Have you ever wondered what the afterlife is and what it looks like?
That is the question that a living person like me is wondering. What is the Afterlife? And what does it look like?
In all my life, I have constantly imagined the different shapes of the Afterlife. Those images changed over the years in my life.
When I was 9 years old, it was the first time I heard about “The Afterlife” from my parents when they prayed to their ancestors, and when I asked them what it was, they answered “It is the world of the dead.” I seemed to imagine a world filled with souls in it when I heard the answer from my parents, without knowing that it was more than a place of souls.
When I was 16 years old, I tried to research the Afterlife on my own using documents from books. And I was extremely surprised because the afterlife is not only a place where the dead go but also much more than that. It acts as a bridge to help souls reincarnate.
Each myth's afterlife may have slightly different characteristics and descriptions, such as Diyu of chinese mythology as a place of torture for sinful souls, or The Duat of Egyptian mythology, where the soul of the sinner will be eaten alive by the ammit. They all have a different look, making each one extremely unique in its own right, but they all have one thing in common. They are all places of the deceased, they are all places that help us reincarnate into another life.
How can they be so similar? There must be some connection between these afterlife myths.
But until now, I still cannot explain this.
When I was 28 years old, I tried reading stories about the afterlife in different mythologies again as a way to entertain myself after tiring lectures. And strangely enough, I imagined the afterlife in those myths looking like a “shadow” of our living world when I was exposed to the Divine Comedy and hell of Christianity.
The Eight levels of hell in Dante's Inferno and in Christianity seem to represent the sins of the living world. It reflects the conscience of those souls after death and carries out them in the form of punishments.
Maybe when we are alive, when we do any thing that goes against our conscience, we may not be sad for it. But deep inside that body and mind, that Self, that Soul is shedding a tear for that action. And that soul will probably, after dying, and entering the Shadow called "hell", its sorrows and regrets will be realized into actions to punish itself before moving forward into Reincarnation.
Perhaps other afterlifes in myths work like this too. But there is still one question that remains unanswered; that is, are these afterlifes one and the same?
Maybe I have to wait longer to find this answer.
Now I'm 45 years old, I'm one step closer to answering that question. In Carl Jung's lectures, the collective unconscious is an immaterial place that gathers human thought and consciousness, and the shadow is one of the quite interesting things that exists in that unconscious.
The shadow mentioned in Jung's books is something formed from hidden desires, sadness, suffering, or even joy, and contempt.
And imagine, the Afterlife is a “Larger Shadow”, which can allow those subconscious shadows to become reality.
And how does it relate to the question of how these afterlife are connected? The answer is simple, all afterlife can be a state of mind that every Self, or soul, must go through before reincarnating.
For each person with a different culture, when entering it, there will be perspectives that it is the Afterlife in their mythology. And that is born from the Jung shadow within them.
Imagine a simple example, when a sick vilking dies, now deep in his Shadow lies shame and humiliation, because according to their custom, those who die of illness will not honorable enough to ascend to Vahallah as one who died in battle, and when entering the Afterlife, that Shadow will embody the Hel1 in their culture as a thing of belief combined with the influence of the thought.
The way it works is for one sole purpose, which is to cleanse things that can affect the reincarnation process, because if the Self, the subconscious, or the soul are not cleansed of these things, deep within it - the Shadow - when going through the reincarnation process, there will be the risk that future lives will be affected by what the Shadow of the previous life has. Therefore, those Self, or souls, must endure torment in the subconscious hell created by their shadow until the sins and sufferings in their hearts can be erased. Then they will enter the reincarnation process.
That's what I got for the question of how the Afterlife are interconnected. But it seems that is not enough, the name of "that" place, the place that reflects the afterlife, hell and the underworld is still unknown.
And I will continue to research to find it.
When I was 75, I had the opportunity to experience and know that answer. It was like an endless darkness enveloped everything as my breath stopped.
Everything in this darkness is like a "cosmic-void journey". Have you ever wondered if God exists in hell, the underworld when he is omnipresent? The answer is unlikely to be “yes,” because then it would be too simple to be a question.
The Afterlife, the underworld, hell is the absence of God, for it is nothingness waiting to be filled with the Shadow-Selfs of the dead, as a cleansing process before entering god, reincarnation.
It is the same as or can be the Da'at2 . Because Da'at is not the sefirot3, but is the place where those sefirot become one, and also from Da'at, the path to the incarnation, the remaking, the kether4, I, god, begins. And there, we will both become one with God and become a new person. Because Da'at is also called "Knowledge", so when souls have completed their cleansing, their souls in the path of "Knowledge" will be separated into two parts: One is information, memories, history of them, and second is the place where those things originate and are born from, themselves. Through that characteristic, the dead will no longer be afraid of losing everything, because everything they experienced, their memories, their history will be saved, and they will exist forever in the kether, the collective mind, the Akashic records, the dreamtime, to wait for the day to be opened again by those who are enlightened about the subconscious.
When I witnessed all of that, I was able to see all the aspects of the afterlife: the absence, the reflection, the cleansing, the path, the separation of one, with one becoming one with all, kether, and the two rose again.
It's beautiful, and I will soon experience that beauty now.