Several years ago, We were attending a small church in Pasadena, Texas. One night i had a very vivid dream. I dreamed that one of the women who went to church where we did had died. I dreamed that she came to me during the night and the two of us went down to the church building for a conversation. She said that she wanted to talk to me before she passed over. She said that she was sorry for the way that she had treated us. This dream was very real. Two days later, i told my wife about this dream and my wife said that she had learned that this lady had died two days before. I really believe that the lady in my dream came to see mefter she died.

What an interesting discussion this is. In my early teens through to my late 20s, I was a born-again Christian (raised in the Lutheran tradition and believed that anyone who confessed Jesus as Savior and Lord was a Christian), and actively participated in many evangelical activities to spread the Gospel. Also sang in a couple of small ‘pop’ Christian siniging groups traveling around Canada and the United States to ‘share Jesus’ with people so they could be ‘saved’. I no longer consider myself a Christian and while I do believe there is some kind of meaningful afterlife after we die, I certainly don’t know for sure — I am quite comfortable with this unknowingness about an afterlife. What I am more curious about, is what people believe human beings are. Are we just sinful people who need to be saved? Do we have a spark of the Divine that can be nurtured? Do we live ‘in’ God and are therefore each a unique representation of God in this world, or do we live outside of the Divine Spirit and need to either believe a certain something (e.g., Jesus) to have God live in our hearts/souls or do we need to do something (e.g., love our neighbors as we love ourselves) to get to a place called heaven? I think it is ultimately what we believe being human is that is going to shape how we treat each other and live in this world.

Boy howdy-this’s one hell of a subject to which no one knows the answer. Been chasing this one for many of my 80 years and am a real believer in “Chardin’s” quote about being a spiritual being having a physical experience. Looked up the word “Soul” in one of my dictionaries and it said “without beginning and without end” That and many other things over the years have made me a truly avowed reincarnationist, and agnostic. Also read much about Edgar Cayce and he was truly a remarkable man specializing in the question. We”ll all know someday. Geno from Reno

i’d better be thinking about where I.m going—someday, probably soooner than later ‘cause Im pushing 92. But I.m really too busy to think about it much, except at 3:30 a.m. when I am wide awake. Since I play it safe by believing in all religions, sort of, I try to add up the evidence and it’s very confusing. If we’re smart we never stop learning. Right? So by the time we’re about to shuffle off we’ve accumulated a lot of useful wisdom. Now my experience is that nature is pretty amazing in most things so it doesn’t make sense that all that wisdom and intelligence will vanish like a puff of smoke. I think it might be useful in another plateau or needed in another phase. Spirits with knowledge may have been tested by life and need to be recycled. But, then, who am I? Just a positive idea. Adeline Mohre

The perspectives of all the people who have responded to this question is distinctly Judea-Christian-Muslim (i.e. in the tradition of those who believe in and/or were inculcated with the tradition of a belief in the God of Abraham)… plus some distinctive Jewish or Christian or Muslim coloring. Which is understandable since this is what most of America (and half the world) believes in! The other half of the world, however, despite active missionary work by Christians and Muslims, still has a completely different perspective. East Asians, who comprise about a third of the world’s population, are raised in the Confucian tradtition. About God and Spirits, Confucious said: Respect all Spirits/Devils and Gods, but keep them at a distance. Confucius also said this about life after death: We know so little about this life, it is hard to speculate about the next. In the five thousand years of East Asian history, wars have been fought for every conceivable reason: for power, grab land, steal wealth, etc. But there has never been a war fought over what one side believed was the will of God. In East Asian thought, there is no anthropomorphic God who is concerned about the happenings of individuals; instead, God, if there is one, is an impersonal Force that (much like gravity) that keeps the world in balance… as, for example, in Feng Shui. In East Asian thought, unlike in Star Wars (May the Force be with you), the Force is NEVER with you: instead, you try to be with the Force. This is the reason East Asians are so ecumenical about religion; we can be respectful about and happy to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah or any other religious holiday. And we don’t get all bent out of shape if someone wished us Happy Ramadan or any other religious holiday; we would say, Why thank you, and Happy Ramadan to you too! But the MOST important of Confucian beliefs—that I think that you ladies would really understand and appreciate—is that ALL of life revolves around the hierarchy of the Five Relations: First and Most Important is the relationship between PARENTS AND CHILDREN; second is Brother and Sister; third is Husband and Wife; fourth is Friend and Friend; and Fifth is King and Subject. Ladies, those of you have children, I think will immediately understand why Confucius recognized that the immutable law of nature is that the only true, unconditional love that exists is between Parent and Child (for the parent, this unconditional love for one’s children is forever, for children, it begins to diminish somewhat after he/she breaks away). Which is why children in East Asia are taught filial piety—that it is of paramount importance to love and obey one’s parents. Parents (most fathers and certainly almost all mothers), don’t have to be taught that they need to love their children. The one indiginous religious/spiritual belief in East Asia is Ancestor worship. The Confucian thought is that the ritual of acknowledging and praying to one’s ancestors is a good way to reinforce the importance and value of filial piety. If there is a hereafter, and there is a God or Gods, what makes us think that He pays any attention to us? As He looks down and surveys the billions of ants/humans crawling the earth, this ant/human is praying for this thing, and that ant/human is desperately praying for that other thing, and this group of ants/humans is asking for help in destroying that other group of ants/humans, etc., etc…. What makes us think that He or anyone there has any interest whatsoever in doing anything for any particular ant/human? The ONLY spirits that might have any interest in doing anything to help any particular ant/human (if intervention is at all possible) is that person’s Mom or Dad. When I die, I will tell my son what my Mom told me when she died: Pray to me. If you are ever in need, pray to me. Don’t expect anything to happen… but if I am around, and there is something I can do to help, I surely will make the effort.

