What does your religion say about the afterlife of animals?

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I think that most animals, and most humans, wind up reincarnating quite soon after death, with no awareness on the part of the being that it’s happening.

If you don’t have a spiritual reality during life, then you won’t be able to have much of one after death either. So there’s going to be nothing much connecting one life with the next.

Humans started being spiritual probably immediately after they started talking to each other and sharing ideas. It would have happened as soon as they solved their immediate material needs.

Once the belly is full and the storehouses are filled and the fires built and the tents go up, humans had to grapple with the fact that they had nothing to do and no reason to start. This is the beginning of mysticism, the act of creating meaning where there was none previously.

So what are they going to do? Use their newly-acquired language skills to have fun, think abstractly, and create culture.

The realm between worlds is exactly like this state. There’s nothing to do, and no reason really to start doing anything. You have to come up with stuff to do all by yourself.

What limits you here is what you think is possible. Your beliefs in life constrain your afterlife in a very very real way. So whatever spiritual beliefs you had in life, you’ll get to act out in the afterlife. Once you’re done acting out these beliefs, I believe you go through a process I call dissolution. Without any further will to exist, your energy body will lose integrity.

How you will experience this will, again, depend on your beliefs. Perhaps you’ll just ‘move to the light’. Honestly I think most people will experience their afterlife as an especially vivid dream, from which they’ll wake up from in a new body. Their physical identity just can’t bear non-physical existence. Perhaps they’ll even experience this dream while they’re in infancy, babies here have to be doing something while they’re growing.

Ancient peoples had shamans that did the work of exploring the world after to find meaning and spread these kinds of ideas. But since their lives were based here, their cultures only came up with a small subset of the possible spiritual ideas.

Tribal cults slowly evolved into polytheistic religions, which improved affairs a bit, mostly through sharing of interesting ideas but it wasn’t until monotheism emerged when humans really started moving past primitive spirituality. Christians in particular finally figured out a teachable, repeatable way to teach people how a spiritual reality not wholly dependent on physicality is possible.

So Christians can last quite some time in Heaven before getting bored.

Animals? They just dream a bit before reincarnating. Their consciousnesses need to evolve before they can create enough meaning for themselves in order to do more. Perhaps pets can live with their former owners in the afterlife for as long as the owners are there, existing as ghosts hanging around the physical world until their owners pass.