The Afterlife:
Prepare it While You Live

Last Update: 5 November, 2023

What This is About:

Human consciousness is not mortal, but eternal, even though the human body is mortal. That is to say, the spirit continues to live after death, which is an Afterlife.

Where you go depends on what you did.

Why It's Important:

Whatever you think about the Afterlife, the sheer eternal duration of it means that it is well worth whatever preparation you can make. You wouldn't go to spend a day somewhere without a hotel reservation; where will you spend your eternity?

Background:

Unfortunately, although the Afterlife is of such extreme intensity and duration of effect to all life on Earth, our society has discouraged attention on it, or pursuit of the truth on it, due to:

Keeping cultural focus on issues of immediate security and comforts, including measuring people's success by these. Government and business have an incentive to mobilize people to produce, purchase, and obey, not to think about their Afterlife. In fact, if we followed Government and business on how to live, we would live only for the now. Many people die without even waking a Will, as if they were immortal.
Portrayal that concerns about what happens after death are childish.
Trusting in unreasonably certain religious guarantees about the Afterlife, typically taught by humans who have nothing directly to do with the administration of the Afterlife. These assurances alleviate the natural alarm we should have over our limited lifespand and approaching end of life expectancy.
Portraying it as offensive to talk about publicly, being an immoral challenge to others' choice of beliefs. It should have been alarming that the different religions have very different views on the Afterlife, in terms of what we will find there and how we should prepare, and they are not compatible, even though humans are fundamentally the same and should therefore face a similar reality. Rather, in the face of these many beliefs about the Afterlife, based in religion, and since it's offensive to say that anyone's religious beliefs are wrong, the popular solution is to proclaim everyone's beliefs as equally valid. Unfortunately howevermuch this works to encourage inter-religious harmony, it also logically discourages anyone from pursuing the truth about the Afterlife: if any belief is equally valid, there's no reason to pursue the truth.

Delusions in this Issue:

Extreme indifference has become popular on this issue, as though most people would rather talk about literally anything else. The attitude seems to be that 'no one knows for sure' so therefore it's not worth investigating. This argument fails in the following ways:

Some people actually do know for sure because they have died, experienced another place, and come back. We're talking about experiences during actual clinical death, many of whom come back without the brain damage we would normally expect for being without a heartbeat for more than 5 minutes (which is proof that something beyond medical science has happened). The reality of these experiences is usually subjective, but sometimes in the process they receive information they would have no other way of knowing. We showcase some of these experiences, further down on this page, as 'near-death experiences' (yes they're common enough that there is a popular term for them).
Whether you're sure or not you're definitely going there, so you squander your opportunity to prepare now if you don't. The Afterlife is not like learning about legendary places, such as Camelot, which we have no reasonable expectation of ever encountering, so we simply dismiss them with a statement like 'no one knows for sure'. Since we're going to the Afterlife, we need to find out. It cannot be ignored because it will be faced. It's not a question of if it's important, of if we will see it, but how prepared we are.
We know we can't expect to come back (even if we do, very rarely as discussed above, it's only to go to the Afterlife forever). That makes preparation even more important. There is no 'undo' button for being misprepared.
In terms of our responsibility and preparation, it's not as important who or what is in the Afterlife, and how it all works, as whether or not we are ready to answer for our deeds. Since we didn't make ourselves, we can be sure that we are accountable to someone or something, and the Afterlife is the most reasonable time for us to give that accounting. This question makes the details of the Afterlife unimportant for us to worry about.
If you build a relationship with a powerful eternal being whom you can rely on, ie. God, you can expect that relationship to continue in the Afterlife. It's logical that that person would function at the very least as a guide to help you readjust, as any friend would.
If there is an Accounting, then there is a Judgment, and that implies punishment or rewards. It makese sense that your eternal judgment is something not to fail. Imagine the most important exam of your life times infinity. That's how important this is.
We are totally dependent in the Afterlife, as far as we know. We know of nothing we can bring with us, not or money or even our bodies, and we don't know how it works, which would leave use totally dependent for support until we can establish a new framework for our existence. The vulnerability of it makes preparation more important.
It's forever. The timeframe makes ensuring a good Afterlife infinitely (literally) more important than having a good life on Earth. Based on this wisdom many people have wisely invested their lives in self-sacrifice and the service of others, to invest in their best Afterlife. This also means that no gain in this life is worth hurting your position in the next one.

