Top 10 Wildest Theories About Life After Death

Even after death, the soul’s troubles might not be over. According to ancient Egyptians, the soul descended to an underworld called “Duat” and embarked on a journey fraught with peril. The famous Book of the Dead, along with other similar texts, provided insight and guidance as to how one could overcome these post-mortem obstacles, which included demons and monsters. At the end of the road, the soul (or heart) was weighed against a feather, and, depending on the outcome, that soul became either a midnight snack for Ammit, Devourer of the Souls, or was allowed to move on to Aaru, the Field of Reeds.

Another belief is that we never really die at all. Doctor and medical researcher Robert Lanza argues in biocentrism that our current scientific worldview is all wrong: consciousness creates the cosmos, not the other way around. He points to the role of the observer in quantum mechanics to propose that we generate our own reality in this theory of everything. There may be many universes, some of which will include other versions of ourselves. Death, Lanza claims, is therefore just an illusion. Our consciousness will always exist - moving through the infinite universes of the multiverse.

One day, we’ll all shuffle off this mortal coil. But according to members of the UFO religion Raëlism, this doesn’t mean we won’t get a brand new one. Their leader, former sports-car journalist Claude Vorilhon - a.k.a. “Raël” - advocates human cloning and mind transfer as a means to eternal life. In fact, an associated company, Clonaid, claimed to have cloned the world’s first human back in 2002. In the meantime, Raelian baptism involves sending an initiate’s genetic information to an extraterrestrial supercomputer - preserving them for cloning in the future.

In Lewis Carroll’s novel “Through the Looking-Glass”, Alice is told that she’s part of the dream of the slumbering Red King. When he wakes up, she’ll flicker out like a candle. It’s a clever allusion to idealism and the problem of other minds - how do we know that other people and the outside world really exist? Our only direct experience is of our own mind. One extreme solution is metaphysical solipsism: the belief that only the self actually exists. But this means that when the self dies, the whole universe will die too - extinguished like a candle.

Are “good” deaths rewarded? In some Norse sources, those who die in battle go to either the hall Valhalla or the field Folkvangr, while others descend to the underworld. The Aztecs believed that slain warriors and victims of sacrifice accompanied the deity of the sun as it rose, while women who died during childbirth followed the sun as it set. Those who drowned, were struck by lightning, or died from certain diseases ascended to Tlalocan, a paradise of eternal spring. But people who suffered ordinary deaths were consigned to Mictlan, an underworld of nine levels in which the soul had to make an arduous trek downward past crashing mountains and hungry jaguars.

As a child, James R. Leininger was obsessed with planes until he began to have nightmares about a plane crash. He claimed to remember taking off from a boat called Natoma and being shot down over Iwo Jima. He even named someone else on the boat, Jack Larson. It turns out that all these details matched a real pilot . . . also named James. The idea of reincarnation was popular in Pythagorean and Platonic schools of thought, and remains widespread in Eastern religions. Hinduism and Buddhism teach that, depending on our karma, we might come back as an animal, god, or ghost; Jainism allows that we might even return as a plant.

Ray Kurzweil, futurist and Director of Engineering at Google, claims that in a few decades we’ll be able to upload our minds into the cloud and live forever. In fact, according to Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, we may already be living inside a simulation. Bostrom argues that if future civilizations are likely to create digital simulations of their ancestors, there will probably be more simulated people than real people. Therefore it’s reasonable to assume that we’re actually simulations. If we’re a simulation of an actual, historical ancestor, we are (in one sense) already dead. At least... in the real world. Wachowskis, eat your heart out.

Founded by Iranian prophet Zoroaster over three thousand years ago, Zoroastrianism is big on the whole “reward and punishment in the afterlife” thing. After death, the soul ends up at the Chinvat Bridge, which extends into heaven for you – but only if you’ve been more good than bad. Bridges that connect worlds feature in many stories, both mythological and modern, but the Chinvat Bridge is distinct in that it narrows for the wicked, throwing them down into the House of Lies, and widens for those who follow truth and order, leading them to the House of Song. Which would you choose?

If time is infinite, all possible events will occur, over and over again. This would leave us trapped in a kind of infinite loop, forced to repeat our actions again and again, reliving the exact same life, as well as all possible variations. The idea of eternal recurrence haunted German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who felt it was both the heaviest of burdens, and something we have to embrace in order to affirm our lives. In modern times, it’s been used to explain our sense of deja vu. It’s hard to know what to hope for: while eternal recurrence makes our lives - and history - unbearably heavy, the opposite idea leaves our lives light but fleeting.

In his dialogue the “Phaedo”, Plato has Socrates recount a detailed myth about the afterlife. The earth, Socrates explains, is much vaster than we think: overhead is a purer earth, and below are hollow spaces through which subterranean rivers pass in and out. When we die, we’re guided underground to be judged; the ordinary are sent to the Asphodel Meadows, the mediocre sail to Acherusian Lake, to be punished and absolved. The evil are cast into Tartarus - a deep abyss of judgement and torment. It’s the Splash Mountain of the soul, which only the pure pass over, ascending to higher worlds, some without bodies, to places of indescribable beauty.