My wife and I are constantly questioning religion, life and death. Which religion, do we believe, is closer to truth? Why are we alive? What will death be like? This is something that has dramatically evolved once we met each other.
Before I met Nicole, I believed one of two things (mood permitting):
1) We are ALL going to heaven
2) Nothing happens
HEAVEN
I was raised Catholic. Baptized, First Holy Communion, reading/highlighting excerpts from the bible every morning with my grandma over breakfast, the whole nine yards. Catholic children's movies, books and music.
Puberty hit and the religion started to lose meaning for me. All these people who claimed to be religious yet judged others like breathing air. I then hated any sort of Christian/Catholic religion. I picked up a Wiccan book my mother had on herbal spells and remedies. I created little capsules of herbs I called my "emergency" pills that would supposedly give my immune system a boost as well as my pocket book and love life. I made a bag of bath herbs to give to my crush in hopes he would fall for me although I could never muster the guts to hand it to him and say, "take a bath with this!" I loved the basis of it, that it was centered around the energies of nature. I made a Book of Shadows which is just a log of all the spells, chants, and things you learn. I got a couple friends into it with me. I was proud of my new outlook and wore it on my sleeve. Actually, on my finger, as a ring. Everyone knew my stance. One day, a girl in my acting class copped an attitude with me and said that Wicca wasn't real and I was an idiot. I thought to myself really hard, willing her to see that it was, in fact, real. A half hour later she ran out of class to vomit. She pointed her finger at me, "YOU did this to me!" It scared me so bad! I dropped Wicca then and there.
My faith in Christianity was renewed when I saw the movie, Passion of the Christ in high school. I wrote underneath the bill of my hat, "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" and drew a picture with the line "If you love those who love you, what reward is there in that?" But the line that struck me the hardest, and that I still use to explain my viewpoints on heaven and hell with Christianity is "Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do." Suddenly it clicked with me. Didn't Jesus die for our sins? So we would be forgiven and cleansed of our evils because we know not what we do? Because maybe being raised to live in a bad environment molded us into judgmental killers? So if we're all forgiven, aren't we all going to heaven?
I understand that this is a VERY HARD concept for a lot of people to grasp. It's too simple. People WANT judgement. They want justice for those who have wronged them. But that wouldn't be a very Christian thing to believe though, now would it?
DREAMING
I watched a documentary (can't remember the title of it at the moment) that was about what happens to our body at the point of death. An interesting discovery was that, even though the heart ceases to function, they noticed that there is activity in parts of the brain that are in charge of dreaming. This shouldn't come to as a surprise. Death is also called "the big sleep" for a reason.
From the Los Angeles Times there's an article on brain function after we die as well.
"Evidence of a sharp burst in brain activity after cardiac arrest suggest a neural explanation for anecdotes from patients who have recovered from near-death experiences, including a sensation of leaving the body, and deep memories flickering in dream-like fashion."
Read more: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/sep/18/science/la-sci-sn-brain-activity-death-20130918
I think this explains why people who die and come back to life say that they have seen "heaven", "hell", and even "limbo" upon their return.
I developed another concept that will seem hard to grasp. Do we create our own heaven and hell? I believe our heaven and hell is how we feel about ourselves and our life on our death bed. At the time of death, if we are gripping to all the loss we'll have and how we'll be judged, then I believe we'll see hell. If we feel okay with our souls and let go, we'll see a heaven. If we're just tentatively waiting to see what happens, I believe that's when we see limbo. This concept is still hard to grasp by others because of our need for justice and to reap the rewards of our efforts.
After I met Nicole, my views evolved to one point and then to one other final point (for now):
1) We dream, then go through reincarnation.
2) We dream, then our "conscience" jumps to another dimension we are currently living in.
