Is nobody interested at all in what happens after we die?
There is a ToeQuest thread named something like 'What Happens After We Die".
— Abloom —
At first, you sleep in your dear mother’s womb;
At last, you sleep in the cold silent tomb.
In between, Life whispers a dream that says
“Wake, live, for the rose withers all too soon!”
What Really Happens After We Die?
We die ‘little deaths’ all the time.
Our atoms change, some of our memories go away
And some new ones reappear,
Although I realize that it is the core of memories
That defines us as us.
It’s just that we are hardly the same person now
As when we were much younger.
We had ‘death’ before birth, too,
And now there is life after birth.
Is there life only during life?
If one had amnesia and began learning the world anew,
Then one might say that one as the previous person
Was ‘dead’ and that it is our new life that counts,
One not even missing the old one.
And, while the ‘big death’ is much more
Than any of these ‘little deaths’,
It is that our atoms go on
To reside in a new person eventually.
It’s not like there is any continuity of memory,
But more like that any narrative will do.
As for really knowing all, that is, the TOE,
Meaning that we know that we can’t know it all.
This is a relief and so then we can go about our life
With the ultimate freedom to be.
Now and Zen
Everything that is part of us—
Our cells, tissues, organs and organ systems—
Has come about over billions of years
Because it proved successful in the great survival stakes
During our perilous evolutionary descent with modification.
The brain, being no exception, evolved, in part,
To allow a creature to learn from what happens in its life,
To retain key elements that could influence future actions.
We are geared for self-preservation.
We will do anything to avoid facing the possibility
That who we are now cannot continue.
We ourselves are mainly the cause that we are interested in.
The self is preoccupied with staying alive,
Which is why our species is still around today.
It is a prime biological function to be afraid of death,
And so the self, as thus contrived,
Is able to fully play its crucial survival role.
We want to equip our brain with a soul
That offers us an escape when the brain dies
Since the self cannot come to terms with its own extinction.
From a subjective standpoint, we are all born equal
And undifferentiated (before that, ‘we’ were dead),
But as mature selves we make a distinction
Between the individual and the surroundings.
Still, the brain keeps changing throughout life,
In a pattern of the shifting flux of its neurons.
We gain and lose memories and feelings,
Essentially creating a new person over and over again.
The self is thus not so rock solid as it seems.
These moment-to-moment changes differ from death
Only in degree. In essence, they are identical,
Although at the opposite ends of the spectrum.
So, we are not static things.
Other neural networks will come to be in other,
Future people, albeit with an “amnesia”
Of what went on before in the brains of the previous others.
Why should we be happy about this?
We never can be, because the ‘I’ cannot operate
Outside of its own boundaries.
The only viable alternative is to think of a way
In which it is possible to ever continue on.
What will it be like to be a part of someone else after we die,
With our own particular narrative of life cast aside?
This is the ‘zen’ of now and then and when.
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Originally Posted by Hans J Zeunert 
