Afterlife
The
afterlife (or
life after death) is a generic term referring to a
continuation of
existence, typically
spiritual and experiential, beyond this world, or after death. This article is about current generic and widely held or reported concepts of afterlife.
See also: Underworld, for a comprehensive catalog of specific traditions about afterlife.Most cultures past and present, have contained some belief in an afterlife. This belief is usually manifested in a
religion, as it pertains to phenomena beyond the ordinary experience of the natural world. Various evidences have been advanced throughout the ages for the existence of an afterlife:
*Testimony of individuals who claim experiential knowledge of facets of afterlife
**by having died and then been sent back to this life (
near-death experiences)
**by having visited the afterlife during a period of unconsciousness (
out-of-body experiences)
**by having seen the afterlife during a revelatory vision
**by a unique personal gift of remembering an afterlife (before-life) existence
**by having communicated with (or received a message from) someone who has died (
after death communication or
electronic voice phenomena)
*Testimony of individuals who are thought to have special insights into the afterlife
**holy ones
**miracle workers
**spectacular converts
*Claimed testimony of visitors from the afterlife
**God(s)
**Angels
**Spirits
**Demons
*Human intuitions of goodness thought to emanate from the afterlife
*Rational philosophical or theological arguments
**The immortal nature of the soul
**The natural desire for immortality
Formal characterizations of the afterlife have elaborated these testimonies in innumerable ways. These traditions may be broadly distinguished by how they answer questions such as:
*What happens at the moment of death?
*Is the afterlife a normal life, or a different type of existence?
*Are afterlife conditions a consequence of good and bad actions during life?
**If so, what are these rewards and punishments? Who is assigned to which fate?
*Is the afterlife eternal?
*Is the afterlife unchanging or ever-changing?
*Is it possible to reincarnate as a human or another form of life?
*If there is an afterlife, then is there a "
prelife" (life before birth)?
Belief in an afterlife usually entails the belief that something survives the body when death occurs, such as an immaterial
soul or spirit. Philosophers have long debated whether the soul or mind has an immaterial or incorruptible quality; see, for example, the
Mind-body problem. Some pantheistic systems have seen the afterlife as a process of (re-)assimilation into a cosmic spirit.
While the major monotheistic religions of the world (
Judaism,
Christianity,
Islam, and their offshoots) almost universally preach some form of
mind-body dualism, many Eastern "religions", such as the many branches of
Buddhism and
Taoism do not contain any such claims, and may in fact preach ideologies that are opposed to it.
Zen Buddhism in particular is famous for
koans and parables that are meant to teach that the nature of consciousness is transient and/or
illusory, with some schools going so far as to say that even the concept of a "self" is fundamentally flawed.
Many religious traditions have held that the afterlife will resolve justice by assigning rewards and punishments to people according to how they lived their lives. This belief can be found throughout the ancient world, especially in Greek and Roman religion, as well as in various Asian religions. To the extent that the afterlife is a form of justice, it is usually restricted to humans, as other animals are not held responsible for their actions.
The afterlife played an important role in
Egyptian religion. The believer had to act well and know the rituals explained in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead.If the corpse had been properly
embalmed and entombed in a
mastaba, the defunct would relive in the
Fields of Yalu and accompany the Sun god on its daily ride.If, during the
psychomachia, the souls of the defunct were found faulty, the demon
Ammit would eat them.
In the monotheistic traditions of
Judaism (see
Jewish views of the afterlife), most sects of
Christianity, and
Islam, human
souls spend
eternity in a place of
happiness or
torment, such as
heaven,
hell, or
purgatory or
limbo.
Most Christians deny that entry into Heaven can be properly earned, rather it is a gift that is solely God's to give through his unmerited grace. This belief follows the theology of St. Paul:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. The Augustinian, Thomistic, and Lutheran theological traditions all emphasize the necessity of God's undeserved grace for salvation, and reject so-called Pelagianism, which would make man earn salvation through good works. Not all Christian sects accept this doctrine, leading many controversies on grace and free will, and the idea of
predestination.
In the informal folk beliefs of many Christians, the souls of virtuous people ascend to Heaven and are converted into
angels upon their deaths. However, a more literal reading of scripture suggests that the dead wait until the
Last Judgment, which is followed by resurrection for the faithful. More formal Christian theology makes a sharp distinction between
angels, who were created by
God before the creation of humanity, and
saints, who are virtuous people who have received immortality from the grace of God.
In view of the eternity of afterlife, some consider regular life as relatively unimportant, except for determining one's fate in the afterlife. Life is just a provisional situation, and the metaphor of a tent as provisional housing facility is used as quoted below:
For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.(
2 Corinthians 5:1)
Some sects, such as the Universalists, believe in
universalism which holds that all will eventually be rewarded regardless of what they have done or believed.
Jehovah's Witnesses interpret
Ecclesiastes 9:5 as precluding an afterlife:
For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.They believe that following Armageddon a resurrection in the flesh
[Acts 24:15 KJV] to an Edenic Earth
[Insight on the Scriptures vol. 2 pp 574-6] will be the reward for resisting the tendency to sin and that eternal death (non-existence) is the punishment for sin lacking repentance.
[Reasoning From the Scriptures pp 168-175][Jehovah's Witnesses website on Hell]During the European Enlightenment, many
deist freethinkers held that belief in an afterlife with reward and punishment was a necessity of reason and good moral order.