All my thoughts about what happens after we die had to do with something that was connected to religion—heaven or paradise, God with the big white beard, Jesus, the white guy in the clean white robe. Having been raised catholic, and then divorced myself from that religion (ha ha), I then became more lost about death. I meditated, I tired to be a protestant, I tried church, and they were all good, but there was something missing. Then I got cancer, and I found Laurie Anderson’s “Strange Angels” CD, and that explained it all for me. “Strange Angels” for me was about breast surgery, chemotherapy, and dieing into energy of the universe. It comforted me through my cancer journey, and now, 15 years later, I still listen to that CD and feel like I know how to get to heaven, and that I don’t have to do anything other than live until I die to get there.

I’m glad I tuned in to the website today, ladies; this is something I’ve been pondering quite a bit lately. My interest has been sparked because of a very special memorial park that exists in West Los Angeles where a lot of the dear folk who made an impact on my life with their own self-exprression and generous sharing of their spiritual soulful selves are buried or housed, so to speak. It’s really peaceful & beautiful there. Lately, I have found myself spending more time in this memorial park to pay my own personal homage to the memories that are stirred up for me by each individual I can recognize that I wish to think about & how their own self-worth contributed to my formative years - particularly as an American girl growing up in a Southern state. I have felt energy like a life force surrounding many of the memorial sites there. It’s really no wonder when you think about the loveable people whose families & kin folk have placed them there: Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Fannie Brice, Merv Griffin, Mel Torme, James Coburn, Peggy Lee, Marilyn Monroe, Darryl & Virginia Zannuck, Eve Arden West, Donna Reed, Ava Gabor, Carroll O’Connor, Jack Lemon, Walter & Carol Mattheau, Sammy Cohn, Jay Livingston, Minnie Ripperton, Frank Zappa, Carrie Hamilton, Helen Hayes, John Cassavetes,…at least 225 people you may recognize among the throng. Surely, all of you who read this here & read each one I’ve written has had some personal memory invoked just recognizing each name. That’s how it is when we think of any dearly departed soul we knew in this earth life. I get a warmth, a knowingness that something else is beyond this existence. The soul does go on; I feel certain of it. Anyone having a mystical experience acknowledges this to be so. It’s an awareness, as well. I have dreams of loved ones who have passed “beyond the veil”, so to speak. I have dreams so vivid, it’s more like a visitation. The experience lingers upon recalling specific details revealed during the dreaming. Those folks may be very busy in the next step of transforming immortality. Like Dr. Maya Angelou sang at Coretta Scott King’s funeral: “I won’t go - I shall go - I gotta see what the end is gonna be”…… Jean Waldorf Black ^_^