Definitions

The Afterlife is the continuation of your consciousness without your physical body.

Facts about the Afterlife:

The time after this life is infinitely longer than the time of this life. It's like comparing 1 to infinity.
As one is to infinity, so is the importance of this life compared to the Afterlife.
If there's any chance of truth about the Afterlife, especially anything wise to prepare, it is worthwhile to spend your life doing that preparation. If you can prepare eterneity for the investment of only a limited time, that is a strong profit, ie. much more reward than what you invested.
Your consciousness is you. Anything else associate with your being are only peripheral things and some of them, like your body, expendable.
There is no reason to believe that consciousness ends with physical death. No one has been able to tie consciousness down to specific physical processes, or otherwise prove that it is dependent on biology. Therefore there is no reason to expect consciousness to end even if the life of the physical body does. In fact the evidence is that consciousness does continue after death. For example:

October 23, 2022: Surgeons Find Evidence of a Soul After Patient Describes Operating Room After Declared Dead for 20 Minutes

It is dangerous to cling to the first theory of the Afterlife you find, becausee life is not something you get to repeat if you get it wrong. You need to be right the first time about this.

Theories about the Afterlife:

There are other beings in the Afterlife, since, at the very least, you are not the only one who dies. It is also reasonable that this entire system was set up by someone, or at least is run by some kind of governmence, since conscious beings in one place tend to organize into some kind of social order.
You will be judged in the Afterlife. You can't escape the judgment of others when they are present, and they are present in the Afterlife. It is reasonable to believe that this judgment will not be merely by peers but by whoever is running things in the Afterlife.
You will be judged primarily on the morality of your deeds, because God, truth, and morality are the only things which matter in eternity, and the first two of those you don't control and thereforee cannot be judged on.
If you had a specific life purpose given to you, presumably you will be judged on how well you accomplished it.
How well you developed your consciousness in life seems reasonable to also be important in determining where you got next.

What the Threat is:

The threat is that unrepented guilt, whether you care about what you did wrong or not, must be repented or punished in this life, or there is justice to be executed on you in the next life.

Although Hell is not a threat to life during physical life, it is a critical threat to life after death.

Evidence of Heaven: The Good Place. Really Good.

Near-Death Experiences of Heaven, God, or loving beings:

Hell: The Bad Place. Really Bad.

What the Issue of Hell is:

This is about the facts that:

