Do enlightened beings ever have visions of the afterlife?

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I consider myself enlightened, and I get afterlife visions all the time. They come often enough that I consider it part of my journey to actually understand as much as I can of the afterlife.

My visions are extremely difficult to articulate the full meaning of, but I guess I can try. The other day I was walking to work, walking is when I get most of my visions, but I suddenly had a vision of interacting with someone I knew who was dead. We didn’t get very deep, our personalities ‘clashed’.

I then realized that, for the same reason we get bored in Earthly life, we’d get supremely bored in the afterlife. The reason is that it’s hard to generate meaning all on your own. You can get interested in something, then spend a bunch of time diving into it, and because you can do anything you want in the afterlife, eventually you’ll answer all the questions you had about it, and you’ll have no further desire to go any further.

The Jewish afterlife, sheol, is a dull place, where most people just kind of sleep until what they call “The World To Come” comes to pass. It’s not very interesting so most people just sleep. I imagine them as having varied dreams for awhile, but even the dreams get uninteresting so they’ll settle into a deep stasis that can last for hundreds of years between ‘wakeups’.

Reasons for waking up would involve a newly dead person wanting to meet his ancestors. Sure, wake up, say hi, say some encouraging things, but if you could have solved the problem of making the afterlife interesting, you’d have done it for yourself.

I don’t believe in any particular afterlife, but I do believe that the afterlife is defined by the beliefs you have in this life. I can see this easily turning into the Jewish afterlife, particularly if you have this amazing idea of a future world.

The need for the afterlife to depend on Earthly beliefs is a weird and tragic one. But I think omnibenevolence ultimately demands it. Otherwise you’d be having religious beliefs imposed on you against your will. And even if you want to exist forever, how invested are you going to be even if other people aren’t?

I personally could, in my afterlife, convince someone that there’s a whole big world out there beyond their religious beliefs. I would obviously be motivated to do this with the people I knew in life. But for me to be motivated to do this to people I didn’t know, can easily be seen as proselytising.

A friend of mine had visions of people ‘corraling’ souls in the afterlife into, well, I never got an answer about what. The souls just kept following the person in front of them and didn’t even know they could leave, even though it would have been easy. And the ones who did leave were mostly looked at as stupid by people around them. At any rate this would be limited by the individual’s willingness to keep doing it. Most people are incredibly impressionable, what keeps them from being impressed on is the lack of anyone to bother to want to do that to them.

The ethical dilemma to solve would be whether someone’s more or less inspired vision of a better afterlife is better than the classic Jewish afterlife of just sleeping waiting for a better world.

Reincarnation has people diving back into Earthly-type lives to improve their consciousness. Maybe they’ll achieve enlightenment or whatever. I feel like it’s an option for anybody who loses the motivation to continue on their afterlife journey.