How do we know an afterlife exists

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>>18618583

>>18618583
We don't know one way or the other. We can only hope and have faith.

By dying

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>>18618583
We don't. All we can do is hope there isn't

>>18618619
Why would you hope there isn't?

>>18618638
Not that anon, but most religions believe that there is a heaven and a hell and i'd rather that there'd be no afterlife at all then for people who we would consider innocent or at least neutral as humans to suffer in hell for an eternity.

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>>18618638
Immortality is a curse not a gift. Yeah a couple hundred thousand years might be great but existing for billions and billions of years is something I wouldn't wish on my worse enemy. I just want everything to end when I die

>>18618646
I don't think so anon, I think that's just Christianity everything else doesn't seem to differentiate between the two.

>>18618646
Catholicism says that everyone gets to go to Heaven eventually, some people have to spend some time in purgatory and the people who go to Hell have to stay there long enough to learn their lesson. Which could be trillions of years, but yeah, everyone gets to go to Heaven eventually.

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Wake up please

>>18618658
That's just not true though.
Purgatory is about people who have been saved but due to venial sins that weren't confessed/forgiven during life, can't immediately enter heaven until they are punished for them.
People who commit mortal sins like rejecting/not following christ, murder, etc are still tortured in hell forever.

>>18618664
Well if that reality is anything like this one, I think I'll sleep in a bit longer.

>>18618666
I dunno, I heard that on the internet. Are you trying to tell me people might be lying on the internet?

>>18618670
Stay woke

>>18618646
Though I was raised Christian, I don't believe in their version of Heaven and Hell. I believe that it's up to the individual person on where they end up.

>>18618653
Time is supposed to have no meaning in the afterlife.

>>18618583
In the Gita, Krishna says we can see ourselves going from one body to another in a single life, thus it is not a difficult conclusion that the death of this body is just a more abrupt change of body for the self.

> Bg 2.13 — As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.
> Bg 2.22 — As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.

Technically there is no "after" life. There is no "before" life. We are eternal beings, whose awareness is limited and often covered by the temporary.

>>18618657
There are the Heavens and the Hells, but they are simply temporary places within the material realm. Just as there are heavenly and hellish places here on Earth, there are places not on Earth that are much better or much worse.

But in Vaishnavism, along with this is the difference between the eternal and the temporary, the spiritual and material. Heaven isn't the realm of God. Heaven is for people who wanted to enjoy for themselves, but chose a religious path to achieve it.

> Bg 9.20 — Those who study the Vedas and drink the soma juice, seeking the heavenly planets, worship Me indirectly. Purified of sinful reactions, they take birth on the pious, heavenly planet of Indra, where they enjoy godly delights.
>Bg 9.21 — When they have thus enjoyed vast heavenly sense pleasure and the results of their pious activities are exhausted, they return to this mortal planet again. Thus those who seek sense enjoyment by adhering to the principles of the three Vedas achieve only repeated birth and death.

>>18618646
Do you not realize that there are ideas about the afterlife other than those of American fundamentalist Christians?

>>18619059
They are all equaly impossible to prove, so why bother, just worship what your ancestors did.

>>18618583
Don't believe we do, and I'm perfectly comfortable with that

>>18619062
I think you just don't think about the implications rather than being 'comfortable' with the idea of non-existence

>>18619061
I don't worship anything. I wish I had a beautiful succubus mistress to worship, but I don't.

>>18620818
That's not good anon. You were made to worship. Without worship you will break down like a car that never gets driven. Fulfill your purpose

There is an afterlife, you're just not conscious of it. You'll rot and go back to the ground where pretty flowers will grow.

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here is the truth.

The Afterlife is real
Reincarnation is real
Your Soul is timeless
After death you have a choice
Spend the rest of eternity united with The Creator
Or come back here to do more work
The choice is yours to make - and noone will hold it against you if you choose to rest.

Know this however: Suffering creates education.
Education progresses our souls to even higher levels of perfection.
The reason for life IS to suffer because that is the way we find meaning and understanding.
God has a sense of humor and there is no good or evil. Just is.