When I was very young, I remember sitting on the front porch thinking that my grandmother was on the very cloud that I could see from my chair and, if I looked up quickly enough, would see her watching over me. I was so comforted by that, it’s still something I’d like to believe……………….sixty years later. During a serious illness, sixteen years ago, four years after my own mother passed away, we all, my daughters, myself, my son and I, felt the presence of my mother. My daughters would ask each other, how they will tell Grandma; they would plan on taking turns picking her up to bring her to see me before the inevitable shock of speaking of her in the present would kick in. It was strange, all of us with this very real sense of her presence at a time when she was needed. The extraordinary thing as well was that she wasn’t a nurturing mother. Not the June Cleaver of my youth; yet this is what she would do if she was worried. she would summon the children to drive her, to take her wherever it was she had to go. Telling her about the incident would be difficult since I was held in an unrealistic light and my illness would be viewed as catastrophic; especially a life-threatening illness. It would be my mother who would have to be comforted. At one other time I felt this same presence: when my first granddaughter was born. If one believes in reincarnation (and I “kind of” do) then the feeling my daughter, my granddaughter’s mother, and I had was that my mother reincarnated as our litle Rebecca. So, who knows? Who really knows? And, if it gives comfort to believe that we’re where those who need us can find us, who does it harm?

I have to agree with Joni and Sheila on this one. Without going into very long and convoluted details, I can say that I have had numerous experiences in my life and in the lives of loved ones that have left me absolutely certain that there is a continuity to our spiritual life after physical death. This has been a belief system present in all human society from the beginning of recorded history and probably before. It has been present in all cultures no matter how far they are separated by space and time. Trying to think about things like “How will we all have space to live?” or the like is trying to understand something that lies beyond our human experience in terms based on that very limited experience. Why is it so hard for humans to let go of human limitations; to admit that perhaps we don’t, and CAN’T know everything? The more I live, the more I realize how much we DON’T know. That doesn’t alarm me. To the contrary, it’s what makes life so fascinating!

Pantheism best fits my belief system. One belief is: “It does not regard this life as a waiting room or a staging post on the way to a better existence after death.” Evidence suggests that after death our various parts….atoms for a better word….are recycled back into the “universe”. You might say we continue in a different configuration…we are even more scattered than we were when we were alive. Now there are many possible explanations for just what makes up the “universe” and how it started…if it started and how it will end…if it will end. One theory suggests that time as we define it does not really exhist. So I’m the last one to say I know what is going to happen but I can say based on the evidence that “this it it”….when I’m dead I’m gone as a human being and as anything with something called consciousness. So I’d better do what I need to do here and now cause I’m not going to get another chance. But then there is one strange possibility: At some point in the distant past all the atoms that make up me were scattered all over the place with the odds that these atoms that currently make up me would actually get together in exactly the relationships that currently occur in me would have been astronomical against that possibility…BUT IT HAPPENED. Those bad odds apply to each and every person who ever lived….but everyone did live. So perhaps, given enough time, all these same atoms that make up me in exactly this relationship will somehow get back together in exactly the same relationship and there will be another ME. WAIT! maybe it’s already happened….maybe I’m really ME #2…or #3 or #7,653.

I hate that I have never believed, in God. My whole family does, and they are aghast at my doubts and no faith. I’m a good person and I do so much for others, maybe my doubt in God, well, it is from my own doubts in myself. I don’t know. I was told we are only here for a short time (meaning God’s time, one day to him could be a thousand years to us, vice versa), we are here to be, like tested (on faith)? In temporary shells, and when we die, if we believed and were good, we become light and after Judgement Day become awake and live in heaven where it is eternal peace and love. It just sounds so, scripted. Great story. Is God watching us? Is HE watching? All the sadness, I see so much. I’m super ultra sensitive so I feel it more, it pains my mom. She prays every night on her knees. And she grows older and now the pains come with her age. I can’t save her, stop her pains. I try to read the Bible, oh God how I want to believe. Sure, it would be some awakening to see Jesus come back, if that’s what’s suppose to happen, and he looks at me and points down, cause I didn’t believe, so I’m going to hell. Is that how it works? I want to believe, how I want to. I do see a joy in believers. The Bible says faith is a gift to everyone. That Bible, it’s some story. See, maybe I just get in my own way. I don’t know. Maybe one day God will answer my prayer when I ask him, is he there? God, it’s Ashley, are you there? Did he ever answer Margaret? I didn’t finish that teen book. Peace.

I was glad to Hear Lily bring up the idea of what happens to the physical body after death. It has been the relationship with loved oones bodies after their deaths which has given me insight into spiritual after life. I was young when my mother died and I couldn’t help but to imagine the level of decay her body was expereincing. At first it was terrifying but it soon became reassurring to become that she was not her body and that her spirit was the biggest part of her and so we would always be together.

What happens to us after we die? I don’t remember.