What is after Death?

Dramatik

Ahh it's just a dream I had, I guess it's my own understanding of what happens to me in the end or maybe it's what happened before I was born. Ha ha! Sorry I didn't mean to come across as like "this is what happens! I'm right everyone else is wrong" I'm pretty open to hearing other people's ideas on what they think might happen, after all there is no way I could know either.

I guess what's left that is floating upwards is your consciousness or your spirit/soul depending on if you're religious, not too sure really but I was able to see my arms as I stretched them out on front of me to look at them when the tethers of energy started to attach to me although they were semi transparent.

I like to think of seeing your body in a transparent form, kind of like how a hazard light turns on, on a car dashboard if there is something wrong with it. It's your consciousness's way of telling you hey your body isn't operable any more so I've greyed it out for you.

nozzferrahhtoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119315662#Comment_119315662

Sorry for your loss. It's amazing to think of how many people reach the age of 40 without ever losing anyone. Let alone reaching 30. So losing someone close at 33 will mess with you. I lost someone at 16. It's still a big part of who I am today over 25 years later even though I would say I am "over it".

As for forming a metaphysical belief based on what you experienced: That would be a very human thing to do. It is a neat and powerful little story and our human brains love that.

But two things strike me.

First, the whole point of chemo is "You will get sick, really quite sick indeed, and then hopefully you will get better". So your dream was not prophetic in any way. It was literally describing the whole intention and process of what chemo is and does. So your dream was telling you something you pretty much already knew. Which suggests an internal source for the dream rather than some visitation from the afterlife.

Second, it seems poignant that you refused the final treatment on the promise that your dream told you would survive.... and you did. So the story seems powerful when taken in isolation. Statistically however the story is rendered more mundane. Quite simply all the people who refused one or more treatments due to some supernatural belief.... who died.... are not here to tell us that story. Equally so people who stuck it out to the last treatment: Some of them are alive today some are not. Put another way, we only HEAR the stories that sound poignant because relatively no one goes around telling the mundane or terminal stories. So stories such as yours seem to stand out in some magical way when in fact in the "Big Picture" they do not.

Medicine is not an exact science. The doctors are working on the best data available. But they get it wrong and the vagaries of human biology mean even the best data which will be right for the first 9999 people will be wrong for person number 10000. The best medical data likely told your consultant you should complete the treatments. You decided otherwise. And in your case the best available data was seemingly wrong. Not taking the final treatment was probably the right thing for you to do. The next person making the same decision as you, might likely die. The next not. And so on.

So to answer your question over all, I do not see anything in your experience that warrants thinking that "some part of us might survive". That doesn't mean it doesn't of course, who knows! It just means your personal experience would not be a good basis for suggesting it does.

Pointing out X is a bad argument for Y, does not mean Y is or is not true.

nozzferrahhtoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119340642#Comment_119340642

There are so many books and movies and shows and so on describing that kind of experience that I can understand why such a concept would be so ingrained in you as to give you dreams about it. In general I tend to be skeptical about any "truths" about life, the universe, and everything that I seem to have gleaned from dreams.

That said though, out of body experiences are probably a lot more common place and mundane than many of us think. In fact it is quite easy to intentionally illicit minor versions of it whenever you want.

For example there is an old trick where you place a fake arm and hand in such a way as it looks like a person's actual arm and hand. Then you hide their real arm and hand. Then using two feathers you tickle both the real and fake hand at the same time... while the other person stares at the fake hand.

In many people, after a short enough period of time, the brain switches to thinking the fake arm and hand is the real one. Their brain literally starts feeling their arm to be outside where it actually is.... and feeling it in this new location that is actually outside the person's body.

At this point, for laughs and kicks, its a lot of fun to embed a knife in the fake hand and watch the reaction of the person :)

The TV show QI did this trick on their contestants once in fact if you want to see it in action: youtube.com/watch?v=S4fiZJew22A

There have been some interesting and pretty well structured studies trying to find evidence that people who felt they left their body and were looking down on the room.... actually were. Including by one Sam Parnia who was heavily biased towards belief in an after life. So far I believe they have found not just very little evidence, but absolutely none. Unless something new was released I have missed since.

looksee

^^ not sure what it proved but it had me falling about laughing!

mariaalice

We become one with everything.