We have an accountability for our thoughts, words, and actions, beyond to Earthly authorities, to our Creator. We can expect to be Judged there, for good deeds to be rewarded, and evil deeds to be punished.
The concept of Hell is that it is a place where these kinds of punishments are carried out, typically that the evil you did (and didn't repent of) is returned to you in similar fashion as you did to the innocent, only returned to you in tremendous repetition.
Hell is said to be eternal, although not every source agrees. Whether or not Hell is an eternal punishment, it is wise to everything to avoid it, beause the testimonies of visionaries and those of related near-death experiences are that the punishment of Hell is extreme beyond our imagination in both repetition, duration, and intensity. Part of the reason for the the high intensity of suffering is that, it is said and is reasonable, the pain felt by the soul-spirit hurts much more when injured directly than when the pain has to go through a body to be sensed by the soul-spirit. Appparently there are limits to bodily pain, but not to spiritual pain.
Punishments for sin can be avoided if the person sincerely repents, so long as they do so while they still live. After death, such repentance is not accepted.
Similarly, if a person is justly punished for what they did wrong in this life, as far as we know that is accepted to avoid punishment in the next life.
The standard for Afterlife judgment is morality, not legality: if something is legal in your society at the time you did it, but morally wrong, that's a guilt towards your Creator.
Afterlife Judgment is also based on intent behind your deeds rather than just your deeds, because the Creator knows your intent and keeps a spiritual record of it.
Due to the Afterlife Judgment being based on the morality of intent rather than outward appearances, some people who appear to do evil things with innocent intent, such as some prostitutes, will not be punished, while some people who appear to do good things with evil intent will be punished. For example, one visionary reported the the late Pope John Paul II is actually in Hell, because Jesus was angry with him because, during his life, besides some other sins, most importantly, the Pope taught, even in an official written document, that Hell was not a place, portraying it as simply a separation from God, even though he knew that it was a place. This worked against Jesus Christ's work to try to warn people about the reality of Hell, endangering many people, especially as the Pope was the religious leader of billions of people (there is a responibility to leadership): WARNING TO ALL CATHOLICS AND IDOL WORSHIPERS! Hell is Real, Pope John Paul II is BURNING in Hell.
It's when the morally guilty go unpunished, and they don't repent, that they face inescapable punishment in the Afterlife.
As doing evil things causes harm to victims in this world, and harm to purpetrators in the next, and since God is just but did not design us to suffer, He has been reaching out, through prophets, visions, and other means, to warn people to stop sinning (ie. stop doing evil).
The idea of Hell is easy to ignore in this life, because the gift of Life itself affords us comforts for now. Some might even laugh at those who try to describe, portray, or otherwise warn about Hell. Sadly, the horror of Hell isn't conveyed well through words or visual effects but it must usually be felt to appreciate its full gravity. Few have been allowed to witness it and come back to tell about it. Unlike stories of heaven, apparently due to shame, stories about going to Hell are less common.
Despite some interpretations, Hell is not about suffering for choosing the wrong religion somuch as justice for the moral evil you have done.
Few people give enough thought about where they will go after they die, even though it's inevitably coming, and even though it is eternal.

Evidence or Testimony

Here are sample testimonies of Hell:

The Concept of Puragatory

Although not Biblical, there is a Christian concept, in some denominations, of a place you go to in the Afterlife if you have unrepented sin or shortcomings which are not serious enough to send you to Hell for (mortal sin) but which you need to atone for in terms of suffering.

The popular viewpoint on this in such believe systems is that the penalties for sin are severe, only a little less agony than Hell, and for timeframes which are often measured in tens, hundreds, or thousands of years. For example, one notion is that for a single sin the atonement is suffering for longer than your Earthly lifetime. It is also believed by some that time passes much faster in Purgatory than it does here, for example that a year there might be a day here, based on the Day-Year Principle.

Questions about the Afterlife

With our transition to the Afterlife even more certain than our life expectancy here, and our life expectancy here far less than the eternity of the Afterlife, it would be wise for humanity to make answering certain questions about the Afterlife a high priority, such as:

Is there a Judgment in the Afterlife?

It seems likely that whoever made us will want to evaluate our performance at some point, and based on that evaluation, decide what to do with us, because this is a sensible way to manage resources.

What are the consequences of that Judgment?

As conscious beings endowed with freedom of choice, it is likely that there will be some reward or punishment as a result of that Judgment.

At how high a standard are we Judged?

What is considered failure?

How much punishment are we talking about for a certain failure?

Such things are of vital importance for humanity to understand.

What can we do now to improve our Judgment?

What preparations are most important? Can transgressions be remedied? How much easier is it for us to remedy things now than atone for them at the Judgment?

Which religion has the most accurate concept of what happens in the Afterlife?

We really need to know this.

What We Can Do About Your Afterlife:

Pursue your own spiritual experience. Spiritual experiences are usually subjective and it's all too easy to scoff at someone else's experience to puff your own pride. If you want to find out the truth, however, it's your responisibility to pursue your own experience. For example, many people report success simply addressing God and asking Him to help them understand if He is real.
Stop doing evil. This is the single most important thing you can do to improve your Afterlife.
Get to know God. Seek Him out.
If you have sinned, don't put off a repentance. Repentance only counts before you die, and death can come at any time.
Do as much good as you can in the lifetime you have. This website is a good resource to alert you to activist issues which need attention.
Help others to save their life and/or Afterlife and you help save your own.

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The Afterlife: Prepare it While You Live