Here’s the premise: You’ve been provided absolute proof that when your earthly body dies, your consciousness, your essence, your soul, the part of you that makes you “you” moves to the next phase of existence. You don’t know what it is, but you know beyond any doubt that there is a next step.
Will that affect how you life your life here and now?
Do you work at being kinder and gentler in the hopes that a nicer you will move on?
Do you go crazy, wild, and reckless, knowing that this isn’t all there is?
Do you consider hastening the journey?
Do you just keep on keepin’ on?
I don’t think I’d make any extreme changes in how I live my life, but I do think I’d give serious consideration to going back to school under the assumption that my knowledge would travel on with me. I’d study physics and mathematics in more depth. I’d study art. I’d learn more languages.
Yeah, I know I can do those things anyway. But at this stage of my life, there are other things I’d rather do, since for all I know, today is all I have. If I knew for sure more awaited me, I’d want to go there as a more educated me.
Well, I think I’d get pretty wound up about just WHICH afterlife it would be. I mean, would I need to die in battle to end up in Valhalla or Folkvangr instead of Hel or Nifhel? Or would it be the Christian heaven or hell, or the Islamic view? Is it the Classical Greek Hades (Elysian Fields, Asphodel Meadows, Tartarus, Fields of Punishment)? Is it perhaps Hindu-style reincarnation? Wiccan Summerland, or something else entirely.
Seems to me that the nature of the afterlife all of a sudden became less academic and drastically more pertinent because in this hypothetical, we know an afterlife exists.
The question can’t be answered without knowing at least something about the nature of the next plane, and, MUCH more importantly, how your life here affects your “status” in the next.
If your “self” moves on, with awareness and consciousness, that’s one basis for choice. If you become part of a combined consciousness - a “godhead” - that’s another. Since the OP says the first, I guess it would depend on whether your “self” continues or becomes a past stage you can move past.
If the next plane is the same pretty much no matter what you do here, then all you have to consider is what kind of person you want to carry forward - will a “good” person and a mass murderer be treated the same, have the same self-regard, etc?
If the next plane is judged - a la most religions - then you would probably want to live this life to have the best status in the next. That’s a famous philosophical question, with the canned answer that it’s best to live as if your life here matters and determines your status in the next, because the reward is too great and the punishment/loss equally great… and the third alternative of nothingness or no continuation meaningless.
Which, given the OP’s strictures, amounts to: If we have no inkling of what the next life is, then we really don’t have any more actionable information than we do if we knew for sure there was no next life or if we didn’t know whether there was or wasn’t.
Knowledge that doesn’t produce actionable information tends to be ignored when it comes to actually doing something. Folks would be all up in arms about the new knowledge, but most wouldn’t actually *do *anything different.
I think I’d be less likely to commit suicide. Not because I’d be afraid of being punished in a fiery furnace, but because of the high likelihood I would be reincarnated into a situation that’s worse than what I’m dealing with now.
I probably would be more goal-oriented too, just in case we have to have a stellar performance evaluation to get placed into a good afterlife situation. I’d probably work harder at being friendly and more generous and try to develop my humanity more (being more creative, engaging my senses, enjoying the world around me).
But I still wouldn’t sign up for any particular religion. An afterlife isn’t necessarily supernatural. It could just mean we have a very poor understanding of the natural world. Perhaps “afterlife” is whatever exists outside out of the spectacular simulation we called “this life.”
Personally, I do more or less belief in an afterlife, in a sense. It’s a bit complicated, but I suppose it’s not really relevant to the specific question being asked here. That all said, I also think that the idea of an afterlife as a way of affecting how I live my life is rather silly. I think the idea that I should behave a certain way in the hope of achieving a better result in the hereafter is not unlike promising a child a cookie if he can sit still in the waiting room.
Rather, I base my morality and my life choices on the idea that if I need to be “bribed” with a more positive result after I die, then I probably wasn’t all that moral to begin with. Instead, I see this as a limited opportunity with the gifts I’ve been given to effect the most positive change I can. I try to learn as much as I can and share it with as many people as are interested. I try to be kind and helpful to my fellow man, and hope that that can spread farther. And I recognize and try to work on the talents I have and use them to create a more beautiful world.
