After Life, There is Nothing - Letters from Readers

Before I start this post, let me apologize to my readers who've written me over the last two weeks: I'm quite behind in my emails, and everyone who has written to me has a LOT to say.  I'm grateful! But it's taking me a while to catch up.  So my apologies. 

Today I want to share a note that was sent to me from a reader in Germany.  He has asked that his name be withheld, but his message is as follows:

My parents are atheists, and I do not believe in God, either.   I do not believe anything lives on from us after we die.  Death is final. There is nothing that comes next.  I know this; I believe it. But it scares me.  It scares me to think of being nothing.  I do not even understand what that means.   Why does the thought of that make me feel so afraid?  

Thank you for sharing.  For my other readers who are jumping in on this post, let me remind all that this is not a religious blog.  It is not my intent - now or ever - to promote any particular religious system or doctrine.  I know my readers come from a variety of different backgrounds and locations - and that means that there are likely an array of vastly different systems of belief.   It is not my job to advocate for (or against) any particular religious doctrine.   If you find me doing that, you have my permission to call me out for it.   

What I am trying to do, though, is change the way we look at biological death.   And this reader has presented a very interesting (and relevant) dilemma that I'm sure a lot of us face.   Oftentimes, our religious beliefs conflict deeply with what we intuit may be, but our most fundamental paradigms are based upon certain docrtines, and this makes it near impossible for us to reconsider them.  This particular reader denies any belief in God, and would likely take issue with what I'm about to say, but:  atheism is its own doctrine, and its adherents likely experience the same phenomenon I just mentioned.  I could write an entire post about how this is true, but that's now what I'm trying to do. 

Afterlife is not dependent upon religion.  But your religions beliefs may compliment your afterlife experience.

The dilemma here is that this reader feels afraid:  his personal ethos supports the finality of death, but naturally he's afraid of becoming nothing.  He indicates that he cannot even understand what being nothing means.  And here's why:  you can never imagine being nothing because it is not something you have ever experienced.   You were never nothing, and so nothing - or the absence of existence - is not a condition with which you can identify.  This does not preclude a belief in the existence of any type of god or higher power.  It simply is.  Atheism, at its core, supports a belief that no god exists.  But because as humans beings we have equated an afterlife to the belief in the absolute existence of a god (whom we must not anger, or lest face his/her wrath), then we assumed that being an atheist means that we must not believe in afterlife. 

There is nothing about afterlife, however, this is based on belief.  Please understand: I am not in any way denying the importance of faith.   Faith - and religion in general - is fundamentally important to our journey here, and I encourage everyone - atheists, christians, muslims, hindus, sikhs, buddhists: please, keep your faith! Do not discard faith.   I will write more later about the importance of faith and religion.  For now, however, please understand that the point I'm making on this blog is not that afterlife is to be relegated to the corridors of religion.  I want to take afterlife out of that equation altogether, and make it an experience for everyone, not just the devout.    

Science currently supports the possibily of afterlife.  Multitudes of people - whose religious beliefs vary greatly - proclaim their experience of an afterlife after a trauma event left them clinically dead.   The hard question of consciousness is now being looked at with a different lens.  My proposal supports the conclusion that afterlife isn't a religious experience at all.   Afterlife doesn't mandate a belief in any god or system or rhetoric.   It is instead an inevitability which we all will experience, and while our pereceptions and environments may determine the type of experience we have, those elements will not create that experience: they will instead support it, much like modern medicine supports the health of your body but cannot create health indepdently of it.   I will write more about the relationship between environments and afterlife in another post.