afterlife = last moment in your head?

[INTP]

I had this(weird?) theory about afterlife when i was stoned few days ago. We were discussing about psychedelic substances and brains natural chemistry a bit with friends earlier.

First of all, the last moment when your about to die your brain releases large amount of dmt(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine). This psychedelic substance is part of your normal brain chemistry all the time, but since its controlled, you are not seeing hallucinations all the time. Or actually you kind of are, but its more like controlled hallucination and this controlled hallucination is how you perceive the reality. Hallucinogens like dmt can cause almost full loss of time and more you take those substances greater the loss of time is. Hallucinogens replace some of your your normal neurotransmitters, making your unconsciousness your consciousness by making your cognitive functions more equal and some of them come from unconsciousness, kinda like removing all barriers between them and because of loss of these "barriers" everything seems confusing. Also the amount of information that you get while on hallucinogens is so huge that it normally feels overwhelming(at least if you take enough hallucinogens). You can feel total loss of ego, out of body experience etc. This was the fact part and now to the speculations.

What if the amount of this dmt is so huge/placed right that you lose sense of time so much that the last moment becomes infinite time to you. Combined with the fact that the amount of information going thru consciousness is REAAALLY huge, possibly so huge that every bit of information could be handled on this last moment "trip". Making everything you have ever experienced and every possible connection with every possible outcomes gets processed the same time without making any new connections between. Combining this kind of experience with total loss of time could create "heaven" for you with the combination of total enlightenment.

Afterlife - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All these believes of afterlife share some same characteristics like total enlightenment, out of body experience, life being judged after dying(or karma), infinity etc. So to me all these visions of the afterlife seem like misinterpretations of the same thing. And since these believes originate from the days when people didnt know at all about brain chemistry it could easily be because they didnt know about dmt or that your brains contain it and releases much of it when dying.

I could write about it more, but i dont feel like that anymore

Anyway personally i think that this raises important question: should i think more what im doing with my life? I have never believed to afterlife, but thinking about the thing like this makes me wonder if in the end it matters more what i do now than i thought it would. Even tho im not sure that this will happen, i think there is a chance of something like this happening. It kinda scares me(in a good respect kind of way scary) that if i spend much time now(or at some point of my life) wallowing in bad feelings instead of pursuing good feelings i would experience all those bad feelings again, instead of experiencing good feelings twice. If this doesent happen and i just black out after dying, it doesent matter how i spent my life, so it doesent matter in the long run if i enjoy life at its fullest or not. Earlier i was so sure that i will just black out, that i havent really cared how much i am enjoying life, thinking that at least if its bearable i can handle it without a problem..
Going against my current way of thinking(about just blacking out when dying) feels scary and kind of like i would be doing something im not supposed to do. But does that really matter in the long run even tho i would just black out?

What do you think?
Would be nice if you would give this a serious thought before replying.

 

[theadoor]

In this case, all roads lead to Rome and I believe that in the end we all will have structurally the same, but in details different experience ('you're unique, just like everybody else' idea), which is built on our past actions. Therefore IMO you should enjoy your life at its fullest no matter what the ending experience is like, because we can't really enjoy the results and ending anyway (sorry, I don't believe in paradise or reincarnation). Or at least we can't be fully sure that we can, but we can still fully enjoy the process, right? but then again it's only my opinion.

 

[lunalove]

I don't believe that the afterlife means being punished. I do not believe I will feel all of my negative or positive feelings again in the afterlife. I do believe that we will reincarnate, and the negative experiences will be repeated in different ways until we learn and grow from them each time we come to this world. So I agree that it is a good idea to learn, grow, and experience as much positivity in this life as possible!

I would like to point out how much power this gives each and everyone of this to make our world a better place. How much joy and light and love we can give to one another! (And how much evil, hatred, and negativity we can create as well. Though I hope we all choose the former!!)

