luciferianbuddhism:

For all my experiences I still wonder about if we have souls and what happens after death. I know there is no way we can really know until the last sand of our life has flown away.

I admit freely that I have some belief in the soul and the afterlife but I also admit that it’s definitely a concept of comfort for me. I cannot say for sure if there are souls or afterlife or what really goes on. My cop out answer is that whatever happens is perhaps what you believe. It’s kind of like that scene in American Gods with Anubis where he weighs your heart but you go to the place you believe in, for Laura, eternal darkness.

I like to believe that when I die, I will go to my Gods. Maybe I will serve them or maybe there is a space of untime between this life and the next. Perhaps it will be like the ending of Mitch Albom’s book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Maybe, in the end, we are just all recycled matter with this collective memory of times past and it’s why so many people were Cleopatra in a past life.

Still, I remember being a little girl and seeing this man at the end of my bed, or in the doorway or the corner of my room. He always stood there simply watching me. He faded away eventually as I grew into my teens. One day I finally spoke to my mother about it and she remarked on how I described him sounded like my mother’s father. This grandfather I have never seen a picture of and he was dead long before I was born. Yet, somehow, I was able to see him watching me as a child.

I don’t know if that’s proof or all the other small little things involving ghosts and ancestors that have happened in my life. I don’t know if there is proof. I fully do not understand it and that is alright. It is a mystery and one of life’s many mysteries. Long in the future, we may be able to explain this or fully understand what happens after death, but I accept that what I believe is a comfort. It helps with my mental state. Does it mean it is Truth? No, but I think as it stands there is no real way to know said Truth 100% sure. You could say it with confidence or speak of your near death experiences but the only ones who truly know are in their graves.

Obviously, I don’t know either, because no one knows.

I have a few different ideas about what might happen.

What I think will happen is the Epicurean idea. The components of your body and soul disperse into the universe, and are formed into new things. No memory remains of what you were before. You die and you are dead. You no longer exist. Your matter lives on, rearranged– your body in the food of worms, your soul, if it exists at all, reforming into other souls.

What I would like to happen:

“Grant that my soul someday rest close to thee,

Beneath the tree of Knowledge, which shall spread

Its branches like a Temple overhead.”

-From Litanies of Satan by Baudelaire

Hanging out in the shade with Lucifer and some Luciferians for all eternity. Sweet!

I am also open to the possibility of reincarnation. I guess. It’s what I was raised to believe. 

I also halfway believe in ghosts, and if you accept the idea of spirits of the dead hanging out, then that changes your metaphysics all around, of course. Do we all become ghosts? Do some of us move on? To where?!

As a spiritual exercise, I sometimes also like to entertain the idea that the Christian hell exists and I am going there. The benefit of this exercise is to see if I am resolute enough in my morals and beliefs that I would be willing to suffer eternally for the freedom of living them out in this one life– for in that cosmology, one can argue that only in life on Earth can we ever taste freedom, and that only by defying God, since if we obey Him in life and join Him in death then we may indeed be more happy and comfortable, but we’ve never really tasted our own desires. I love the idea of a defiant eyeblink of freedom, bought with an eternity of hell. It’s very courageous and noble and romantic (in the Byronic sense) if you think of it that way. I don’t really believe in hell but I have accepted the possibility, although I consider it unlikely. Still, I think, worth the risk.