If there is no afterlife what will become of us after death?

Home - Quora Link

Constraining the solution space to ‘no afterlife’, essentially makes reincarnation or oblivion the only possibilities.

The difference between an afterlife and reincarnation boil down to one thing, the nature and structure of the new world that you go to. Christian Heaven is an afterlife because its rules and structure conform to concepts that we here on Earth have determined. The Jewish and Islamic afterlives are similar.

Buddhist reincarnation has you come back to this world, in another body, human or animal. There is also the possibility of reincarnation into a heavenly realm in Buddhism. This is still reincarnation rather than afterlife because the new world and your place in it are completely divorced from your life here. Also possible is “Earthly” reincarnation into another world besides Earth.

Contemplation of this reveals an in-between option. What would it mean to mix up the ideas of afterlife and reincarnation? This is where “astral realms” lie, and what my current belief structure revolves around. You retain your current consciousness, imbued into an astral ‘body’, and continue existence in what the Buddhists call “formless realms.” This lasts until you tire of existence, then you ‘fall apart’ and your essence reincarnates back into an Earthly realm.

I’ve also heard it called the “Unmanifest.” This is an interesting terminology, manifest reality. What makes reality manifest? If you do enough meditation, you can envision and even explore all sorts of different ‘riffs’ off of the sort of reality we enjoy.

Essentially if you take “what it means to be human” and boil it down to the bare minimum, human consciousness is a form of agency that is facilitated by our bodies, brains, and minds. The human experience is to feel somewhat disconnected from those three things, arising the beginning of dualism.

Nondualism, or Neo-Advaita, a conception of enlightenment dreamed up in the 30s to sell Buddhist mysticism to Westerners, asserts that this separation doesn’t actually exist. In its zeal to sell books, it has become fundamentally disconnected from the rest of Buddhist theology, as such Western Buddhists have very little in common with Eastern Buddhists in terms of motivations and values.

It’s unclear in my mind that Neo-Advaita is actually true or not. The mere fact that you can explore formless realms indicates to me that they do actually exist. My personal feelings is that Neo-Advaita is a corruption of Buddhism that happens when you try to introduce Western materialism to it.

The lifecycle of existence that Eastern Buddhism proffers seems much more realistic to me, where you continue existing for perhaps hundreds of lifetimes until you go through the work of removing the fetters, then you have a few more in heavenly realms and then you’re done existing. More realistic, but I’d still call it wrong. Buddhism, like Christianity, has yet to catch up to the concept of evolution.

When you take into account evolution, and apply it to the concept of conscious agency, you can derive a conception of enlightenment from it. In this conception, there’s no real room for an ‘end’ to evolution, species on Earth don’t end unless snuffed out, rather they evolve into new species.

So animal consciousnesses evolve and eventually find themselves in human bodies, where they eventually evolve to, well, what exactly? I explored this question years ago, and my conclusion was that so long as an agent’s environment and form can contain it’s ambitions, it can continue existing in that environment indefinitely. So there’s no real reason to posit an end to conscious existence.