/lit/ - Literature

One of the most fascinating hypotheses, transcending yet included the relatively simplistic, shallow dualism of heaven vs hell based off of what religion you choose to believe or disbelieve in and how faithfully and piously you follow it, how much of a “sinner” or “saint” you are, is of the afterlife as an immaterial, subtle continuation of whatever state-of-mind you’ve cultivated while living. A bitter, resentful, depressed, unhappy, incurious, moping person mostly only dependent on their petty pleasures in shallow pastimes — tasty food, drinks, eating of snacks, smokes, sex, TV-and-movie-watching, accumulation of money, successes in the career and education field, and the like — finds themselves when dead in an immaterial body which can no longer sustain such pleasures, instead being in the afterlife subtle state which doesn’t even have the physical, material organs-and-appendages-of-perception to enjoy these.

Have you ever dreamt while hungry or thirsty but food and drink couldn’t actually be enjoyed by you, frustrating as that was, despite that you could “see”, conjure up in your mind’s eye the subtle replication of it?

Conversely, have you heard of NDEs with people saying such things as, “My life flashed before my eyes — all the good and all the evils I did, the joys and sorrows, the ways I helped and hurt others.” A person’s life mainly based on causing suffering to themselves and others might then have to vividly, painfully experience — in a correspondingly hyper-emotional, more personally intense (for being in the very seat of the “soul” now removed from the confines of the physical body and brain) lucid-dream-like-fashion, their life, how dreary, insipid, and uninspiring it was or, conversely, how positive and uplifting. Their own “sins” in the form of bad memories — as well as the subtler spiritual faculty of genuinely being able to feel what suffering it caused to others, which one can more easily cover up and deny to oneself in one’s conscious waking living normal state — would itself be “hell.” And the joy itself of a well-lived life it’s own “heaven.” Think also about whatever deep philosophical thought and spiritual experiencing, whatever relationship one formed to a concept of God, a Ruling Overspirit, in one’s life, which could give one faith and sustain oneself (or not) in the afterlife, the “training” one already did in this life, keeping its brevity in mind, how short it is and how one should prepare oneself for death while already living.