Where do people go when they die?

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The best term I’ve heard for where I believe we go after we die is ‘the unmanifest’. Manifest reality is defined by rules. The most visible of these rules are the ones we call physics. The unmanifest is a realm beyond rules. The way I picture this is as worlds emanating from what is called ‘the Source’.

Humans are a class of entity that I call ‘beings’. Beings possess a number of properties including self-awareness, consciousness, form, and ability. When we die we lose exactly one of those properties, form. The rest stick around, I believe we even keep our memories for a time.

Existence without rules presents a big problem for beings, namely boredom. I suspect those that hold beliefs in an afterlife rather than in reincarnation tend to stick around in the ‘machinery’ of the unmanifest for a much longer period of time. I believe these worlds we live in require a lot of behind-the-scenes work to function the way they do for us. Monotheistic afterlife-believers and shaman-types do this work for us.

I believe eventually all beings reincarnate back into a manifest reality. Eternity simply gets boring to a being’s mind after enough time and we want a reset. Shedding our conscious minds and plugging ourselves anew into a brand new body is a sure way of curing that feeling, at least for a little while.

The stress of a new body forces your old memories out of your mind for awhile. But the core of ‘you’ remains and you eventually craft a new body and mind that resembles the old you. After you die again, some of them might come back, but your identity has shifted to revolve around your recent experiences, it would be hugely jarring to a being to suddenly identify with eternity. So a rebirth is literally that.

At one point in time, I was an atheist. I was sure that out of all the varied religious and spiritual belief systems out there, only one of them could be literally true, so therefore the probability was that none of them were true. My thinking was too small. It’s perfectly reasonable for all of them to be true.