>>18620931
fuck you asshole, don't include me in that "we" of yours, i'm pretty sure it's cunts like you who destroyed the meaning in my life all while i was like "PLEASE NO, PLEASE STOP!"

and if you don't understand my accent, well i don't believe you with your "education progression", FUCK YOU YOU BITCH.

by the way, YOUR DEFINITION OF "God" MIGHT NOT BE EVERYBODY ELSE'S!!!!!!

>>18620931
This sounds about right

How do we know life exists?

>>18620884
Eat a dick, I dont have to waste my life on some faceless idea

I am going to play the fedoratheist. There is no afterlife, science proves that. Because well we have measured that after you die, you are dead. It is in a peer review OK. Stop your wishful thinking. Now can anyone tell me where my penis is? I can't seem to find it?

>>18620884
I don't find anything in this world worthy of my worship, and I've already broken down anyway.

>>18620953 isn't me, if you were wondering. I'm the guy you replied to.

>>18621014
You don't need to disprove anything. The burden of proof is on the person that made the claim.

The fact we are conscious now means that it can happen again. If its happened before it can happen again

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>>18620940
The Creator created each one of us individually so we could grow to be more.

Know that every single encounter, person, and event in your life was already pre-determined

Not by God, but by you.

>>18621556
Can confirm, everything (even the small things) happened to us for a reason. To understand why is the same as to understand the creator

>>18618666
you'd know better than me satan

>>18618638
Because they are edgy atheist who don't want to be rapped by demons for billions of years.

>>18620931
You're not supposed to tell them that you doofus.

>>18618583
The Bible.
Now go drink your fluoride.

>>18620931
>The reason for life IS to suffer
>God
>is no good or evil

There's always a light at the end of the dark tunnel, that's what I always say about the afterlife.

>>18618583
Think hard enough.

Get into such a deep thought to where you can comprehend infinity and that the closest way to discover the secrets of the universe is by using the machine that the universe itself has blessed you with. Use your brain to envision every possible scenario in your life and the future, and eventually the wires in your head will connect to synchronize with the multiverse itself. Understand that every millimetre of movement has a theoretically infinite alternation

>>18621735
I dunno about yourself, I like the bible because it further evaluates and reaffirms what I already feel for God and Gods relationship with me.

I wasn't born with a bible in my hand. I went to the bible for solace.

Maybe something of you will remain after you die or maybe not. Either way I'll be fine.

>>18620931
Good and Evil exists so there is suffering to learn from. It's a give and take that's balanced. Nigga ying yang

>>18618638
So they can gloat about how tough they are for being okay with it, and call you "childish" or "arrogant" for wanting your existence to continue.

>>18618583
The afterlife is a state of mind. Whatever you believe truly what you deserve (even if you are a narcissist you know what you deserve in death) your mind will follow

>>18622341
That sounds like a bad situation for people who die with depression and self-loathing that makes them believe they don't deserve anything.

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>>18621860
>>18621918

>>18618583
This is the afterlife

There is no afterlife.
Make the most of your life, because that's all you get.
Maybe when you die, your "soul" gets recycled into the void along with everything else, but you will not be conscious of this. Your remains will decay and become food for other life forms. In a way, your "lifeforce" will transfer through the soil and feed the worms and the plants, but this is only if you die in the wild or are buried without being embalmed inside a coffin. Unfortunately, modern man has largely removed the only benefit to the earth which decomposing human bodies should provide. Cremation just puts more CO2 into the atmosphere, and nobody gets buried without toxic chemicals and treated pinewood preventing any kind of natural cycle from taking place. I digress. The afterlife is a fantasy. The only thing after life is death.

>>18620931

I wonder if you get a preview into the difficulty of the life that you'll be taking on. For instance, my life is pretty boring but easy going at the same time. If my next life were to be even easier, and perfect my soul at the same time? That'd be a tough pass up.

Plus, I don't know how cool the creator is, nor how I would experience that. Is it a conscious thing? Do I have any abilities as a human? Tough choice.

>>18625945
>Make the most of your life, because that's all you get.
I hate when people throw out this platitude. It could only really work as advice if you're an able-bodied person in the first world.

>Your remains will decay and become food for other life forms. In a way, your "lifeforce" will transfer through the soil and feed the worms and the plants
No one gives a fuck if your physical remains will feed plants and worms.

