/lit/ - Literature

>>20704459
For a while, you might actually have the sensations of “starving” and “dehydrating”, great hunger and thirst in the afterlife, while the immaterial energetic subtle desire persists but the physical capability to fulfill it doesn’t. This might all be referred to in traditional Christian terminology as the state of “purgatory”, in which the subtle body literally purges itself, in a long period of sorrow and uncomfortableness at being unable to eat, drink, or have sex, as in the Ancient Greek myth of Tantalus, or its boredom at not having the same comfortable repetitive stimuli of the physical world and only being able to exist in this lucid-dream-like disembodied projection in the void, as in the myth of Sisyphus.

After a while you can imagine this second subtle sheath of energetic desires, emotions, memories, remorse or lack-thereof, and the like, eventually wearing away, purging itself of this in a long-drawn out painful process and eventually withdrawing into the yet higher, purer, subtler intellectual soul, the seat of the real inner person and its actual spiritual depth and goodness (or lack thereof), which might finally just give away to a long-drawn out blissful state of rest, finally having purged the memories and desires of physical life as well as the remorse for how poorly it was lived, entering now into something like a further drawn-out deep dream like state of peace. You can find traces of an afterlife cosmology like this in systems like the Tibetan Buddhist cosmology system of the Bardot (after-death states) as well as the various Hindu yogic schools of thought and cosmological systems, as well as the idea of various koshas/sheaths corresponding to different states of consciousness and intensities- or vividnesses-of-experiencing — the waking physical sheath, the dreaming energetic subtle sheath corresponding to dreaming sleep, and then finally the causal/mental/spiritual ego corresponding to the state of deep sleep. With the death of the body, there are only the subtle immaterial energetic bodies to maintain its experiencing, which, again, would primarily be heavenly or hellish based off of its “karmas,” which could literally be said to be its own quality-of-experiencing it cultivated.

Even in Abrahamic faiths and by some Christian theologians, something like this understanding of the afterlife as essentially “self-determined” in a way — not that God “decides to condemn some souls into Hell because He is such a tyrannically autocratic bigot”, but that people create their own heaven or hell based off their own faithful experiencing of the presence of God and their own love of God, or lack thereof.

>What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky