afterlife = last moment in your head?

[kidd]

Is gold any less valuable, for being fresh from the mine.










Ask me about my ferrous metal attachment. It's magnetic! Joking, that's just what see.

 

[Lark]

I sort of think this thread shows the extremes that a certain trend towards putting mankind at the centre of things goes to.

What if not just the afterlife but this life is all just in your head and you're imagining it all, yes, even I am a product of your drug addled mind. Quick. Wake up.

 

[Munchies]

exactly, so don't fear the reaper. Romio and Julliet are together for eternity.

 

[kidd]

Not the dmt death experience. But close, it's a classic about the cop that confiscated weed. Then made he and his girlfriend some brownies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW5trBzVAzE&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

[Spamtar]

Depends on how I die. If its a auto/plane/train crash most likely the last thing on my brain is skull fragments.

 

[Kurt.Is.God]

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.

Whoa, hold on. If you got this from Strassman, you've got it wrong. Or actually, you've PROBABLY got it wrong. He admitted that it was all speculation. There is NO proof that DMT is released before we die, when we're born, or when we sleep. There IS proof that we have endogenous DMT in our blood, and that DMT is readily accepted by our brain across the BBB, though. And Strassman suggested that this concentration of DMT in our blood is responsible for NDEs because of the similarity of the experience to NDE's.

On another note, supernatural experiences: I was just reading about Kundalini syndrome earlier today. Some woman did a study, and found they shared a lot in common with acid trips. Hot/cold flashes, electricity down the spine, extreme empathy and terror, religious feelings, the loss of the ego. Something's going on at the 5HTP2 receptors, at least. That sounds somewhat close to DMT, actually.

Out-of-body experiences, on the other hand, are something I've experienced a few times, and they're nothing at all like these (I've tripped, at least). They DO begin with a sensation of electricity down the spine that gets stronger until you're literally being vibrated, and there's the odd buzzing/rushing noise that accompanies hallucinogen trips. After exiting your body, though, it's a whole lot more mundane. Literally just looking around your room, which looks exactly the same as it does in real life. I hear people often experience "reality fluctuations"--their astral body will have more than one limb, or the room will be wrongly proportioned--that's about as profound as it gets. I've only made it out once, and I found myself locked to the floor and immobilized, with blurry vision (weird).

Also, Karl Jansen wrote a book on ketamine which proposes an NMDA receptor theory for near-death experiences. He even has a guy saying he experienced a near-death experience before trying ketamine and they're indistinguishable. Go ketamine!

 

[garbage]

I sort of think this thread shows the extremes that a certain trend towards putting mankind at the centre of things goes to.

What if not just the afterlife but this life is all just in your head and you're imagining it all, yes, even I am a product of your drug addled mind. Quick. Wake up.

Regardless of whether this world is just a solipsist illusion or whether it actually 'exists,' there are still consequences for my actions and so I must maintain a sense of personal responsibility, and it is still in all of our best interests for us to band together, "play nice," love one another, and connect to something meaningful.

What are the negative consequences (morally, personally, etc.) of believing that the afterlife is chemically induced?

(For the record, I've had similar thoughts independently and had compared them to a black hole's singularity, though I never had the background or knowledge to tie it to biology.)

 

[INTP]

I sort of think this thread shows the extremes that a certain trend towards putting mankind at the centre of things goes to.

What if not just the afterlife but this life is all just in your head and you're imagining it all, yes, even I am a product of your drug addled mind. Quick. Wake up.

 

[miss fortune]

(For the record, I've had similar thoughts independently and had compared them to a black hole's singularity, though I never had the background or knowledge to tie it to biology.)

oooh... I think that I'm going to be mad at you now because I was just getting ready to refer to black holes

I remember hearing a similar, though different, thought in the movie Waking Life years ago when a character suggested that perhaps all of the life that we thought that we were currently living was actually those last firings of your brain before you're totally dead... I was disturbed by the idea for a bit, but then it occurred to me that if that was the case there was nothing I could do about it, so why fret it?

same with the afterlife... if that's all it is, why worry? there's nothing you can do about it so you'd just better hope that it's a good trip so that you can enjoy the ride

excerpt from the movie to give an idea of what I'm talking about... though this isn't quite the right quote "All through the centuries, the notion that life is wrapped in a dream has been a pervasive theme of philosophers and poets. So doesn't it make sense that death, too, would be wrapped in dream? That, after death, your conscious life would continue in what might be called, "a dream body"? It would be the same dream body you experience in your everyday dream life. Except that in the post-mortal state, you could never again wake up, never again return to your physical body."