Although there is certainly a lot of culturally produced religious/spiritual propaganda that touts the afterlife in many variety, there is also certainly a lot of culturally produced scientific/materialist propaganda that touts that we are bodies and that is it. All I know for sure is that you will never personally die. Death always happens to someone else. If there is afterlife (reincarnation, heaven, ghosts) then, of course, you will never personally die. However, even if there is no afterlife, you still won’t ever personally die, because there will be no you to say, “oh I’m dead.” Again, death always happens to someone else (to me, that is a clue as to what death is all about). I’d say that most people believe in some form of afterlife because in their personal day to day experience they feel more like minds than bodies; bodies seem more like just an interface. And to a person who has ever experienced certain altered states of consciousness, such as those facilitated by certain psychoactive substances, like adequate doses of psychedelic drugs, the body starts to lose all credibility of primacy. Only when a person becomes a brain worshiper and attempts to attribute mind completely to physical organs does afterlife start to seem dismissible. Are you a body or a mind? |