As you can tell, I have given this considerable thought Thank you for such a thought-provoking post, INTP luna~

 

[Polaris]

It's possible that someone could, after the moment of human death, enter a kind of DMT-based hallucination that stretches on forever. This hallucination would not be infinite in any special sense, though. When we speak of infinity, what we mean is that a thing is transcended by another thing and that this other thing is transcended, as well. This flow of transcendence is repeated forever, but only in the sense that the moment we posit it, that position is itself transcended. In other words, there is not an embodied infinity but a multitude of things, including ideas of infinity, that each promise an Eternity, a Truth, a Foundation--in short, a God--without ever fully realizing that God for the reason that God is known only through this unfulfilled promise. This unfulfilled promise is simply time: a thing lying there like a fragment of the truth and consciousness flowing forth from it in search of the rest. It's useless to say that consciousness could escape time through the full truth, because all that informs us of the full truth is its absence. This absence is not a nothingness; it is the cardinal direction in which consciousness flows. If we imagine that there's a destination at the bottom of it, we may as well travel south in order to reach the southermost southward.

 

[Fluffywolf]

It's possible that someone could, after the moment of human death, enter a kind of DMT-based hallucination that stretches on forever.

You sound pretty sure of that.

This hallucination would not be infinite in any special sense, though. When we speak of infinity, what we mean is that a thing is transcended by another thing and that this other thing is transcended, as well. This flow of transcendence is repeated forever, but only in the sense that the moment we posit it, that position is itself transcended.

*blink*

In other words, there is not an embodied infinity but a multitude of things, including ideas of infinity, that each promise an Eternity, a Truth, a Foundation--in short, a God--without ever fully realizing that God for the reason that God is known only through this unfulfilled promise.

*rubs chin*

This unfulfilled promise is simply time: a thing lying there like a fragment of the truth and consciousness flowing forth from it in search of the rest. It's useless to say that consciousness could escape time through the full truth, because all that informs us of the full truth is its absence. This absence is not a nothingness; it is the cardinal direction in which consciousness flows. If we imagine that there's a destination at the bottom of it, we may as well travel south in order to reach the southermost southward.

*stares blankly for a while*


...

Ok, here's what I think happened. Confusement and shock is the cause of hinted DMT induced 'eternity'. In reality: You are dying, you hallucinate, you die, brain activity ceases, you're dead, hallucination is gone.

A physically induced hallucination can not transcend the boundaries of time.

 

[Katsuni]

Ok, here's what I think happened. Confusement and shock is the cause of hinted DMT induced 'eternity'. In reality: You are dying, you hallucinate, you die, brain activity ceases, you're dead, hallucination is gone.

A physically induced hallucination can not transcend the boundaries of time.

ANd yet... a physical aspect CAN.

I've had a similar theory for over a decade now, but for the moment I'd like to focus on the point fluffywolf brought up.

Consider the event horizon of a black hole.

If someone were falling into a black hole, as they get closer to it, time slows, further and further, until reaching the event horizon when it flatlines basically.

To the outside observer, time continues as normal, the person falls towards the black hole and maintains a constant speed, passing by the event horizon as if nothing happened at all.

To the person who is falling, however, time is distorted and stretched out the closer they get; it turns into the half, half, half paradox, where the similar line of thinking is yeu start at 1, and cut it in half, leaving yeu with 1/2; then move 1/2 closer again, so 1/4, then half again, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, getting infinitely CLOSER but never reaching yeur goal of 0.

As such, when someone tries to reach the event horizon of a black hole, to them they will never reach it, the distance will stretch longer, as will time, so that the individual falling will never actually reach it. Time itself will slow to a crawl before they reach the threshold.

Thing is that death of the brain is similar...

Take a situation where someone is in a paniced state... that whole "time seemed to stand still" feeling. The brain normally only processes information so quickly, however, in situations of dire need, it can more or less go far past those limits and process information at astounding speeds for a short time. The overall effect of this, is that time seems to slow down as yeu're able to look at, register, think about, and act upon far more information in that short timespan.

If yeu were dying, the brain can do some REALLY screwed up stuff when it's being affected in not just its' chemistry, but also its' electrical impulses, being oxygen deprived, sugar deprived and so on... there's so many factors during death that the brain would be going nuts, and yet its' sole function is to take input information, and process it so that it makes sense.

Soooo... as yeu die... the brain attempts in vain to make sense of the crap that's going on, and if it manages to tap into yeur previous memories of an afterlife, it'll probably use that to try to make sense of it all.