We dissolve and our atoms mix with everyone and everything who ever lived and who will ever live.

looksee

Most of those atoms are shut firmly in a box well buried in the ground!

mariaalice

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119343633#Comment_119343633

 They, quite literally, make our universe what it is. When we die, our bodies do not turn into nothing; rather, they are broken down into their constituent parts and recycled into the ecosystem. In short, our atoms go on long after we are gone.

https://futurism.com/science-explained-atoms-last-forever

rtron

We all get a date with Megan Fox after death. Least that's what I was told...

mobby

I hope for all the good and honest people I have met in my Lifetime that there will be something for them when they die.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119341230#Comment_119341230

Points taken and I agree.

However there's a little more to the story which predates my dream. Some weeks before he died, I asked him if he thought there was anything after death, and he said if there is I'll hang about the rings of Saturn watching the comets go by. Couple of years later, the internet was commonplace, and I googled his name. Up came a link to Comet Hyautake. It meant nothing to me and when I clicked on the link, up popped a photogallery by different people of the comet's progress over several weeks. Scrolling through them I came to March 26 1996. There was a single photo of the comet for that day. It was taken by an Angel Sanchez in the Canary Islands.

Same name, different country. A coincidence no doubt, but what a coincidence.

NSAman

My mam, who was a nurse for many decades, always tells us of the same stories for many people who died in hospitals but were brought back through resuscitation.

once they recovered, practically every person saw family and friends beckoning the to come towards them, while looking down on themselves from above. Only to be drawn back by a “force”, once they were resuscitated.

could be many things as the brain remembering things as it is starved of oxygen, could be “spirit” which personally believe in leaving the body.

it’s an amazing part of “life” to discuss. It will happen to all of us at some stage. Only then will we know.

wotzgoingon

I died once and was resurrected two days later which I still hold grudge over as I was living it up with a tap of unlimited Smithwicks and surrounded by beautiful women who were in awe of me. Great weather and swimming pool. I was living the life and then all of a sudden it was over and I was back to this sh*t hole.

moonage

When we're asleep and dreaming we take it to real until we wake up.

But how real is what we call "reality". Maybe when we die we wake up to the ultimate reality (whatever that is).

"Row, row, row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

Life is but a dream"

Saladin Ane

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119317675#Comment_119317675

I guess so. Am just getting used to the Oldie radio. Will try both your mentions. Haven't heard Canned Heat, Chuck Berry. Janice Joplin and Ireland's own David McWilliams. No, not Ginger Nuts of financial guru fame, but the man who wrote and sang Days of Pearly Spencer. This was a song that dealt with empathy for the downtrodden. Haunting, swirling violins career in and out. BBC refused to air it [not politically motivated, but because Solomon (the promoter) was a Radio Caroline backer]. It charted in many European countries. Some of the sounds were got from singing through to the studio from an old telephone box. Go play it and see.

Ultimanemo

What is after Death?

It doesn't matter

What matters is: What is before death?

nozzferrahhtoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119344061#Comment_119344061

It does give a great buzz to the brain when a coincidence like that happens. Our brains are evolved to get a kick when it spots patterns. So when something like this happens it is like a super stimulus to the brain. I myself have a similar coincidence in my life where a rather life changing event turned out to have been instigated by someone with exactly the same name as me. I have also entirely lost count of how many events, places, and things in my life have coincided with the house number of the house I grew up in. It genuinely feels sometimes like that number is following me around in life.

Two things jump out though when considering things like that.

The first is that things that seem to be amazing coincidences are actually not as amazing as we think. Our brain is just really bad at mathematics and scaling up probabilities. A great example of this is called "The Birthday Problem". Try this yourself. Ask people how many people must be in a room before the probability that two people in the room will share a birthday is 50:50. It turns out the number is actually only 23 people. When most people I ask guess they tend to guess anything from 180 (approximately 365 days divided by 2) to 800 (apprx. 365 * 2). So something poignant happening in your life associated with two people having the same name.... might not actually be as amazing as it first strikes us. But again the biggest reason stories like that seem poignant and amazing.... is that the coincidence makes YOU tell the story. The other 10,000 people who googled a name on the same day as you and found no coincidence are the stories we DONT hear. So we as individuals have a small picture rather than Big Picture reaction to anecdotal coincidence.

