Afterlife may be more imaginative and creative

“All experience is, to one degree or another, ‘generated’ experience. Everything in the world that we see ‘out there is actually manufactured by us, at least in part, through a collaboration between the secret, creative part of our minds and the unprocessed, blooming, buzzing raw material of the physical universe: a universe that is in fact not even made up of solid stuff at all, but rather of relationships between patterns of energy that in themselves, if we look deep and hard enough at them, dissolve from energy into something even more indistinct and hard to pin down, something that some scientists have suggested is itself akin to or even identical with consciousness. The only world that we can truly know is the world we know personally. The completely impersonal, completely objective, completely ‘out there’ world just isn’t there.

‘But what if, granting that this is the case in life, it is even more the case in death? What if in death, too, a world is waiting to encounter us, and that it too is partially independent of us and partially in need of our participation . . . but to a greater degree than it is in life? It may be that unlike the world we encounter ‘down here’ in earthly life, the world up there is infinitely more malleable to our directing imaginations, infinitely more ready to take on the shape and nature we want it to. In this transphysical dimension, perceiver and perceived may interact in such a way that the mark of the observer lies much more strongly upon what he or she observes—even though in both cases, it remains true that there really is an observer, and there really is a world that he or she is observing.

“In other words, it may be that just as we cannot live in the physical world in anything but a completely personal way, neither can we live in the world beyond this one in that way. Just as there is no such thing as a generic path through life—just as each life takes place in the first-person singular—so there is no such thing as an impersonal path through the worlds waiting after the death of the body. It is a journey that individuals take, and individuals alone.”

Ptolemy Tompkins, The Modern Book of the Dead (Atria Books, 2012), 100.