It may even SEEM like eternity to the one afflicted, similar to the blackhole scenario, but it's moreso yeur perception of time is directly linked to yeur brain's ability to process the information of time, and if yeur brain is going splat... that's the last thing it's bothering to try to do, and it will be going into the aforementioned overdrive as it tries desperately to handle processing whot's going on.

As such, if yeu were dying a relatively quick death, but not instant, like say... drowning or head being squeezed in a vice, something that would take several seconds to several minutes to occur... chances are yeu would encounter yeur afterlife.

And because of the machinations which caused such, yeu wouldn't go to the afterlife yeu were hoping for, but rather the one yeu KNEW yeu were going to. Let's say yeu were trying yeur best out of fear to be the perfect religious person... but were insanely fearful yeu would go to yeur respective hell. If that's the stronger belief of the two, as yeu died, that would be more likely the one to be realized, regardless of how one acted in life.

Yeur own deepest beliefs, or fears, would be realized. This may be good, it may not.

I'll have proof of this myself if I die in such a manner, as my knowledge of where I'll go when I die is unlike any other described heaven or hell... if I see that place, I'll know I was right. Of course... then I'll be dead and won't be able to tell anyone, but meh whotever.

In any case, it's an interesting thought, one I've toyed with for a long time.

Yeu'd still obviously die, but it may seem like eternity to the one dying.

 

[nanook]

Would be nice if you would give this a serious thought before replying.

shit, i am trying for ten minutes now, but this is just not the topic that can be handled with thoughts. more data (DMT and other) required.

 

[INTP]

ANd yet... a physical aspect CAN.

I've had a similar theory for over a decade now, but for the moment I'd like to focus on the point fluffywolf brought up.

Consider the event horizon of a black hole.

If someone were falling into a black hole, as they get closer to it, time slows, further and further, until reaching the event horizon when it flatlines basically.

To the outside observer, time continues as normal, the person falls towards the black hole and maintains a constant speed, passing by the event horizon as if nothing happened at all.

To the person who is falling, however, time is distorted and stretched out the closer they get; it turns into the half, half, half paradox, where the similar line of thinking is yeu start at 1, and cut it in half, leaving yeu with 1/2; then move 1/2 closer again, so 1/4, then half again, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, getting infinitely CLOSER but never reaching yeur goal of 0.

As such, when someone tries to reach the event horizon of a black hole, to them they will never reach it, the distance will stretch longer, as will time, so that the individual falling will never actually reach it. Time itself will slow to a crawl before they reach the threshold.

Thing is that death of the brain is similar...

Take a situation where someone is in a paniced state... that whole "time seemed to stand still" feeling. The brain normally only processes information so quickly, however, in situations of dire need, it can more or less go far past those limits and process information at astounding speeds for a short time. The overall effect of this, is that time seems to slow down as yeu're able to look at, register, think about, and act upon far more information in that short timespan.

If yeu were dying, the brain can do some REALLY screwed up stuff when it's being affected in not just its' chemistry, but also its' electrical impulses, being oxygen deprived, sugar deprived and so on... there's so many factors during death that the brain would be going nuts, and yet its' sole function is to take input information, and process it so that it makes sense.

Soooo... as yeu die... the brain attempts in vain to make sense of the crap that's going on, and if it manages to tap into yeur previous memories of an afterlife, it'll probably use that to try to make sense of it all.

It may even SEEM like eternity to the one afflicted, similar to the blackhole scenario, but it's moreso yeur perception of time is directly linked to yeur brain's ability to process the information of time, and if yeur brain is going splat... that's the last thing it's bothering to try to do, and it will be going into the aforementioned overdrive as it tries desperately to handle processing whot's going on.

As such, if yeu were dying a relatively quick death, but not instant, like say... drowning or head being squeezed in a vice, something that would take several seconds to several minutes to occur... chances are yeu would encounter yeur afterlife.

And because of the machinations which caused such, yeu wouldn't go to the afterlife yeu were hoping for, but rather the one yeu KNEW yeu were going to. Let's say yeu were trying yeur best out of fear to be the perfect religious person... but were insanely fearful yeu would go to yeur respective hell. If that's the stronger belief of the two, as yeu died, that would be more likely the one to be realized, regardless of how one acted in life.

Yeur own deepest beliefs, or fears, would be realized. This may be good, it may not.

