What happens after death is a question which has two possible answers, but death is nothing to fear whichever answers is correct.
There is no doubt that our physical bodies either rot and decay, or are burned to ashes, but it is also true that most of our bodies are made of empty space surrounding the fundamental particles from which we are all made. These fundamental particles from which we are all made are completely indestructible and continue to exist. So, what happens after death depends upon your point of view.
If there is scientific ambiguity about what happens to our physical body, there is even more ambiguity about what happens to our consciousness. Despite years of research, there has never been a universally accepted theory about consciousness, how or where it is formed, exactly what it is, or what happens to our consciousness after death.
Really, there are only two alternatives, neither of which have been scientifically proven or disproven, but whichever of the two alternatives you believe, death is not anything to be afraid of.
If consciousness ends with the physical death of our bodies, this is not much different to the way in which our consciousness ends every time we go to sleep at night. The difference is that our final sleep is eternal.
What worries most people is not the final going to sleep, but what happens in the period immediately before going to sleep for that final time. Prior to that moment of death, we are afraid of suffering acute pain from some accident or harm which may befall us, afraid of some long-term pain from cancer or from some other terminal illness, or afraid of the emotional pain of some incapacity of mind or body. Given a choice, most of us would rather die peacefully in our sleep, but whatever physical or mental pain does precede our death, it ceases at the moment of death itself. If this is what happens after death, it is simply a final going to sleep.
The other alternative, is that after my physical body withers and dies my individual consciousness continues somehow. ‘I’ continue to be ‘me’ despite not having a physical body.
There are many scientific theories of consciousness, some of which include a universal consciousness as well as an individual consciousness. These theories offer the possibility that our own consciousness may not only continue after death, but may also become part of a universal consciousness (some may choose to call this consciousness ‘God’) which incorporates the totality of all knowledge, all memories, and all emotions of the combined individual consciousness from which it is formed.
Either way, death is nothing to worry about and it is always peaceful. If it is our final ‘going to sleep’ from which we will never again wake up of regain consciousness, then (as it says on many gravestones) our rest is eternal and everlasting. If, somehow, we awaken to a consciousness that is unencumbered by our physical bodies, how exciting is that.
Depending upon your point of view, death may be the ultimate unconsciousness and eternal sleep, or the harbinger of the ultimate consciousness when our own consciousness leaves the constraints of our body and unites with some greater consciousness.
I don’t know what happens after we die. Nobody knows. It is all speculation, but there cannot be many of us who have not speculated about it at some time or another. There is no right or wrong answer, at least no right or wrong answer that can be proven with our current state of scientific knowledge. The question of what happens after death is currently unanswerable by science, so whatever answers we accept in our own minds we accept in faith rather than as scientific fact. There is nothing to worry about either way, and no reason to fear what happens after death.