>Unfortunately, modern man has largely removed the only benefit to the earth which decomposing human bodies should provide. Cremation just puts more CO2 into the atmosphere, and nobody gets buried without toxic chemicals and treated pinewood preventing any kind of natural cycle from taking place.
Why should anyone give a fuck about this?

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>>18618583
Some don't believe, but they don't know.

I can say for me I've had experiences. One incident was back in the day when people had answering machines with cassette tapes. In essence, when I went to clean out the house. The power was not working, fuse box shut off.

Anyways, there was a message on the answering machine. The machine wasn't plugged in nor did it have a tape in it. The person who passed said on the machine, " I'm alright, the people here are alright, it is good, don't worry".

Read into gnosticism and look for gnostic techniques of meditation

Might as well keep this thread going. Because there will be another in a day anyway. Answer is nobody knows what the fuck happens.

>>18621918
Good and evil are flawed concepts your mind creates in an attempt at self preservation. You wouldn't place the labels on the concepts of existence/nonexistence or life/death, so why place them on constructive/destructive concepts? Ergo the only evil/good that exists is within man.

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>>18625970
Since you have a very long time to reincarnate you can do whatever you want,
as no soul just wants hard lessons.

But, just because someone is wealthy and has the good life, doesn't mean he has easier lessons.
It just depends on the type of situations that dictate the level of learning you receive.

>>18627425
If this is true, I'm going to take a really fucking long vacation when I get there. I've had enough misery and "hard lessons" for ten lifetimes already.

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>>18618666
nice trips
hell is a prison sentence for your soul so imagine 13 generations or something

>>18627486
This, pretty much. If the afterlife transitions smoothly and I don't get stuck being told by some god where to go, I definitely don't want to be on this planet for a while. Plenty of times I've tried to help someone and got bitched at or fucked over because of it. There isn't enough good that I've experienced to try and roll the dice and hope for the best

>>18627572
There is no roll of the dice.

So, you arrive at the afterlife, and you don't meet god. You meet a version of yourself who chose your life for a reason. In fact you are that person much more than you are the person you are now. You won't be "forced" to come back, you will choose to try again.

So if you committed suicide, or dodged your lessons or experiences you'll come back to an identical life.

You will have successfully annoyed yourself a bit though.

>>18627601
That doesn't exactly sound any better

>>18618583
We don't, unless you consider ancient desert goat herder mythology to be proof.

>>18627636
Well, if you can't stand your life, and don't want that sort of pressure you ought to try to release your karma.

It takes a bit more effort than saying a prayer off google, but with a bit of meditation and intent you can have this life for yourself.

Just promise not to do evil with it after that point, ok?

>>18627655
Depending on the definition of evil, that sounds far more agreeable

>>18618583
we don't, which is why it's called belief and faith not facts backed up by multi - source evidence

>>18627681
Basically don't hurt others, and don't sow the seeds of harm to others.

As you say, there is enough badness here already.

You might even find it easier and more satisfying to do good work WITHOUT the lesson of rejection and futility as a burden.

>>18627741
Sounds a lot better actually. Rejection and futility sounds like a lot of bullshit I don't want to have to learn at the same time as whatever else there is to do. What kind of meditation does it take anyway? 10 minutes a day or something?

>>18623757
That webm looks similar to some LSD visuals. Needs to move slower though

>>18627636
>That doesn't exactly sound any better
far better than being condemned to a pit of fire for eternity no?

>>18618589
Oh my god that's so cute. Thank you so much for that image, anon.

>>18618638
Because any eternity will eventually become soul deadeningly boring.

>>18627760
It's a bit much to sum up in here, but send me an e-mail and I'll explain how to do.

[email protected]

>>18627801
It doesn't sound better because when you find out your prison is yourself there's no hope of escape.

>>18625945
lmao
you're basically justifying someone raping your family if they wish to
"make the most of your life"
literally the most retarded statement ever made, as if "making the most" is actually the only point of existing
as if the only point in existing is basic hedonism
maybe its one of the driving forces that lead us but baby you're far far away from the truth

>>18627650
or the other 10 million religions that consider an afterlife

>>18627830
And...? People used think the universe rotated around the earth and a bunch of other crazy shit, but that doesn't make it true.

