What Happens After We Die?

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 The world is filled with unanswered questions. Like, what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? What did dinosaurs actually look like? Who tasted candy corn, and decided that it was worthy of being sold in stores across America? And why am I posting this blog instead of the PTA Reflections story that's due next Wednesday? But the ruler of all unanswered questions is the infamous one of "What happens to your consciousness when you die"?  

 Do you end up in some kind of heaven or hell after you die, depending on what you've done in your life? Do you reincarnate, and become a new person? Do you just wander the Earth after you die as a ghost, witnessing events play out before you but being unable to do anything to change them? Or does it all just fade to black?

 The short story "The Egg" is an interesting interpretation of what happens after you die. It starts out with an ordinary man in the modern day dying in a car crash, and waking up in an empty void. In this void, they meet a god, who tells them that after they passes through the void, they will be reincarnated as a Chinese peasant girl in 540 A.D. When the man questions the go about this, the god says that the man has been and will be reincarnated as every human being that has ever or will ever live. Every emotion that has every been felt by someone was felt by them. 

 The god created this universe in order to help the man grow and mature with each reincarnation. After the man has lived through every life that has ever been lived by a human being, he will become divine, just like the god. The name comes from the man's comparison to the universe being like a giant egg. 

 Now personally, I don't believe that our universe is like that of The Egg's. There are some plotholes, like how he would have this conversation with every person that happened to die on a specific day, or how a fundamental principle of our reality like time could just be ignored in whatever void the god lives in, but I still find the story a pretty intriguing interpretation of what happens after we die.

 So, with all of these variations of the afterlife, what version of the afterlife do I believe in? To be honest, I'm not sure. I'm an atheist, and thus I don't believe that there are any higher powers out there judging us for our actions in the human world and deciding to send us to different places. I don't believe in ghosts, and I don't get why the only thing you can do after coming back from the dead is act like a cold gust of wind. And I feel like reincarnation would be pointless as an afterlife anyways, because you lose all of your memories of your past life when you reincarnate. That leaves our consciousness just... disappearing. But for our consciousness, the idea of the lens with which we see the world, just being shattered, is weird. So in the end, I don't have an answer to that question. And since we can't exactly ask a dead person where they go after they die, we won't ever get an answer of what lies after death.

 But in the end, what happens after death won't change what we do in the present. You shouldn't do good things because you fear divine retribution from the gods above after you die. You should do good things so that you leave the world better than you found it.

 See you next blog, whenever that will be.


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