I have this theory about the afterlife: The eternity you get is exactly the eternity you expect. When you die, you get the afterlife that deep down inside, underneath your deepest suspicions, you really feel you're going to get. If what you truly expect is oblivion, then there is nothing. Gone - bang! Out like a candle. If you expect to go to hell, you get hell in all its lurid glory. If you expect to go to heaven then you get heaven, and wow, it's better than you ever could have imagined it! Because...that's how everyone imagines it. Better than they could have imagined it. If you expect reincarnation, then your afterlife is a fairly mundane and life-like approximation of how you'd imagine the next 80-110 years of earth to unfold, with you in it, as a different person.
Or whatever it is that you deep-down truly expect. That becomes your experience.
Now I don't know whether these afterlives would be created by someone else, and bestowed accordingly upon each dying mind, or whether the fully-formed mind has enough juice to manifest its own afterlife after it leaves the body - maybe even linking up with other minds whose afterlife ideals overlap.
Or maybe dying is like falling into a black hole. In the instant you die, as your consciousness detaches and departs from your blood and brain, your mind creates an infinitely compressed moment - which your consciousness experiences as eternity. And so that eternity is the one you expect.
Can you imagine if that was how it were really set up? How disgustingly arbitrary! How awful! Sentenced to an eternity of whatever you happen to truly believe! The raw, stinging injustice of it!
I don't really believe all that. It's just a theory. Came up with it after watching too much Twilight Zone in one of those marathons. Like, ten years ago.
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