Life after death is one of the most inspiring topics and, at the same time, a tricky one to write about. Depending on the school of thought, people expect different things, from heavens and angels, karmic reincarnation to simply nothing. You cannot satisfy every reader in a subject that does not have an absolute right and wrong, simply because it cannot be demonstrated. The afterlife is a matter of believing in what your values, family or purpose in life teach you.
Does or doesn't exist? It doesn't matter
Let us assume afterlife doesn't exist, there is no place to cross over, nothing at all and everything in your life ends with you. If you believe it, there is no chance you will be able to tell the unbeliever that he's wrong. He cannot go back and change his life, it is too late. Let us assume that afterlife exits. If you have always believed in it, you have the chance to tell the unbeliever he was wrong, however, he still cannot go back and change his life, again it is too late. Since in both cases you can't go back, we have to make a decision in this life if we believe in afterlife or not.
Which decision does give you the best return on your life? You are working in a company and your boss tells you you're going to be fire in a month. What incentives do you have to excel in your work in that last month? None! Now, your boss tells you you're going to be promoted in the next month to a new office far away in Asia. Would you do the effort to excel in the next month? Oh yeah! It is in the human nature to excel today when there is a purpose for tomorrow. Believing in something beyond this life has the potential to be one of the most powerful personal incentives to excel in our life.
A purpose found in something possible but unlikely to exist
How can we fit afterlife in a world where science is the king? There is one way: afterlife must be an extension of our reality. Think about it. One of the difficult areas to accept is the gap between our tangible, measurable reality and the philosophical concepts behind the different afterlife schools of thought. Angels, reincarnation, concepts so far away from what we see and experience in our day-to-day life. However, if we think about the afterlife as an extrapolation of our reality into a world very unlikely to exist but logically possible, it would make afterlife a concept more approachable and easy to visualise.
That has been the approach behind A Lifetime Waiting for Eternity. I created a world, Ely's world, that expands our reality in a logic way. I sought for physical facts that have "soft" scientific explanations with room for the imagination of a writer to play and explore other alternative options that might be very unlikely and yet logically sound.
I'll get in more details in following blogs.
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