Of course, the wonderful thing about all of this is, even if there is an afterlife, it also happens to make all of that better. If one is judged off of works and rewarded, then I’m doing the best I reasonably can. If I get reincarnated, whatever knowledge does get carried over, I’m maximizing that and hopefully making the world just a little better for my future life too. Or even if not, at least there’s some kind of legacy, whether or not my name is remembered, but that my life had meaning. But I do believe that the motivation behind action affects the outcome, and so while I sometimes think about it in some of these regards, I still make the effort to do good for it’s own sake, rather than hoping for karma or a better afterlife or whatever.
So, in short, even if I were guaranteed there were an afterlife, I doubt if would have much affect on me. The only way I could see it changing my behavior would be if that afterlife had some sort of bizarre ritual involved. Then again, I might even rather be judged by my works and heart than by jumping through certain, more or less arbitrary, hoops.
I’d be mighty damn careful about how I lived healthwise, because I don’t know if said “afterlife” would be better or worse than death itself, whereas before I had the concept of what death would be like down pretty much. I wouldn’t change my behaviour-I have no idea what the right path might be, and no one has thrown any lightning my way so far so I think I’m doing o.k.
As an aging Jesus freak, my attitude about the afterlife for some time has been that while I don’t know what it consists of, I know who is waiting for me at the end of this road.
So knowing for an absolute certainty that there is something after this life doesn’t really change much. Removes any last vestiges of doubt about that, I guess. The nature of the afterlife remains in the Lord’s hands, and I’m good with that.
It would open my mind up a lot more to things I now dismiss as woo. If some other plane of existence is a reality, then I’d be curious as hell if that plane interacts in any way with this one. Supernatural would become “supernature” or “superphysics.”
I find it interesting that some of you looked at it from the reward/punishment point of view rather than as a transition, like from childhood to puberty to adulthood. Despite 8 years of Catholic school, I never considered heaven/hell in my imaginings. Wonder what that says about me?
I think I would just feel more secure. I have problems with anxiety, a lot of them centered around illness and death (my own and others’), and if I could be certain that this life was not all there is, I can see myself just being more relaxed on a holistic level.
Intuitively, it feels like that afterlife would not be a torturous hellscape but something more benign – either neutral, like life on earth is, or better. I already try to live as the best person I can be (failing a lot, but I try to learn from my mistakes), so the revelation of an afterlife wouldn’t affect my behavior, I don’t think. If you told me there was nothing but hell awaiting us on the other side, I’d want to make this life as pleasant for myself and others, and if you said we were all going to a paradise, I certainly wouldn’t want to make this life more unpleasant for anyone by acting reckless or destructive. (What would be the point?)
I think I would just feel comforted to know with certainty that death isn’t something to fear, and the peace that that knowledge would bring me would infuse itself throughout my being.
This is making me tear up. :o I hope this comes to pass.
Whether or not there is an afterlife determines whether or not it makes sense to spend time and effort on “spiritual growth” or “soul work”: working on making myself or others a better person in ways that don’t have an effect on this present world.
[QUOTE=Jesus]
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:
But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t understand. My response didn’t presuppose a necessarily Christian afterlife, just one in which something of who we are or what we’ve done survives with us.
Since I already believe in exactly what is proposed in the OP (admittedly with no proof except my sincere belief), having absolute proof would make no difference at all to the way I live my life.
I will say that my vision of the afterlife includes everyone, with no hell or punishment for misdeeds, and therefore no need to behave a certain way to guarantee a better future.
I like to think our lives here on Earth are spent in an arena setting–Maybe it’s a vacation, or occupational training, or some form of education. Whatever the motive, you either select or are assigned a life to be “born into” and only the morality bit of your consciousness gets implanted into your body. You’re here with your inborn morality and you tumble through your session gaining perspective and self-knowledge. When your time is up you take it all back and you get to reflect on your experiences and actions in your fully conscious form. Maybe you’re proud of how you handled it, maybe not. Maybe you have another go in the arena, maybe you only get one shot in a lifetime and that was it. So anyway, Nah, I wouldn’t change a thing. I act as my moral compass directs anyway, making changes based on what I think the right answers are would likely just bite me in the ass.
ETA: I would, however, likely become even more frightened of botching death and ending up in some limbo state for an unreasonable length of time.
I’d donate all my extraneous earthly possessions to charity and spend the rest of my life helping others and living straight edge, vegetarian, the whole works. Then I’d go to hell for being a selfish hypocrite because I only started to care after thinking my neck was on the chopping block.
People who say they’d commit suicide are crazy. That’s an instant ticket to hell in many belief systems.