Afterlife in different cultures and philosophies

According to Hinduism

In the Hinduism of Upanishad, Yâjñavalkya (sixth century BC), founder of Yajur Veda blanc, appears the concept of rebirth, reincarnation; in its Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad, appears the notion of retribution of merits and faults, karma means act, “moral act and result of the act” (not just “ritual”), man dissolves at death, but his karma is the cause of a new birth who will inherit his good or bad deeds of the previous life. According to Hindu tradition, one needs fifty-two million births before being reborn as a human: he reincarnates as well as plants and different animals, for millions of times before finding a human womb, as an embryo (vegetable symbol) becomes fetus (animal symbol) before being born as a human newborn, if he has not managed to get out of the matrix of Nature by the Issuance of the cycle of reincarnation (thanks to different types of yoga bringing to destroy the ego, selfishness being the main obstacle to union with the Divine). In a work attributed to the same Yajnavalkya, the Shatapatha-Brâhmana, of Yajur-Veda blanc, it is asked that those who did not properly perform the rites reborn after death, that immortality is acquired by the rites of limited duration, cremation produces a new birth; we pass to the death between two fires, which burn the wicked and save the good, which then go towards the sun. Other Brâhmana add that the father reborns in the son.

According to Islam

Muslims believe that a number of events occurring after death, the most important steps being:

• life in the barzakh: The barzakh is the place where souls, “arwah” in Arabic (plural of “ruh”) will be consolidated.

The soul is separates from the body by a special angel said angel of death. According to Islam, sleep is considered a death. The soul must wait until the end of the world. martyrs are projected over time, according to the Koran the martyr never dies, he goes straight to heaven. NB: The martyr, for Islam is not the one who has given up on life rather than abjure, but the one which died for a cause, considered noble or sacred, at some point in history. According to Islam the one who died defending his property is considered a martyr.

• The end of the world: it has a double feature. It is sudden and general.

It is sudden in that it arises from a sudden and fast way. Only God knows the deadline. It is general in that it is cosmic. In the Koran and the prophet’s words, all previous messengers to Mohammed spoke of this apocalyptic day. Everything must go.

• Judgment Day: It will happen when the earth will be another earth, same like the heavens (Qur’an 14: 48) and will last 50,000 years. The sun will approach much of the Earth and its heat will increase 70 times more than in summer. Humans will be in the dark, however, but that there will be no shadow on Earth. God will judge people without intermediary.

The day of judgment has several steps:

1. “yawm al Hashr” or the day of resurrection, physical Resurrection: It marks the beginning of the Day of Judgment. People will be resurrected by Allah, naked and uncircumcised, to be judged.
2. Gathering: All mankind are gathered in one place to do judging.
3. Exposition of books: Each individual has a book of its own which is registered all his actions: Everyone will have his actions, good or bad, that will be exposed.
4. Retribution: According to their deeds, people will be rewarded or punished.
5. Balance: The proceedings will be compared, good against bad.
6. Bridge: It connects the new Earth on the outskirts of Paradise and will be drawn on top of Hell where all unbelievers will fall as well as some disobedient Muslims.
7. Basin: Each community will have its pool which believers drink before entering Paradise.
8. Intercession: Courtesy of God, prophets, and other pious, intercede for believers who deserve punishment.
9. Final remains to hell or paradise
   • The Hell; It is a place in which will be punished those who disbelieved, always, forever and for a period, some disobedient believers. Hell knows many mansions and 7 gates.
   • The Paradise: This is an abode of eternal bliss reserved for people unifying God and the sincere people. Paradise in the Koran is called AL JANNA, sometimes it is designated by the plural (JINENE); He also knows many mansions, the highest is called Firdaws hence the word: PARADISE
10. Vision of the Lord: who will return to Paradise shall they see God? According to the Sunnis, it is to see the Lord without any notion of distance and without a doubt this vision as the vision of the sun in a cloudless sky. According to the Shiite trend, it is impossible to see the Lord, it is to see His light.

NOTE: Muslims do believe in agony and bliss in the grave? Theologians say that this is a controversial and religious trends are divided on the subject. The prophetic words that speak of a judgment down here in the grave are not convincing as to their veracity according to some currents, and are fair and unambiguous according to Sunni tendency for example … Note that the prophetic words are not all true and correct (bad protractor…). Only the Koran, according to the theologians, could not be distorted as it was recited by Muslims and then preserved in writing some years after the death of the prophet of Islam. The torment and bliss in the grave are mentioned only in some “hadith” of the Sunnah (prophetic words). According to the latter, after death, a person will be questioned in his grave by two angels named Munkar and Nakir. 3 questions put to them: “Who is your Lord? Who is your prophet? What is your religion?”. Pious Muslims correctly answer these questions and will have the happiness in their graves, while fishermen and other non-believers do not respond properly and will be punished.

The unbelievers will be punished pending trial:

“When the worst punishment will identify adherents of Pharaoh: The Fire, on which they are exposed to morning and evening. And when the day of the Hour will come (it will be said): Bring the people of Pharaoh into the severest penalty! “

Ibn Kathir said, “this verse is a great reference in the arguments of the adherents of the Sunnah to prove the existence of punishment in the grave during barzakh”.

