Life after Death: Reincarnation, Darkness, Afterlife

Imagine yourself as an elderly person lying in the hospital bed, moments away from death, and you think to yourself, where am I going once I die? Life is not a circle, you are born and eventually, you will die. What happens to us when our own circle of life ends? Lots of people have different opinions on where we go when we pass away. Do we reincarnate? Maybe there is nothing when we die or could there possibly an afterlife?

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is the idea that once we die, we will come back to this earth in another form. We may still be humans, we could be animals, but somehow we will come back as a form of life on the earth. Abiding by this view, we would be saying that we are in a cycle. We will be born, live, and die, and then we will be reborn. Hindu and Buddhism people strongly believe in this as a part of their religion. Of course, many people, non-hinduism and Buddhism suspect that this way of life is supernatural and scientifically impossible, some scientists have found similar cases however none of them belong under the term Reincarnation. So is reincarnation a part of the cycle of life? The circle of life is continuous and never ends similar to reincarnation, you are endlessly rebirthed going through the circle of life repeatedly. Reincarnation and the afterlife both share the comparison of life after death. However, their contrasts outnumber their comparisons greatly. Reincarnation is technically life after death, it is just another life here on Earth. You die, and your soul is recycled into another body.

Darkness/nothing

Some believe that the human body goes nowhere after death. Now, where does the human soul go after death? Where do all the memories, capabilities, thoughts, and wishes go, where do the personality, the spirit, consciousness, and the character go?

Some people believe that once your die you simply cease to exist. You're not in an endless tunnel of darkness with your own conscious, you're just nothing. People like atheists and agnostics strongly trust the idea of nothing happening to us when we die. When our own circle of life ends, it is dark and we don’t exist anymore. Note that people commonly have no trouble understanding this for animals. For example, some people develop a loving relationship with their dogs. They know the wishes, traits, and personality of their dog. When the dog dies, it’s like a good friend died. Yet, few people think that the dog’s spirit went somewhere. People understand that it just ceased to exist. Positive atheists believe that it is the same with humans.

Afterlife

An innocent person suffers hardship or injury: he is hit on the head, he suffers a stroke, he sustains damage in a car crash or on the operating table. A feeling of disconnection comes over him, a sense of being “outside” himself. Perhaps he remembers an opening: a gate, a door, or a tunnel. And then, all at once, he is being guided through other worlds that look and feel to him more “real” than the world in which he once existed. These realms are both familiar and strange, containing music that doesn’t sound like music and light brighter than any light, and creatures that may or may not be angels, and the familiar faces of loved ones lost. The afterlife is the belief that the essential part of an individual's identity or the stream of consciousness continues after the death of the physical body. Many religions, whether they believe in the soul's existence in another world like Christianity, Islam, and many pagan belief systems, or in reincarnation like many forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, believe that a person's status in the afterlife is a reward or punishment for their conduct during life. In the Afterlife, there are two places you could go from the earth once you are dead, heaven and hell. People who were substandard and committed crimes on earth would be sent to hell and the ones who didn’t do hellish actions would be accepted into heaven.

Your life isn’t a circle, you go through different stages in life growing up and getting older. There are many possibilities as to where you actually go when your time is upon earth, but no one really knows for sure until we experience it ourselves. Maybe we reincarnate and become another person, maybe we there is nothing once we die as if we are asleep forever or drifting into the afterlife and meeting loved ones who have passed.