The Different Types Of Afterlife You Should Know About | Unveiled

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The Different Types of Afterlife You Should Know About</h4>

What happens after you die? Where do you go if, indeed, you go anywhere at all? What should you be expecting to see when you depart this waking plane?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re taking a closer look at the different types of afterlife you should know about.

In this video, we’re not discussing whether the afterlife does or doesn’t exist. It’s something that we have covered before, so be sure to check out our channel if you haven’t already subscribed! But, here we’re taking a closer look at the many, many versions of the afterlife that humankind has served up, over the years, in one way or another. We’ll first look at our cultural ever-afters, then those that are enshrined in legend, and finally we’ll analyze life after death from the scientific and technological point of view - discovering some cutting edge innovation that experts claim really could preserve our souls forever.

Culturally speaking, the afterlives offered up by religion are still those that most people are most familiar with. Christianity, the most followed religion on Earth, has the entwined concepts of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. With the virtuous supposedly destined for eternal joy and the wicked condemned to fiery torment. Here, the afterlife, so long as you do make it to the good place, is apparently better than anything you could imagine while alive. In some accounts there is still a middle ground, though. Purgatory is a world suspended between Heaven, Hell and Earth itself, and a place for purification of the soul. Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy" vividly illustrates it in his depiction of Purgatorio as a realm where souls go to cleanse themselves.

With Islam, the second most followed religion on the planet, there are again ideas on arriving at a Paradise or descending into Hell. It’s more specifically a culmination of one's earthly deeds, though, and revolves around the Day of Judgment, where your living actions are said to be literally weighed, and your destination determined by how well or badly you’ve lived.

With many of the world’s polytheistic religions - meaning they have more than one God - there’s a different outlook. With Hinduism, there’s reincarnation and moksha. The afterlife revolves around samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and is driven by the law of karma. In “Bhagavad Gita”, a sacred text, it’s explained that we will attain another body. So, although we’re usually unaware of it in the present, the afterlife is more like an extension of whatever came before. In one sense it means that everyone alive right now is already experiencing the afterlife, and will likely already have lived many afterlives to get to this point. 

There is an even higher goal in mind, however; Moksha, which is the liberation from this cycle of birth and rebirth. Here, there’s a clear bridge between Hinduism and Buddhism. Buddhists also envision a continuous rhythm of rebirth, governed by karma, journeying towards a liberation from suffering, as outlined in the Four Noble Truths. The ultimate goal here, though, is to reach nirvana, a similar state of freedom and enlightenment. The way to nirvana is paved in the “Dhammapada” - a collection of poetic teachings from the Buddha. For example, one mantra says that hate is not conquered by hate, but by love and that this is a law eternal.

It’s quite a jump from Buddhism to the afterlives of Old Norse, but if you were looking for something different then welcome to Valhalla. A glittering hall in Asgard where fallen warriors are honored, most of what we know about it comes from the “Poetic Edda” - a vast collection of anonymous poetry, and a written record of all the oral legends that were once passed down. Entry into Valhalla is quite an exclusive club, however. First you have to have died heroically, and then you need to be chosen, with Norse heroes either ending up here or instead in Fólkvangr, an alternative field for the slain. 

In Norse, if you didn’t die a hero then you’re headed to Hel, but descriptions differ as to exactly how bad this would be. In some tellings, Hel is a dark and shivering place, slithering with snakes, and it’s where all the worst people end up. However, in other depictions it isn’t quite so grim, with Hel again being a vast hall for the dead, and in fact where most people end up. It doesn’t quite have the glamor of Valhalla, but it is still possible to avoid eternal torment. As with most afterlives, your ultimate fate is determined by your actions on Earth.

Finally, and to head a couple thousand years further back in time, the mythology of Ancient Egypt paints another, different picture of what awaits us. For the Egyptians, you were headed to a place called Duat, another realm of the dead where a series of challenges and judgments await. Navigating Duat was no easy task, but if you were worthy then it certainly was possible, and you could perhaps even hope to one day ascend to live alongside various gods - including  Anubis, Horus and Osiris, the undisputed Lord of the Dead. 

Similarly to some other systems, judgment played a crucial role, with the heart of the deceased being weighed against a feather. The heavier the heart the more full of sin that person was said to be. However, if you were to fail this test then you weren’t sent to a “bad place” as in most other setups. Instead you were more simply denied entry to Duat, expelled from the Underworld, and effectively erased from existence. Any form of afterlife was totally taken away from you.

Of course, with all of the above there’s a reliance on Faith. On followers believing that their afterlife is the right one. But, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular, the shift toward science and empirical evidence has increasingly meant that faith might soon have nothing to do with it.

First, the concept of digital immortality tantalizes modern technologists with the idea of preserving consciousness in a digital realm. Imagine a world where whole personalities, entire memories, and personal intellect are all encoded in algorithms. Where the mind is mapped to the point that it can be reproduced again and again, and again. For many, with the advent of everything from cloud computing to virtual reality, and with our ever-increasing understanding of DNA, genes, the human genome, and of how the brain works, this is where society is headed. Your life on file, ready to be picked out and loaded up whenever it’s needed. 

The clearest link between this and the afterlives of religion is that those who populate both will have done away with their physical bodies. There are some ideas that a digital consciousness could go on to inhabit an artificial body (and therefore remain on Earth, to some degree) but the focus is still very much on your essence rather than your physical being. What some might call your soul. As such, and imagining a time when the tech is possible, there are clearly many ethical questions to consider. But perhaps the biggest potential quandaries surround control and privacy. With a digital afterlife there is no God, but there is whoever uploads you; a higher being who would still exist as if on a higher plane.

If you’d rather not submit to being translated into data bits then perhaps there’s something to be said for quantum immortality, instead. This is a still much debated concept, originally based on Hugh Everett’s influential Many Worlds Interpretation of reality. Many Worlds imagines that whenever there is the potential for two outcomes, in anything, then both of those outcomes do take place and reality splits to accommodate them. At the extreme end of the scale, however, some have taken this to mean that at the moment of death there’s always an alternative where you don’t die. And so, in this way, at least one version of you is destined to live forever.

Quantum immortality is widely held to be controversial to the point of absurdity, but there are some theories arguing that, more generally, we might exist in some kind of quantum state after we die. Here, the debate inevitably bleeds over into the Mind-body problem, with those on either side attempting to decipher where consciousness ultimately resides. Is it a product of the brain? Or is it separate, and does the brain in fact work more like a consciousness pylon, receiving and transmitting consciousness for so long as it’s alive? If that second one is true, then there are mounting suggestions that we could all essentially become interdimensional beings in the afterlife. That, because we’d no longer be confined to just one body on one planet in one galaxy and one universe, we might suddenly find ourselves - or our energy - flooded with the unfiltered, true potential of the cosmos. Any attempt then to predict what will happen next is almost impossible, because the options are so vast.

For now, the one thing that is certain is that we don’t yet know what awaits us. From the vivid realms of religious traditions to the speculative frontiers of digital and quantum immortality, there are plenty of potentials to choose from - but all are based on either faith or as-yet-undiscovered scientific breakthroughs. While the mystery of death remains, those are the different types of afterlife you should know about.