According to Judaism

Traditionally, Judaism thought the deceased joined the kingdom of the dead, Sheol, and they lived there like shadows. The book of Job (450 BC) stated: “My life is but a breath … As a cloud it vanishes and goes, what goes down to Sheol does not go back” (VII, 7-9). Only Enoch and Elijah were “abducted alive to heaven.” The wicked have for punishment the suffering and misfortune in their lives on Earth, infertility or premature death (Deuteronomy, XXVIII). But Isaiah (53.12) and Ezekiel (37.1-14) suggest the reward of the righteous and the resurrection to a new life of the dead reconciled to God.

Jewish mysticism, from the second century, believes that man has, in addition to the physical body, many souls. The Jews Neoplatonists Abraham ibn Ezra (1150) and Abraham bar Hiyya, distinguish three parts: nefesh, ruah, neshamah; Kabbalists add hayyah, yehidah. “The five names of the soul are, in ascending order: the nefesh (spirit), the ruah (breath, anima), the neshamah (soul, spiritus), the hayyah (life) and yehidah (union). If one group an acronym initials of each of these terms gives the word naran-hai, NaRaN-HAI. This is the doctrine of the Kabbalist Isaac Luria, 1570, in Safed. “The nefesh remains for time in the grave, hovering above the body; the ruah ascends to paradise according to its merits; and neshamah goes directly back to his native home. Punishment and retribution incumb nefesh and ruah only. According to Moses of Leon, once a cosmic jubilee, the soul rises from his communion with the Shekhinah [the Divine Presence] to heavenly paradise hidden in the world of the divine spirit, that is to say, to Sefirah Hokhmah [wisdom within the tree sephiroths of Kabbalah] ”

According to Mormonism

In Mormonism, life after death is a part of the plan of salvation by which God achieves immortality and man’s eternal life. Under certain conditions, the dead can become himself a creator god.

According to the ancient philosophies

For the ancient Greeks (Homer, Hesiod), the deceased’s soul passes Lake Styx in Charon’s boat. It then crosses the brazen gates guarded by Cerberus, and remains forever in Hades, the unseen, underground world, with the life of a shadow, “devoid of strength and meaning” without hope of return (Odyssey, XI, 602). Achilles from Homer said: “Even in the house of Hades, soul and image are, after all, something” (Iliad, XXIII, 103). But the fate of the good is not better than the fate of the bad. Only serious criminals (Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion) are punished; and only a select few (Menelaus, Achilles) are transported to the Islands of the Blessed. Ennius argues that, for the ancients, the death body was buried, the soul went to heaven and shadow in the Underworld; reads the Aeneid (V, 81): “Hi, ashes that are rendered me in vain, soul and paternal shadow.”

Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato defended metempsychosis.

Plato expressed through myths on this subject. In the Gorgias (522-527), at the end of their first life, all souls are judged, and the perpetrators are punished souls, others rewarded in the Islands of the Blessed. According to The Republic, Book X (myth of Er), all souls are judged (614 cd) and the souls of the culprits are conducted for a thousand years to the underworld where they are punished; the other for the same period of a thousand years go to heaven (X 615); after this time, they all returned to the meadow of judgment (614 X c), where they earn the court of Fates that returns to Earth, each choosing for its second life, his way of life (X 617 ). The goal is purification.

The ancient Stoics (Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus), before Diogenes of Babylon, believe in the Eternal return, that is to say, in the endless periodic repetition of the same elements of the universe, including human souls and behaviors.

“For Plotinus, each soul is conducted where it deserved to reach based on his past life. The deceased, temporarily staying in the world of the dead, comes back to earth to refine, to correct the consequences of his committed acts (Enneads, I). The souls who could not get rid of the body return back into human bodies. Some even became animal, fall back into the bodies of animals (which is not the doctrine of reincarnation itself, but rather the concept of metempsychosis). Some, best, are allowed to choose for themselves their new bodies. Others, again, rise beyond the sky, are changed in stars and, from there, are contemplating the spectacle of the universe (Enneads, III, 4, 2-5). Finally, the most pure souls will merge with God (Enneads, III, 4, 6). Whoever killed becomes a man to be murdered; a son who killed his mother becomes a mother killed by her son (Enneads, III, 4, 13). ” All is set by Providence (Enneads, II, 3, III, 2; IV, 3).

The conception defended by Orphism is placed on two natural Plans (animal / human). According to Proclus, “Orpheus wants that human souls may go into the underground scene there to be purified or punished, and the hellish prisons where they are punished. But the souls of animals thereby fluttering in the air, until they were again chained in other body.” Purification for humans, palingenesis for animals. The orphico-Pythagorean tradition, from the end of the fifth century BC, has left “golden strips” where show the hope of being delivered through initiation, the need for the soul to undergo an examination on arrival in the Beyond, the primacy of the goddess Mnemosyne (which recalls the divine origin of the soul and gives the memory of past lives), the need for freedom from bodily lust for life, the distinction between two sources in the Beyond (the source of Mnemosyne, which gives the memory to insiders, to the right; the source of Lethe, that gives forgetting to the uninitiated, to the left). The slats evoke travel and event of the post mortem soul.