>>18627869
yeah but you kinda referenced abrahamic religions only as if afterlife was exclusive to them

>>18627879
Point is that we have no evidence to suggest the existence of an afterlife outside of religions/philosophies that have been passed through word-of-mouth and ancient texts that have been retranslated, reinterpreted, edited and otherwise distorted countless times over the ages.

>>18627901
I am not the person you are directing this to. But this is exactly why I remain agnostic on this subject. I think religion overreaches and I think science does to. We simply cannot measure a subjective experience. I choose to have no belief, not in a reductive materialist sense or in a religious.

>>18627601
>So, you arrive at the afterlife, and you don't meet god. You meet a version of yourself who chose your life for a reason. In fact you are that person much more than you are the person you are now. You won't be "forced" to come back, you will choose to try again.
>So if you committed suicide, or dodged your lessons or experiences you'll come back to an identical life.
Fuck that. There's no "lesson" to be learned or "experience" to be gained from my continued misery and humiliation except the complete and utter despair brought on by the certainty that I've been abandoned, rejected, and mocked by the entire fucking universe. What's the point of continuing to exist in this world where I'm despondent and self-hating to the point of being psychotic, all because of things I have no control over?

I can't conceive of any version of me volunteering for this shit again.

>>18627821
Not to mention that there are huge numbers of people who are literally incapable of "making the most of it" because they're crippled, horribly scarred, sexually dysfunctional, or whatever. What do the "make the most of it" people have to say to people like that except "Oh well, sucks to be you!"

According to http://www.near-death.com/index.html there are some fairly common events in most NDEs.

1. The tunnel. Being dragged through a dark tunnel until you reach a pinpoint of light.

2. Life Review. You entire life gets reviewed from birth to death. The only thing that is judged during this review is how you treated other people all other concerns are irrelevant.

3. Interaction with God. Generally described as sending out unconditional, indescribable feelings of Love, Compassion and Acceptance.

>>18618583

There are relative truths and absolute truths the difference only being in degree.
Just like the truths in finite mind and those held in the infinite mind will be greatly different in degree, mastering the art of mentalist and understanding
all the different levels of causation are key to freezing the pendulum of rhythm and staying polarized on the positive side of the scale. Birth is unity when body is bound to soul they become one. Through the process of experience,
self is created which perceives the world in the way it sees itself separate to the body giving us the subject/object phenomena or duality.

>>18628107 (cont)

But if one through mental alchemy is able to will the mind into creating new neural pathways overriding previous ones with a new map then control of the third eye is obtained and though infinite experience comes infinite wisdom.
It is not how much you know, but how practical and useful what you know is and its method of application. By being and creating a self I believe when we die that our manifested self/ego binds. As, mind(self/ego), body, soul become
one the body goes back to the earth and if the mind is cultivated in such a way it will reach out and leave with the soul if worthy and proven.

>>18618583
I had a big problem with this question, or maybe the idea of not existing. Recently I began reading philosophy, and it is helping.

"For to fear death, men, is infact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for thehuman being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils."- Plato's Apology of Socrates

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I just kinda thought that when we die we float around the astral plane until El/The Creator gives us a task or we act as spiritual entities to those on earth or other terrestrial beings.
If so, I'm totally visiting the annunaki.

>>18620931
bravo Plato

Watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB2tQmT1OJM

>>18627901
That's not true. We have NDEs, OBEs, after-death communications, terminal lucidity, and other things that suggest consciousness may not be generated by or dependent on the physical brain. These are things that have been looked at scientifically by people with solid credentials, like Pim van Lommel and Bruce Greyson.

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Nobody really knows if it exists, but I've thought pretty hard about it in my younger days.
If there is a heaven it is hardly what I would call an after"life", but more like an after"understanding".
Finally joining with the most wise and powerful being in the universe would essentially be like becoming that being. A bit like the hindu afterlife if I remember correctly.
What I mean be "becoming" is that heaven would be the individual being granted the entirety of wisdom in the universe, which power would immediately follow.
Essentially your consciousness would be brought to the level of that which this ultimate being has been at for an eternity. Generally I refer to it as the "existence", mostly being existence is probably the most insane miracle of all.
At this level, your consciousness will lose it's individuality as you see things through widest lens in the universe. You would actually become a part of this divine entity.
There's more to expand upon, but Id rather keep it short than just start preaching for pages unprovoked.