I'll have proof of this myself if I die in such a manner, as my knowledge of where I'll go when I die is unlike any other described heaven or hell... if I see that place, I'll know I was right. Of course... then I'll be dead and won't be able to tell anyone, but meh whotever.

In any case, it's an interesting thought, one I've toyed with for a long time.

Yeu'd still obviously die, but it may seem like eternity to the one dying.

maybe we should start a cult?

Anyway i have thought that the feeling of eternity would be caused by all information being processed at once. Thats because i believe that how people measures time is how fast he processes information. In normal everyday life if you mostly just sit at home doing the same things each day and at times you go out and do something else just that you dont get bored. The time that you spend at home starts to feel like its going faster since there is less information going on your mind. (Extroverts need more time off the home so they might not notice that happening.)
Anyway if that would happen that every connection in your brains(and every possible connection) would get just one energy spike(or what ever that makes the brains tick), the amount of information would basically be infinite, therefore making the one last moment feel like it would last forever.

 

[INTP]

shit, i am trying for ten minutes now, but this is just not the topic that can be handled with thoughts. more data (DMT and other) required.

... amount of dmt(Dimethyltryptamine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

what kind of information you need more?

 

[Zarathustra]

Wow.

I've had almost the EXACT same thought.

Probably like six or seven years ago I had the hypothesis that if one's reality is essentially generated from one's own mind (I'm not trying to be solipsistic here, just sayin that to a large extent it is), then, from the mind's subjective view, reality might never cease to exist, even though, from an outsider's objective perspective, the brain has stopped functioning, the person has died, etc.

I figured this would essentially amount to some kind of afterlife from that individual's subjective point of view, because all their memories, everything they had done with their life, would come to the forefront. Realizing that they were about to die, they would have that "near death" or "afterlife" experience we always here about, in which someone's whole life flashes before their eyes.

Furthermore, I believe that in that state, one experiences a clarity, in which, if one's own life were to flash before one's eyes, one would reach some level of objectivity with which they could judge their life: their experiences, their decisions, their mistakes, everything important...

I made the claim in another post just the other day that, in my opinion, the greatest hell you could put Hitler through would be to make him relive the last moments of his life, over and over again, for eternity.

The hell that guy must have felt must have been horrible -- and deservedly so.

In contrast, think of someone like Descartes (not a personal hero of mine or anything, but he does have one of the most fantastic last moment quotes I've ever heard), who, with his last breath, whispered, "So, my soul, it is time to part".

One heaven; one hell.

Interestingly enough, Descartes was obsessed with the pineal gland as the locus of the human soul (res cogitens ["thinking substance"]).

And I believe, if memory serves me correctly, that DMT is excreted from, or acts primarily upon, the pineal gland...

Fascinating...

Thanks for the great post!

 

[Zarathustra]

p.s. I'd never known that DMT was released in excess right before we die, so thanks for not only independently coming up with a similar thought to my own, but furthering it with that useful nugget of information.

Makes a lot of sense (although, if you have some kind of good literature on the topic, could you send it my way, cuz I generally don't like taking these kinds of claims at face value).

 

[nanook]

i did not mean you should post info about the drug (i took similar dissociatives btw), i meant we would have to do more living and dying, more drugs, more meditation, in order to* find more data that might hold implications about this death experience.

(* i would never recommend/advise/advertise a specific random individual on the internet to take any drugs)

What if the amount of this dmt is so huge/placed right that you lose sense of time so much that the last moment becomes infinite time to you.

i think, that's where we already have one thought to much about the matter.

does it take a million thoughts to undo/falsify that thought? or can we take it back, because it's a methodological mistake, to fall for that thought in the first place? in the end, the mind will only prove that it can't just know some things by its own means. the thinking mind.

so far anyone who experiences some kind of eternity survived it to come back and tell us about it. its seems way too unfounded to assume that a higher dosage would perfect this imperfect eternity. what could more plausibly perfect this eternity is the end of metabolism which implies that nothing would end or follow this "eternity". but there is no reason (in this experience of dmt) to assume that you could not possibly survive it, even without coming back into this body. it's just the old materialistic atheistic worldview, that leads us to assume that only metabolism or "material/biological live" could free us from such a stage, because we think there is nothing else, so no where to escape to. its an assumption.

