After life?

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice,
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling—’tis too horrible.
The weariest and most loathèd worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

My neighbor Bob died recently. He was 89, but hale and hearty, a good, decent man, who lived across the street. He was looking forward to flying his private plane once more on his 90th birthday, some three months hence, but...oh well...

Everyone expected that his wife Ramona would go first, since she is in poor health, confined to a wheelchair, and was recently taken to a care facility since Bob could no longer manage her care all by himself. But then--Bob died instead--of an aneurism.

All this left me pondering, yet again, the great mystery of death; something that people over 70 like myself get used to, as our friends and neighbors our age or older fall away, one by one, and simply cease to exist. 

While cultures and religious traditions throughout the world have beliefs about the afterlife, a closer inquiry into these beliefs reveals that they have little, if anything, in common with one another. To take a simple example, both ancient Egyptians and modern Christians believed in some form of Divine judgment after we die, for our conduct while alive. But while Christians hold that we must confess our sins and beg for mercy before the throne of God, in order to go to heaven instead of being consigned to eternal torment in hell,  Egyptians believed, conversely, that they should recite examples of their virtuous conduct to the divine judge(s), in order to be rewarded with a good afterlife (for which they had to preserve their bodies intact as mummies, as well as their possessions to take along with them). And of course far eastern Dharmic religions--Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, etc.--all generally believe in some form of reincarnation--that our present lifetime is one in an endless series, from past to future, generated by our karma--the net consequences of our actions while alive--and that this will go on until we pay off our accumulated karmic debts by virtuous conduct and meditation to achieve enlightenment, also called "Nirvana" (which literally means "extinction"). 

Who is right?  Anyone? Or are these all simply wish-fulfillment fantasies, while actually, there will be nothing at all after death, other than the decay, putrification, and ultimate recycling of our bodies, while our consciousness, that inner viewpoint behind our eyes, and restless chain of thoughts, feelings, and memories we call "ourselves" will simply vanish, in the same way as a computer screen goes dark when we pull the plug or take out the battery.

That is, as Hamlet says, the question: "To die, to sleep, no more..." or "To sleep--perchance to dream..."

I have no idea, of course, any more than anyone else. I incline, however, toward the view that this unique sense of self that I nurture from behind my eyes is more like a computer screen than anything else; it depends on a continuous source of solar energy, water, and carbon transformed into biomass, to power my physical, neural, and mental processes that model the environment around me, and all these processes take a unique form, based on my genotype, that never existed before and will never exist again. I will simply wink out, that is, when I draw my last breath and my brain, starved of oxygen and water, goes dark.  From a purely physiological perspective, I do not see where there is any other possibility.

But this is only a problem to the extent that we remain attached to this mental formation we call our "self." But what if that "self" is nothing more than a moire pattern, engendered by crosscurrents of air, earth (minerals), water, solar energy, and information, shaped by genetic predispositions inherited from our exponentially expanding array of ancestors? In which case, it will not just cease to exist--it never existed to begin with, as anything other than a convenient verbal construct, a way for a body, endowed with language, to maintain the membrane, both physical and social, necessary for it to function autonomously in an environment full of both things we crave (food, sex, toys, experiences, etc.) and things we fear (enemies, dangers, poisons, etc.)  So when our bodies meet their predestined end, we need not worry about losing ourselves--since we never existed to begin with as anything separate from the world we look out on through our eyes and other senses. We ARE Gaia...and when we die, we will simply melt back into Gaia, as the constituents of our bodies go on to become other beings...