Ignorance is Bliss

I've been thinking about the afterlife.

Everyone has a different theory. Mine, of course, is purely atheistic; we die. (If only my English teacher could see that use of a semi-colon! Oooh la la!) And then we turn into compost in a graveyard, although I think I would like to be buried somewhere else so that I can contribute to the ecosystem... flowers can use me for nutrients and stuff. Y'know. I don't believe in the afterlife. I just don't - I mean, we'll never find out until we're there, but I have no need to comfort myself with the dream that I'm going to be reunited with loved ones and stuff. Death is both horrific and blissful - there will be nothing to fear, when there is nothing at all.

What about other people's theories?

I watched a movie the other day called Waking Life. It lead to a conversation with a friend about dimensions, quantum physics, and all that other fun stuff. Something that came up was a book called Is There Life After Death (a book I started reading but could not stand, thanks to all the physics in the first chapter, but my friend loved). Anyways, in this movie Waking Life, there was a scene where they discussed the last few minutes your brain is alive, after your body dies - during which you (hypothetically) see your life flash before your eyes. "Flash" is used loosely - the idea is, that during those last few minutes, the brain relives every second of your life.

It starts getting complicated now. The idea is, what happens after you finish mentally reliving your life? Do you include in the process, those last few minutes of brain activity? If so, you could have a "dream inside a dream", where you are mentally reliving the life you just mentally relived, if that makes sense. If you agree with the theory that we all "live in our own dimension" - as in, each of us views the world from a separate dimension, which sounds sketchy but think about it - how do you know that everything that has happened in your life, isn't just a figment of your imagination?

Deep stuff. The kind of stuff it hurts to think about. Am I writing this - or have you, the reader, dreamed up both this blog post AND me, the writer?

That got a little off topic. Despite my boring, unromantic atheist views, I do enjoy pondering the ideas of separate dimensions, worlds just inside our heads - quantum physics and string theory. All that exciting stuff.

The best part, though? None of us know what the answer is - and none of us will know until we're dead, and it's too late to pass the information on!