of course this does not change anything about the fact that it could be a scary experience. (been there, done that, samsara can kick ass with great endurance)

my general rules: 1) never assume that a real or super-real experience is the absolute truth.
2) remember that one truth does not necessarily falsify what looks like an opposite, because all truths belong to a level and even if they have absolute value on one level, the other levels remain as they were. for example: if you tap into a part of yourself that seems to be eternally frozen in time, like Prometheus is chained to a wall, that does not mean that this is the truth and everything else (live on earth) should be rejected as illusion. (applying simple rationality to spiritual insight in such an absolute way would causes depression, its a disease to apply one level of thought to a higher level of experience). the self is not constricted to this level of Prometheus, it can be what appears to be frozen and live a live simultaneously. and live is not more valuable, because it is the temporary exception to the truth of being nailed to the mountains. but it is more valuable because it is possible and because it is more awesome. btw, yes it is my experience that i am a separate self who is nailed to this place right now, while another part of me is alive and typing, and no i try not to assume that this is the highest truth. it's just a single insight that i had. one tiny perspective. one possibility to experience reality.

 

[INTP]

although, if you have some kind of good literature on the topic, could you send it my way, cuz I generally don't like taking these kinds of claims at face value

Only thing i knew about the subject was few things about how dmt works when taken recreationally, that brains have dtm all the time and that brains release higher amounts of dtm when human is dying.

I prefer not to use too much information when i start to theorize, since that info might not be correct, so i dont have any literature about this matter.

I dont think that you would relive anything many times, but more like that you go into the "light" where everything makes sense, everything is there, at the same time forever

 

[nanook]

dmt is also involved in dreams. while it is untypical to have dreams that are like eternity, its not so untypical for people who have messed around with dissociative drugs (which include such alternations of time). my impression is, that once you know a part of your self, a possible way of experiencing your self, your dream live will try to get it's "head around it" and it will occasionally use as much dmt as is necessary to create the mental holodeck that can roughly recreate the drug experience, which might have been an experience, induced by another drug. the dream-state turns out to be very flexible. i am only speculating that dmt is involved in such re-creations.

 

[Zarathustra]

I dont think that you would relive anything many times, but more like that you go into the "light" where everything makes sense, everything is there, at the same time forever

I wasn't making the claim that you would.

I was just saying that would be a fitting hell for Hitler.

That being said, I do think it's possible that you experience subjective time, ad infinitum, so, whatever goes on in your head during that infinite subjective time, well, that's up to you, what you did in your life, and your conscience.

 

[Feops]

I can see a sort of extended hallucination taking place at death, but I can't see how it would last forever, even perceptually.

Even with radically lengthened time dilation the brain can only process information so fast.. the longer the experience the less there would be to it. At extremes it would seem an empty thoughtless existence.

 

[nanook]

I can see a sort of extended hallucination taking place at death, but I can't see how it would last forever, even perceptually.

Even with radically lengthened time dilation the brain can only process information so fast.. the longer the experience the less there would be to it. At extremes it would seem an empty thoughtless existence.

true, but that is common for a lot of dissociative experiences anyway: not very much happens, but the vision/'what happens' is loaded with density of subjective meaning (taste, primal emotions like horror, angst, pressure/struggle, basic interpretations) - imagine you become one with the concrete tower below a bridge and all you can conceive is the struggle of being between the weight of the bridge and the pull of gravity. ("dissociative" means in this context: outside of the world of sensory input)

likewise the separate self of hitler could have a paranoid session of feeling a bit damned.

you are basically alone with yourself. all of it at once. can you stand yourself?

 

[kidd]

I love being alone. Born in it live in it. The last moments are going the be the best of my life. It's a good thing I like life. There's atleast 2 sides to everything an nothing stays the same. (Just so no one calls me suicidal!)

 

[Lark]

So let me get this straight, you're asking me to weigh a theory you and your friends came up with while stoned against that of the world religions whose theorising is worked out through the thinking and experience of generations?

 

[INTP]

So let me get this straight, you're asking me to weigh a theory you and your friends came up with while stoned against that of the world religions whose theorising is worked out through the thinking and experience of generations?