I started this random conversation with my fiancé during dinner recently about an "ideal afterlife". This is, admittedly, a morbid topic, but I thought it was an interesting one even though I hadn’t thought of an answer prior to asking him.
What would you hope to experience after your current life ends?
He shared the first thing that came to his mind - to be chilling with his friends and loved ones with no worries. And I asked him, “what if the people whom you acknowledge as friends do not acknowledge you as their friends? Would they still appear in your afterlife?” In that case, would one’s afterlife be “fake” in the sense that it is just based on your memories of others (and the afterlife world) instead of them actually being there so, everybody’s afterlife is essentially different from each others’. Would our afterlives be synchronised (aka we are all in one place, or two places if you believe in the heaven and hell theory) or individualised based on our personal preferences or desires? If it’s the latter, doesn’t it sound like a dream? And, how are we so sure that we are not currently living in the so-called afterlife of our previous lives?
What about our identities? Would we appear in our afterlives in the same physical form that we passed away in (e.g. age and appearance)? Would we also age in the afterlife? This reminded me of the 2020 animation movie “Soul” where every soul takes on the same “Caspar the friendly ghost”-like appearance but has different personalities. Alternatively, Mitch Albom writes in his novel “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” that the significant people whom you encounter in the afterlife may appear in the form that either helps you remember how they are connected to you OR their favourite versions of themselves when they were alive. In fact, all these assumptions are based on our current understanding of human features on Earth which may not ultimately apply in the afterlife.
Let’s return to the previous thought branch. Assuming that I had already ended my previous life and this is one of the many afterlives that I may go through, I think not having the memories of my previous life makes my current life less painful. Ignorance is bliss, right? Perhaps the human mind is fragile and knowing the details of our previous lives might break us or impact our current lives negatively, so we are programmed to just focus on our current lives. There could also be a lot of complications if everyone was allowed to retain their memories from their previous lives. I mean, just look at the protagonist from the anime “Oshi No Ko” (not going to say much or I’ll end up spilling spoilers)!
The possibility of multiple afterlives also brings in the concept of reincarnation. My fiancé shared that reincarnation may not be logical because the human population increases exponentially so, where are the other souls coming from? It might be logical if new souls are constantly being created OR the possibility for us to be reincarnated from or reincarnate into non-humans exists. But, how are souls being created and who gets to decide what our next life is like? Is there really an all-powerful being out there? Since there are already so many mysteries of the world (e.g. how do humans come about in the first place), the additional new questions may not be surprising at all.
My fiancé, being the more practical one between us, ended the conversation by asking if figuring out the afterlife actually matters. Well no, because nobody knows for sure and it’s all uncontrollable. At the end of the day, the topic of the afterlife will forever remain a thought experiment and it may be more worth our time and brain cells to focus on improving our current lives. See what I mean by the default programming of our brains?
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