REINCARNATION
At age 22, I started looking up Buddhism online. It all stemmed from believing that I needed thinking time, meditation. All my life I struggled with depression, Intention Deficit Disorder (should be the real name of ADHD), and later in life I had developed PTSD from an abusive ex. I wanted to stop lashing out at people and I wanted to stop having such rollercoaster-like mood swings. I liked the Buddhist views a lot. That it is merely a way to view life and can coincide with other religions. I started practicing "loving kindness" thoughts which help you visualize accepting and loving yourself and the world around you. It was very powerful for me. Especially when I visualized doing it to a carbon copy of myself. I left the meditation for points in my life when I felt I needed some time to refocus and relax.
I met Nicole when I was 25. I loved that, like me, she wasn't afraid to venture out and consider other possibilities with life, death, and religion. She set a goal for herself to read a book about every religion. She picked up a copy of the bible as well as a book on Buddhism (she is currently slowly making her way through a book on Scientology). She took notes and shared them with me as she went along. She liked a lot of the Christian way as well as Buddhism. We began to talk about reincarnation and about how who you are in this life, will determine what you will be reincarnated as next. The ultimate goal being total enlightenment. We decided we didn't like the idea of heaven and hell and deemed it impossible for our life energy to just snuff out. We believe that the energy in us just transfers to something else. Anything else that requires energy.
DIMENSIONS
A little bit after discovering Buddhism, Stumbleupon brought me to a video of a person doing a drug called Salvia. Salvia, as Wikipedia describes, "is a psychoactive plant which can induce dissociative effects and is a potent producer of "visions" and other hallucinatory experiences." I was curious about this "of nature" drug legal in most states. Apparently the trip only lasts 5-10 minutes which really interested in me because I had heard horror stories from friends about trips on various drugs that lasted for hours on end.
So I tried it. I experienced my muscles locking up. My body told me not to move or talk but I would push past it and make myself move and describe what I was seeing. Objects I looked at began to morph into completely different things.
It was an interesting experience and I did it twice more since the experience was pretty quick. There was a huge difference in the type of trip I had the last time. I felt a hole opening in front of me in the air. Almost like what you see in the old Looney Tunes except cat eye shaped. Suddenly I felt like my body was tilting forward into the tear. And then I felt like I was falling through different lives. Not just human or animal lives but any place of energy. I zoomed to a dimension where the world was flipped on its side and I was a boy sitting on a cliff ledge with my feet dangling off the side. Then I was the vibrations of guitar strings. I kept zipping through these different forms of energy but it was still me. It was as if I was in multiple times, places, and dimensions all at once. It was really hard to wrap my brain around but it felt like it just WAS. So many of these lives were interesting and different. I had zero concern about "Cassi" that I left way back there. But as soon as I wondered about "Cassi" I popped back to "reality".
I then had no fear of death. I then felt that if you die, you don't care! You will be thrust somewhere else and you will have no concern about your family, friends, house, spouse or anything. You just simply become something else and your old conscience is no more. Obviously this is the hardest concept to grasp. Dimensions and energies. Hippie talk! Believe me, I loathe sounding like this too. And obviously having no recollection of cherished memories and not sitting in the clouds with your loved ones for all eternity is a hard pill to swallow. But I believe we do see each other in our other lives. We all live a lot of lives at once. Spread out energy everywhere. Little bits of us floating around. I think that's why we feel drawn to certain strangers or have that "I feel like I've known you in another life" feeling.
If we broke it down to straight science, what exactly are we anyway?
"Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon make up about 99% of the average human. I'm going to cheat a little and leave out the other 1%, which is made up of trace elements (that is, stuff there's only a trace of in the body). Then, let's assume an average adult weighs 70 kilograms. Be sure to keep in mind that the following numbers are based on the number of atoms, not percent of body weight (by weight we are mostly oxygen). A 70 kg body would have approximately 7*1027 atoms. That is, 7 followed by 27 zeros:
7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Read more: http://education.jlab.org/qa/mathatom_04.html
So wait, we're mostly air? Which is atoms?! We're practically not here! If we die, how can all of our atoms NOT transfer to somewhere else? How could it not disperse in tons of different directions? How are we not all multiple things at once?
What are your own beliefs of what happens after death?