>>18628997
>At this level, your consciousness will lose it's individuality
If that's true, there might as well *not* be an afterlife.

>>18629002
That is why I said its not so much of an afterlife as an afterunderstanding. I wish it were more chaotic and fun, but really it's the only form of eternal rest that made any sense to me. Perhaps this divine entity watches over those who seek it's wisdom. Perhaps it feels an immense love and joy for the universe it makes up. Individual or not, it would hardly be something you could chose for yourself.

>>18618602
>By dying

As stupid as that sounds, and is, it's also the only 100% real answer any of us are likely to ever find.

I do think however that nothing really happens when we die, it's easy for us to forget that life is only life for us due to our consciousness, without being conscious not only us but nothing actually exists for us.

Humans have been around for the last 200,000 years, Earth is more than 4 billion years old, the universe is even older than that, and we are just existing in this point in time, if we were such eternal beings where were we all that time?

I believe that nothing can happen to us after death that didn't happen before we born, for we were dead as well, we just woke up one day as a young child and that's it, if there's nothing before, why would there be anything after?

What if we aren't as mighty as we think we are? What if there's no magical soul inside of every one of us that will jump to next body once were done with this one? What if what we call our consciousness is just the product of evolution, of our billions of neurons that while developing defined our personalities and everything we understand as human, such a combination that would be almost impossible to form again, even with infinite time.

It scares us to think of what might happen when we die, even when we were already dead before.

>>18629076
>if we were such eternal beings where were we all that time
In heaven of course.

>>18629076
>even when we were already dead before.
I don't want to go back to the void ;_;

>>18618653
I feel you anon. I really do. but please let me explain why immortality may not be the worst of it.
basically we can all agree that time is one of if not the most important thing to any living organism. the spectrum of things we are able to accomplish is limited to the time we have to pursue our goals. what I want to tell you is that without the need of time, man would stand on the brim of becoming his own god for he has now unlimited time to gather all information, to work his way around all the problems that may emerge.

>>18629076
If we were dead before we were born and then became alive, what is stopping us from doing so again after we die?

>>18629166
“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.”

The homey Alan Watts. Good form anon.

I also don't understand the evolution part of consciousness. Why would we have the need to ponder existential questions on a message board? If anything we should all be at least 20% more brain dead than we are and just procreating.

>>18629180
Evolution does not always go by needs. Random mutations happen and if those with the mutations breed they continue. Green eyes isn't necessary for survival, but it mutated and continued anyways.

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>>18618666
Satan dropping truth bombs

>>18618653
Actually living for a billion years would be sweet. You seem to be implying I'd ever get tired of shitposting on 4chan

>>18629076

If you Were already dead before and then you were born, if you were nothing and then one day you opened your eyes and simply existed, what makes you think that when you go back into the nothingness, you can't exist again?

If you can be nothing twice:
Nothing, something, nothing

What makes you think you can't also be something twice?

Nothing, something, nothing, something

And what makes you think you can't continue the cycle more times? How do you know you haven't already been doing it for a while? This is all theoretical, of course. I asked my ex girlfriend it she had any memories of before she was born. She said she has a bunch of repeating vivid memories of past lives. I don't however. Guess I'm a new soul.

"Am I to blame then? Or the fat man? Or my father for choosing my career? Which of us is responsible? Who makes the world? Perhaps the world is not made. Perhaps nothing is made. Perhaps it simply is, has been, will always be there. A clock without a craftsman."

-John Osterman

>>18618583
Have a look at Dr. Ian Stevenson's work...It may be of some interest to you

>>18618666
what happens when you jerk off to Jesus Christ torture porn is that a sin too or are you following in his path ?

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>>18629724
Blasphemy.

>>18618583
We don't know, and anyone saying he knows is roleplaying.

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>>18620931

>Suffering creates education

Whatever you say Mother Theresa. Next thing you know you'll be saying we should actively create suffering.