Death and Afterlife

For as long as human history, we have tried to look for an answer for death. ‘What happen when we die’ and ‘what will happen after we die?’. These questions have always been around for centuries and many answers have been offered resulting rituals and beliefs. We know that our body decomposes or burnt when we die, but how about our souls?

The idea of what happens when we die has varied from philosophical to a more scientific view. A philosopher from Sicily, Empedocles (c. 490-430 BC) believes that when human dies, our bodies separated into four elements: air, water, earth and fire. Science says that when a human’s heart stop beating and the lungs stop breathing, in minutes, the brain which runs out of oxygen begins to release toxin and order the cells to self destruct resulting in death. How about our soul then? In 1931, Dr Duncan McDougall, in his scientific research of weighing human soul concludes that soul has weight as when human dies, their weight decreases 21 grams. Where do our 21 gram souls go?

A number of beliefs such as ghost, rebirth, heaven and hell have always been featured in classic afterlife stories. The Egyptians believe that their Pharaohs have to go through several obstacles and challenges to return into life. Based on this belief, pyramids for pharaoh are decorated with the bible of death to guide their pharaohs in the afterlife. In an Ancient Greek Mythology, Hades is known to be the God of the underworld where human souls go after they die. Buddhist believes in rebirth, they believes that death is when our soul leaves our body on earth to be reborn into 6 realms of heaven, human beings, Asura, hungry ghost, animal and hell, based on our karma. Christians believes that when we die we will go to be judged and stayed either in heaven or hell forever.

So far science has not been able to explain afterlife. What science has observed is when human is dies, mass amounts of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the most powerful psychedelic known, gets pumped to our body and created psychedelic experiences which are known as near death experience. Still, they cannot answer when people who return from death claims to float on air seeing their bodies. Afterlife may exist or may not exist at all. The problem is what you believe.