You will find in the house of Hades [the Invisible god of the dead] a spring  [Lethe: Oblivion],
on the left, and standing by it a white cypress.
Do not even approach this spring!
You will find a second spring, cold water flowing
of Lake Mnemosyne [Memory]; stand in front of her guards.
You say: ‘I am the son of the Earth and the starry sky;
my race is heavenly, and that you know as … ‘
And, this time, with the other heroes you will be sovereign.”

According to Spiritism

Spiritualism is based entirely on the idea of ​​the survival of the Spirit. According to this doctrine codified by Allan Kardec, death would cause a separation between the physical body and the perispirit, that is to say, the envelope of the Spirit. This separation would be more or less easy. Then the Spirit would be in a dimension that would be its status. Different situtations experienced by the deceased, after arriving in a spiritual world, represent the content of the book: Heaven and Hell. These statements are quite similar to those of Emmanuel Swedenborg published previously.

According to Native American traditions

Religions of the American Indians fmake rom the dead kingdom a faithful copy of the world of living. The classic representation of the kingdom of death in North America is designated as follows: “the wealthy lands of hunting.” Several tribes of the Prairie imagine hell as an undulating meadow where they hunt successfully buffalo, living in teepees, feasting and dancing. Those with sins are excluded from the community, in the kingdom of the dead, they are condemned to the wandering life of the spectra, or they perish by going to the other world or they are sent to another country which hosts ordinary dead. The idea of ​​a final judgment after death and that of a true law of retaliation in the hereafter do not exist among the Indians.

According to Vedism

In Vedism, a distinction is made between the body and an invisible principle, asu, life force, based on soul, personal and impersonal origin, and manas, “spirit”, disembodied seat of thought and internal senses in the heart. The dead (preta) is only twice the shady living, like Homeric psyche. The dominant Vedic conception is that of a kingdom of the dead located beneath the earth, a place of joy without darkness, where Yama reigns and where leads “the path to the fathers” (pitryâna). In the recent Rig-Veda, the individual elements of his death pass into the sun, wind, water, plants. Nothing specific is said about the judgment, sentence length, the last purposes.

According to Esotericism

In the Mysteries of Eleusis, Plato says: “Whoever shall arrive in Hades unpurified and not initiated shall lie in mud; but he who arrives there purified and initiated shall dwell with the gods.” (Phaedo 69c). Mud for profanes, congratulated for insiders.

Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, claiming to hold its data on afterlife of his own “spiritual investigations,” explains his views in his books and lectures collections. He distinguishes the following steps:

1. The etheric body or life body, gradually come off the physical body and the astral body remains attached for a time which is measured in days. After which the etheric body is also detached from the astral body and returns to the universal ether.
2. During this process the conscious being has the impression from spreading in the macrocosm. – “Immediately after death, the feeling is as if our being pervaded everything outside of us.” During the time the etheric body, which is the carrier of memory, is still attached to the astral body, the being can see a vast panorama full of life, the course of his existence on earth.
3. Once separated from the etheric body, the astral body, is still inhabited by desires that can not be satisfied: it is, in a way, hell or purgatory or more precisely Kamaloka. During this period the entity becomes aware of errors committed during its incarnation. The desire to repair these faults fits in it and will form the karma of his later incarnations.
4. The Ego having purified becomes free of its earthly attachments: it is, in a way, the paradise.
5. After death, the human entity rises spiritually through the various planetary spheres, the lunar sphere corresponding to purgatory. It is through these planetary spheres, with the help of angelic hierarchies, that karma is developed. Having reached the “midnight of the Worlds”, the spiritual Monad begins its return to the incarnation crossing spheres in reverse. In doing so, with the celestial hierarchies prepares earthly conditions of its future life on earth. – “After death, we become successively the inhabitants of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and the stellar firmament, then we contract and reincarnate.“
6. Forgetting moves with reincarnation. It would happen on average 1,000 years between two incarnations, but exceptions are numerous.

The reincarnationists divide the length of the interval between incarnations, the rules of remuneration, etc.

In science

No evidence of survival of consciousness after physical death has been scientifically collected, despite the testimony of spiritism and many EMI experiences. The current scientific consensus is that what is called “spirit” is only the fruit of our neural connections, an,d in the absence of brain activity, it is simply happening. In his television series The Human Mind (BBC), Sir Robert Winston mentions the possibility that the tunnel effect experienced during a near-death experience is produced by uncontrolled activation of the cells of the retina in the absence of oxygen, remains within an accompanying dream. Some psychiatrists also criticize the interpretation of those effects as a sign of life after death. For them, there is no experience of beyond, but trauma. Indeed, one can artificially reproduce a form of Out of Body Experience although it is not really comparable to that experienced in the context of an EMI (Jean-Pierre Jourdan, 2006).

Translated from Wikipedia.org