These very same incorporeal cosmic entities are reported by many cultures across history who have experimented with the drug.Terrence McKenna, a philosopher, psychonaut, research, teacher, lecturer and writer, famously recounts his own personal meetings with these entities:
“There's a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, saying "How wonderful that you're here! You come so rarely! We're so delighted to see you!"
They're like jewelled self-dribbling basketballs and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you're being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get a hold on [them ...] and these things are saying "Don't give in to astonishment", which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say "Don't do that. Pay attention to what we're doing".
Eventually, the user gets sucked back through this journey and ends up back in their body once more. Some subjects have said that they literally lived a thousand years during the course of their 5-15 minute trip. Long term studies of these subjects have shown positive changes in the personality of the user. They’re more open-minded, more positive, more loving, and more accepting. All of them said that the DMT trip solidified within them a sense of oneness with the world and people around them. There are no negative physical side-effects such as addiction or nerve damage that come with DMT usage.
Most of these subjects report that reality feels very slippery when they return from this DMT trip. They describe this life as if it's the illusion, and what DMT did for them was to show "reality" for what it was - a counterfeit. DMT peeled this falsehood away, and for the first time they were swept into the true reality for the first time. Maybe there is no death. Perhaps when we die, we see reality as it is for the first time. The reality that DMT takers claim that they've seen.
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Perhaps before we're born, what is now our consciousness existed in a vast cosmic pool of consciousness. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that this pool consists of what we call souls. When you're conceived and your brain begins to develop inside of your mother's womb, your brain becomes attached to one of these souls that exists in this "ocean of consciousness". So the physical brain that you have in your body acts as some sort of antennae so to speak. Maybe every soul drawn from this pool of consciousness is the same. You’re the same. I’m the same. We’re all one person made of the same soul stuff; the same fabric.
But once this soul becomes attached to our brains and inhabits flesh, biology begins to edit the properties of this blank slate soul and is further molded by our experiences making us unique and different from one another. But at the core, at the root, we’re still one.
From science, we know that if you damage specific parts of the human brain, your personality can change and specific functions cease. Specific functions can be mapped to different parts of your brain; or in this scenario, specific parts of your "brain antennae". When your frontal lobe is damaged, for example, we know that a person shows decreased aggression and is more placid. Maybe when this part of your brain antennae gets damaged, it's unable to receive signals from your soul. Once you die and your antenna is destroyed, your soul continues to exist in this pool of consciousness. You still have experiences, but they're nothing even remotely like what you experienced while on earth. You've returned to the center of the multiverse, and are one with everything and everyone once more, forever and ever and ever.
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The previous scenario was very hippie and Buddha-ish, what with dying and becoming one with the universe and all. Let's explore a darker possibility. Before I saw The Matrix back in 1999, I think I took all of my experiences at face value. What I saw is what existed and reality had no hidden doors. Everything is what I perceive it to be. But what if we're all experiencing some sort of advanced simulation designed for us by some sort of alien creatures? What if this world and everything that we know to be true is really an illusion, a computer simulation designed for us by some super advanced alien civilization that we can't even begin to comprehend? What if the laws of this universe are so different from ours that our minds can't even comprehend it? What if the beings that are truly us that exist outside of the simulation are nothing like us at all? Our consciousness is plugged into this humanity simulation, and once we die, we wake up into this new universe where we're questioned about our experiences here. It's possible.
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You face your creator, like the western monotheists say you will. The God of the Abrahamic faiths, inconsistently represented by monotheists, exists in some shape or form. You die and meet this creator face to face and he condemns you to hell or elevates you to heaven based on whether you lived a good life or not or whether you accepted his son Jesus Christ or whether you acknowledged Mohammed as his prophet. You then go on to live in heaven where you are obliged to worship this creator for all of eternity in what is described as paradise, or to hell where you are tortured by both physical torments and eternal separation from your creator. I find this scenario to be very improbable - but you never know. It could happen.
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Your consciousness is recycled and you're reincarnated based on your deeds in this life. If you do good, you emerge from death in a new vessel, perhaps as a newborn Homo sapien. There are strange stories of children being able to recall, in vivid and specific detail, memories from past lives; details that would have been very difficult for them to have come across otherwise. Perhaps those unfortunate people who have lived this life as complete douchebags are recycled as lower life forms and are reincarnated as a common house cat or a rodent and those of us who live more constructive lives are again reincarnated as human or possibly as a higher being.
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Perhaps once you're free from the confines of this body, you exist as a free roaming spirit. No longer contained by the confines of this meat prison, you're able to soar through the cosmos and go any place you like. You can fly through our solar system, out across the Milky Way, and on and on into the universe to discover it's truths and secrets. Many supernatural enthusiasts and "ghost hunters" who are into supernatural phenomenon such as ghosts often report they often come across souls that are trapped in this realm and in this world. These spirits either were really shitty people in life or they have some sort of unresolved business. For some metapsychological reason, these people can't move on and explore the vastness of the cosmos. They're stuck here and can't escape. Once the building they inhabit is torn down or the people they were connected to in life all die, then they're released.
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There are ultimately countless other possibilities concerning what happens to the human consciousness after death. Once we walk through that black veil, ultimately there is no telling what we could experience. That uncertainty, that fear of the unknown is what has compelled every culture that has ever existed to try and come up with some explanation or theory about what happens to us when our bodies shut off. As humans, we're not comfortable with not knowing. It scares us. We especially don't like the idea of the people we love inhabiting non-existence forever once they leave us. That possibility is also too painful for us to cope with.
Once we walk through that final black veil and jump into the black abyss of death, the abyss that everyone preceding us has jumped into, the abyss where we know not what awaits, we know one thing for certain. As Peter Pan said…
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