Where do we go when we die?

 The question, “where do we go after death?” may be the most significant question ever posed in human history. It fits under the same umbrella as “what is the meaning of life,” “is there an afterlife,” among others, questions which I categorically deem as the meat of the dish of philosophical inquiry. Unfortunately, in the four years of formal philosophical training I received for my degree in philosophy, the question was never broached, as I had thought it would be when I began the degree (though, I still do not regret my choosing philosophy as my major). So, reader, you’ll be forced to accept my unadulterated attempt to tackle the question (unless, of course, you choose to reject it by not reading the rest of this piece).

The short answer: You already know what it’s like. Do you remember back in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg? Unless you’re 182 years old, in which case I applaud you for your sustained health, then you may answer “no, I wasn’t born yet.” Well, that is the feeling of what it is like to not be alive. I find it useful to picture life as a break in the eternal nothing-ness (though “no-thing” is not an apt term to use here as it implies the existence of a thing), in which, for a brief period, out of the void comes a human life. Human consciousness cannot fathom how short its span really is; we have the feeling of time accelerating as we age, we have certain moments that feel like they last forever, and other moments that fly by. To me, the sheer span of time on the cosmic scale is not a significant data-point; the only time, the only thing we do or can know, is what we have lived. This “blip” if you will, while easy to conceptually understand on a timeline of nothing-life-nothing, is a severe abstraction of what life really is. I think this description of life as I see it needs some elaborating upon in a very long essay.

To more directly address the “place” the question implies, I reference my prior question. The fact that we have a notion of “place” here is already indescribable. The soul is not a quantifiable thing. There is a mind and body distinction that science has not been able to conquer; no physical scan of a brain can come even close to mapping the conscious and the subconscious. We can maybe say that we are the “I” that thinks, and that is our place, but we cannot be assured of the existence of a world outside of us, re: Descartes. When we think of the cosmic time scale we think of the Earth in a vast space, but the place of life itself, of what life really is, is not a physical thing; consciousness is a metaphysical thing, our only “place” is our mind. So, in death, that “I” doesn’t go anywhere. It is not a thing like a brain or blood. It returns to a previous state of existence, which is the state of nothingness. THere is nothing other than this life. It is not “fair” that we have such little time to realize how significant that is. We are given a playground for 75 or so years, depending on an undefined number of variables, and then we vanish. The life that you have is the only thing that you will ever have. I write this knowing that I just watched youtube for four hours laying in bed before my next sim session tomorrow, so it is up to you to decide. THAT is painfully cliche, so I will leave you with something that is not. Spend some time, daily, thinking about this fact, the fact of death and the gift of life that you have received. Five minutes will do. I plan to take a week-long trip into the Oregon desert sometime in the next month to consider and meditate upon life and death, and hopefully from that, I can give you something more. 

Thank you for reading. Please DM me with any questions or further thoughts you may have, or feel free to comment on the essay so others may see.