The second is that we tend to reverse narrate such coincidence. You intentionally googled a specific name and found something that clicked as coincidentally relevant. But how many other things COULD have come up related to that name that... had they been true.... would also have seemed like an amazing coincidence too? There is simply no way to even estimate that number. It could be, for all you know, a truly massive number. Your imagination could come up with 1000s and it might only be a drop in the ocean of what is possible. Imagine for example, having googled the name, you found that someone with that exact name made a massive donation to cancer treatment research on the EXACT date your friend died. You would have been equally wowed by the sheer magnitude of this coincidence. The human brain is GREAT at seeing two events as coincident. It really SUCKS however at seeing the "coincidence possibility set".

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119344162#Comment_119344162

It is truly interesting stuff, even for the most hardline rationalist atheists. Because even for them such anecdote gives glimpses into the operations and vagaries of the human brain.

Take for example reports of alien visitation and abduction. Consider how coincident the description of little grey aliens with big heads and bug eyes was with "ET" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". It is truly interesting how a narrative can become part of the collective consciousness of a society, and so when unusual experiences happen we as humans reverse narrate that experience through those narratives.

So while it is of course possible that the reason "Near Death Experience" descriptions are so similar across a society..... is that there actually is a light, and a heaven, and an after life, and so on...... it is also very possible that a narrative at the society level is leading people to have those experiences in that way, or to parse them in that way after the fact.

Drumpot

I guess I think of death like a black hole, something that’s beyond our understanding. Not sure what happens , “near death experiences” mean nothing to me, maybe because I’m a layperson in neuro psychology and all things of the brain/mind/consciousness but Couldn’t that just simply be the mind playing tricks as chaos rains as the body shutting down?

The biggest disappointment for me on the topic of death is how I’ve been unable to harness the actual real threat this is to my existence to have a more meaningful life. It’s so abstract in many ways and like most things in life, when it’s not staring you in the face it’s hard to really give it the respect it deserves.

When my dad died I had a massive existencial shock and in part had hoped it would galvanise me to be “better” at living my life (not Constantly driving myself mad worried about future and lamenting the past). Even speaking with my mum yesterday she was telling me how relieved she was that she spent money (that she doesn’t really have) on a trip with dad before he died.

I work in financial planning capacity and this is a kind of paradoxical element to the process. Save now for later is a quite prudent and reasonable thing for the average person to do but sometimes “doing that thing you probably can’t really afford” will have long lasting positive effects for the better. That doesn’t necessarily involve money spending, it can be spending time on something or less time on something (like work, so less money).

Even as I write this I was already dreading certain aspects of today that aren’t actually that bad at all. Could I say “f*ck it, I’m spending day doing meaningful things with those I love”? Yes, nothing but some sort of misguided “buy in” to modern society’s rat race mantra stopping me.

So what is after death? I need to figure out how to actually just live this life meaningfully before spending more time contemplating that question too much….

looksee

On the 'ascending/floating' thing. In my teens we used to do a 'lifting with a finger' trick which is pretty well known and a version of it is described here https://blog.donders.ru.nl/?p=12234&lang=en Our version involved 5 people lifting someone lying on a table. The problem with that description is that the author concludes that each person lifting 20 kilos makes it possible, but 20 kilos is still a fair weight.

As someone who has been both the lifter and the liftee, when the lift happens (and the group can get very good at it quite easily) there is a sensation of almost no weight or resistance at all. And the liftee can have the very clear sensation of being lifted way higher than a group could lift, and hovering near the ceiling. The event happened in a very high ceilinged old room and felt I was looking at the lampshades from level with them. I had absolutely no sense of alarm or panic, and no awareness of how I got back down again. The person is actually lifted about 30 cm or less.