Another afterlife concept which is found among
Hindus,
Rosicrucians,
Spiritists, and
Wiccans is
reincarnation, as evolving humans life after life in the
physical world, that is, acquiring a superior grade of
consciousness and
altruism by means of successive reincarnations. This succession is conceived to lead toward an eventual
liberation or
spiritual rebirth as spiritual beings. However, some practioners of eastern religions follow a different concept called
metempsychosis which purposes that human beings can
transmigrate into
animals,
vegetables or even
minerals. One consequence of the Hindu and Spiritist beliefs is that our current lives are also an afterlife. According to those beliefs events in our current life are consequences of actions taken in previous lives, or
Karma.
Buddhist, however, views that
rebirth takes place without a
self (similar to soul) and that the process of rebirth is simply a continuation of the previous life. The process of being reborn as any other being is based on your
karma. And from a Buddhist prespective, the current life is actually a continuation of the pastlife.
Rosicrucians
[Max Heindel, The Rosicrucian Christianity Lectures (The Riddle of Life and Death), 1908, ISBN 0-911274-84-7], in the same way of of those who have had
near-death experiences, speak of a
life review period occurring immediately after
death and before entering the afterlife's
planes of existence (before the
silver cord is broken), followed by a
judgment, more akin to a Final Review or End Report over one's life
[Max Heindel, Death and Life in Purgatory - Life and Activity in Heaven].
Some
Neopagans believe in personal reincarnation, whereas some believe that the energy of one's soul reintegrates with a continuum of such energy which is recycled into other living things as they are born.
Sikhs also believe in reincarnation. They believe that the soul belongs to the spiritual universe which has its origins in God. It is like a see-saw, the amount of good done in life will store up blessings, thus uniting with God.A soul may need to live many lives before it is one with God.
Some conceptions of the afterlife are not overtly religious. Certain scientific fields developed in the
20th and
21st centuries, that were previously either unknown or purely theoretical, support interesting speculation and questions regarding the afterlife.
Is consciousness a sole result of the specific configuration of matter of a living brain, or do some forms of consciousness or experience remain present in the matter and energy that used to be a living brain? If the latter is true, even in part, then it is not certain that the subjective experience of a being's consciousness ends at the time of death, which could be interpreted as a form of afterlife.
Also, the nature of consciousness and
sentience itself is a subject of wide debate, and not agreed upon by any means. The emerging field of
cognitive science attempts to study the nature of consciousness, sentience, and cognition. It is now possible to study the brain at moments closer to death than ever before, which may lead to insights regarding the cessation of cognition, and possibly even insights into the subjective experience of consciousness at those times. Greater understanding of these concepts, and the processes that produce them, might have wide-ranging consequences for conceptions of an afterlife.
The emerging field of
artificial intelligence in
computing presents interesting questions regarding an experience of afterlife, as well: If a
robot is created which possesses cognition and problem-solving comparable to a human, is that robot considered conscious or "alive"? If so, can he, she, or it "die"? The memories of such robots, if they are ever constructed, could theoretically be composed of some form of electronic storage and stored on devices identical in purpose to modern
hard drives, which can be completely copied in a matter of seconds or hours. If a
backup is made of such a theoretical robot's memory at some point, and that robot's current memory then is damaged, destroyed, or rendered inoperable, and then restored from the backup, in what sense, if any, does the newly restored robot's experience constitute
resurrection - especially if, for instance, a
wireless network is used to back up the robot's memory to the exact moment of destruction? Assuming that artificial intelligence
research continues at the rapid pace it has shown so far, these and related questions may become quite meaningful in the future.
Philosophical arguments
Some non-believers in an afterlife, influenced by
positivism, have argued that claims of an afterlife are
unverifiable and
unfalsifiable, and therefore cognitively
meaningless. Some have argued that, on the contrary, particular claims concerning the nature of the afterlife are verifiable and falsifiable: all one has to do to verify/falsify them is die. On the other hand, they argue, the belief in the absence of an afterlife can be attacked as vacuous on the grounds that the statement "I cease to exist" is unverifiable, unfalsifiable, and therefore by the same token cognitively meaningless. In particular, the concept of our own non-existence is inconceivable:
*What experience corresponds to your own non-existence? None.
*If there is a life after death, then is there a life before birth? And if there was, can that experience be remembered?
Schopenhauer in particular argued that the idea of an afterlife or immortal soul is contradicted by the fact that it is impossible to attach sense to such a concept as the soul without reference to characteristics such as
consciousness, which depend on such physical entities as the brain. Such concepts he argued, are beyond our reach and
noumenal (thus unknowable).A counter-argument to that is that
consciousness does not directly depend on physical entities, merely that our bodies are merely "temporary tools crafted by our souls" (which leads back to the idea of
reincarnation).
*
Akhirah*
Animism*
Atheism*
Death*
Doomsday*
Electronic voice phenomenon*
Elysium*
Enlightenment*
Eschatology*
Eternity*
Exaltation (Mormonism)*
Ghosts
*
Heaven*
Hell*
Immortality*
Jewish eschatology*
Life*
Mictlan*
Near-death experience*
Out-of-body experience*
Pre-Birth communication*
Reincarnation*
Salvation*
Soul*
Undead*
Valhalla*
A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife*
Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Death and Immortality*
A Tibetian Buddhist View of the Afterlife*
Reincarnation and the Afterlife*
Encyclopedia of Afterlife Theories*
Near-Death Experiences and the Afterlife*
Common problems with the concept of Heaven*
International Scientific Research into 'the Survival after physical death'*
Rosicrucians: The Light Beyond Death, pdf file, compilation, 2001
*
Afterlife at
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*
Does Mind Survive Physical Death?, pdf file, Cardiff University and Liverpool John Moores University, UK
*
VERITAS Research Program
