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| Colorscript for "The Afterlife" (Photo credit: Phil Strahl) |
Recently I saw--or thought I saw--a film in which one of the characters is talking about death, dying, and the nature of the afterlife. This character mentions something to the effect that Timothy Leary had expressed a belief that death involves a process where we become so aware of the existence of time that our final seconds of corporeal life are broken down to such intensity that the seconds and milliseconds become like years, centuries, and eventually eternity. In other words, heaven or the afterlife is essentially an eternal dream that our mental or spiritual self--or soul if you will--dwells in.
I personally would not subscribe to this belief since I do believe there is a tangible nature to the afterlife, but it is an interesting concept to consider. After all, it has been proven that a seemingly long dream can occur in a brief span of minutes and even seconds. Many of my dreams will seem not only to have lasted for hours, but will also have a dream memory or history that seems to have happened at a point beyond my sense of experience of the dream that I've had. This could mean there was a previous dream sequence that had occurred but had transferred into memory or the memory could be a false or perceived history that is implanted into my mind as a part of the actual dream experience as I remember it.
Whatever the case may be, time has been distorted because I positively know that those long dreams only occurred within a specified time span according to my last approximation of what time I had fallen asleep and the time I awoke. The perceived dream time is in no way near the real time of sleep.
If the body were shutting down as it would in death, would the mind also slow down to a hyper-speed in a negative direction? Like a gourmet sampling food or wine, would our mind in a dying state savor each tiny fraction of life seconds until that final moment when soul/spirit/mind is suspended in an eternal dream?
This is just something that came to mind as I pondered this movie that I saw or dream that I had or wherever it was that I got this idea. Now if I could only just remember.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Do you know of any metaphysical theory that expresses a similar or the same concept? What do you think of the idea?