It is the mind playing tricks, very convincing tricks but illusions none the less. It may have a lot in common with the 'floating away' sensations described in near death experiences.

nozzferrahhtoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119366941#Comment_119366941

That is a strange one alright. Conceptually most of us know that "Life is short" and that we should suck the marrow out of life each day as much as we can. But in practice we tend to live each day like we think we are immortal. Whereas to steal the words of Sam Harris we should be living each day almost like it is a constant state of emergency. His talk on that very subject here is on this very point: youtube.com/watch?v=ITTxTCz4Ums

As you say the reality of death remains very abstract to us and so it is hard to get it to inform our choices and motivations and incentives. Some people get the abstract made real for them somehow though. The most obvious is a brush will illness or death. Nearly dying tends to focus the mind on the reality of death and people who survive this brush can be very altered by the experience.

Others get the abstract made real for them by watching videos like Sam Harris' above. Or by looking at one of those websites that graphically maps out your potential life span in periods like weeks or months, and shows you visually very clearly how much you have already squandered and how much is left. Seeing such a graphic can be entirely transformative to some people. Mundane and irrelevant to others.

Still others have a brush with their ego and emotions during meditation or drug use which focuses them on the reality of a transient life force. Others go to war and are moved to suck the marrow out of life by losing team mates and fellow soldiers and they realise that they have to life their life to the fullest in order to truly respect the ultimate sacrifice in the service of freedom that their brothers and sisters have made.

But it feels to me that the number of people who have that transformative focusing experience, of one kind or another, is vastly in the minority. Those people always seem to me to be the most amazing and wonderful and charismatic when I meet them however. One person who is themselves a poster here around boards always jumps instantly to mind as the prime example of this. From his exploration of martial arts and meditation - to an amazing array of hobbies and skills - to deep and meaningful charity work - he appears to put more passion and meaning into each and every hour of his day than many of us (myself included very much in this) fit into a year.

looksee

Small anecdote on the death/coincidence topic. When I was 21 I went overseas and a couple of years later my mother decided she wanted to come and visit me. My dad said he had had enough of 'abroad' in the army, and didn't want to go. After a while he changed his mind but they couldn't afford it. There really wasn't a lot of spare cash, it was very surprising that my mother had decided to go. They decided to cash in a life insurance policy to pay for his ticket. This was in the days when the agent would call once a week to collect the payment or do any other business involved.

The following Friday, for whatever reason, the agent, unusually, did not call so the policy did not get cancelled. During the following week my father dropped dead very suddenly, massive cardiac event. Without that modest life insurance my mother would have been left in some difficulties financially, and it always seemed like an amazing coincidence that the agent did not call on that particular week.

DellyBelly

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119315662#Comment_119315662

That's fascinating. Was your friend right when he came back to you in your dream...did you just get very sick and not die?

Leg End Reject

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119367245#Comment_119367245

I don't think they'd be posting here if they had died.

I read a theory years ago that the bright light and vision of dead loved ones is a mechanism the dying brain uses to make dying easier and prevent panic. Obviously there's only one way to find out so we'll never know for sure.

EltonJohn69

You are aggressively interviewed by the cosmic slug.

wotzgoingon

I have all the answers to the mystery of life. Life is not real we are all inside capsules with pipes connected to our body. When you die you get woken up and that is when the real punishment starts. You go to different departments every so often getting punished. One section is for example, say you like doughnuts so have all the doughnuts in the world and you are forced to eat an extraordinary amount.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119367245#Comment_119367245

yes bu as a scientist I guess I knew it was going to get rough and was mentally preparing myself for the battle.

TheTruth89

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058253611/what-is-after-death

What happened you before you were born? or when you sleep? same thing.

Naked Lepper

Taxes.

Well my view on death has always been in the "You are not dead until those who remember you are dead" category.

So in deference to one who died this week I would like to slightly re-write his lines as he spoke them at the end of series 4. A man I remember for a show I watch as an adult. But a man I remember from watching the wombles.

"I'll watch our for you sir / Every night when it gets dark / and the stars come out / I'll look up on your behalf / I'll look up and think of you."

Good night old man.