Is there an afterlife? Well, let us ask those who would know. Oh, wait. They are dead. So where does that leave the rest of us humans?

Looking at dead people, thinking: “Oh shit. Things die. And I’m a thing. That dies.”

Naturally, we begin to fret. “Where are they now? Where will I go? Will it hurt? Will it be cool?”

So we have been obsessed with this idea. This inexorable separation and the questions it leaves us. Everyone, everywhere, for as long as we have been dying, has had to deal with these questions. Has had to deal with death.

The result? Millions of wonderful stories! Beautiful and intricate, to appease the scary mystery. And what a fascinating array of things we have come up with! Since I was a young boy, reading the stories of the Norse Gods or the ancient Egyptian deities, I have had a passion for these stories. They tend to coincide with the stories that we have come up with to explain the other unanswerable questions that we face: “How did we get here in the first place? Where did everything come from?”

So, then, who has the right answer? If you start counting how many different beliefs there are now, and that have been over time, the number becomes almost unfathomable. Millions upon millions of voices begin to sing their song of belief. They can’t all be right, right? Could there be 330 million afterlife scenarios all happening at once? Don’t they contradict each other? Opposites cannot both be true!

Well there’s something about right and wrong. We made up those concepts too. But we won’t get into that right now. Let’s get back to these stories.

Because people are brought up with them, they believe them to be true. They have been told by people they love and trust that these are the answers. But who told them, and how far back can we go when we ask that question? Does anybody really have first-hand knowledge? Many people would think that they know, but the truth is that they are merely repeating a story that was told to them, and so on.

So what is the answer? Nobody really knows. Only those who have died know. If it is indeed possible to know after one’s death. In the end though, what is the point of worrying about it?  You’ll find out when you die! What’s your hurry? Why so impatient? The answer awaits beyond death, and there is no reason to be afraid of it. Be excited! Once you live out your Earthly life, you are on the way to find out the answer. Only then will the truth be revealed. Or not. Who knows? But once you are comfortable with death, you can live a life truly free. There is nothing within our realm that will not decay over time. It’s a very necessary part of life! And why not make up awesome stories to explain it all? And why bother telling people that your story is better? There are tonnes of them out there. Just tell your own, let others tell theirs and let us all be merry about it.

I’m just going to kick back and listen to this symphony of beliefs as it beautifully serenades our species’ journey through time and space. Perhaps I will even entertain my own ideas…

What I’m really hoping for after death is a world where I can see the statistics of anything I want about my life. Let’s say that I want to see how much water I have ingested in my lifetime in pool form. Bam, done. And now after seeing that pool, I would like to compare it to a pool of how much urine I have produced, minus the smell. Boom. Wow! Ok I’ve seen enough. Now to choose what to be next time. Koala? Sure! New religion, anyone?

What sort of statistics would you want to know?