Heaven, Hell And All In-between
Are ghosts real? When people die, do they really become ghosts?
I believe there is life after death. Why you may ask? It's because I am a sucker for science, and to me, science proves that there has to be some level of consciousness after death. Death is not the end.
Matter/energy cannot be created nor destroyed but can be transformed from one form to another. Hence, life, a form of energy cannot be destroyed. When we die, life carries on. The question is what is life? Life is consciousness. Awareness. Intelligence. We are not aware because we are alive, we are alive because we are aware. When we stop being aware, then we are dead. But this sort of complete death is impossible because energy/awareness cannot be created or destroyed.
Therefore, the difference between life and death has nothing to do with awareness or the lack of it. The difference would not be based on if we are aware or not, but on what we are aware of. Consider the question: do we perceive because we have five senses or do we have five senses because we perceive? Do human beings need the eyes to see or their ears to hear?
We evolved the five senses to adapt to our environment in order to survive. The ears, tongue, skin, nose, and eyes all took millennia after millennia to evolve based on the information we received from our environment. Perhaps just as we evolved the eyes to see visions, we can also evolve the eyes to see sounds and the ears to hear visions. My point is our body along with its five senses is only a tool, necessary to navigate this world. Perhaps if death is the medium to another world or realm, then we would not need the body or the five senses. We would need something else.
The truth is that when we die, it’s not only our bodies we leave behind. Most of us don’t realize how much our environment and social construct influence our decisions. Think of who you are without your body, your clothes, your house, your opinions, your beliefs, your religion, and your thoughts. Most people cannot imagine who they are without these materials, and worldly ‘possessions’. They are not self-aware enough to know who they are without social constructs, labels and validations. True and pure awareness, without the impurity of social construct and environmental disturbances, thinks of nothing. It has no purpose, no meaning. Nothing. It just exists. Why? Because it can.
Who were you when you were freshly born? Were you a Christian, a son, a daughter, a homosexual, a lawyer, etc? You realize that you were really none of these things, and because you were none of these things, you had the potential to be all of these things. Life is nothing but aesthetics, and at the core of beauty is the flexibility to mould ourselves and become whoever and whatever is necessary to face adversity. Perhaps, this is the difference between heaven and hell. Heaven is the realization of this power we have through life, and hell is our attachment to social conditions and constructs. So strong are the chords of social constructs that they limit our flexibility. The child that was born yesterday grows into becoming a pastor, lawyer, father, son, brother, uncle, engineer, heterosexual, homosexual, feminist, and so they cannot be anything else. They let their social roles stifle their own growth.
Hence, when they die, although free of their bodies, they may not so easily disentangle from their social constructs. Their social conditioning becomes their own prison; their own hell.
Heaven and hell are no actual locations whether in the physical or spiritual place. They are a state of mind that is best attained while we are alive. Heaven is a realization of our free will and our ability to choose. It is the realization of the power behind Socrates’ words “Man, know thyself.” When you know yourself outside of your social roles, you easily let life flow through you. On the other hand, hell is tied to social roles, and this is the source of all sin. “For the root of all evil is the love of all worldly material”
