Just Some Random Thoughts: Life, Death, and What’s Beyond

I do think it's something we often struggle with. As we get older, it becomes harder to ignore. When you're young, it feels like you have forever—like death is just a distant blur. But each of us comes face-to-face with our mortality, often at a young age. For many of us, it's through the death of a pet or the passing of a relative. Maybe even something you see on TV might encourage you to ponder the inevitable demise of our physical bodies. Many people use spirituality or religious means to come to a sense of peace with it. I tried it. I was once a Christian, but I can't seem to go back to that religion, as I never truly identified with it and always felt disconnected from it. So, once I turned 18, I felt I had more agency over my own thoughts and feelings toward organized religion or spirituality. But I often ponder: What is waiting for us? Could it be nothing—just darkness or nothingness, a ceasing to exist? But if energy/matter is neither created nor destroyed, then where does our consciousness go? Does this same concept apply to our consciousness? Is our consciousness tethered to our human body, or does it cease to exist once we lose connection with our physical body? There must be a god or something, right? How else did we exist? And if the Big Bang is real, then what existed before it? Did all the matter and energy suddenly appear, or was it always there? Is the god or creator a good or neutral god? Is he uncaring of our existence? Are there multiple universes with people like us, just out of reach so that we can never understand each other's experience or perception? What if there are beings with more knowledge? Is that why the universe is spreading away from each other, so that we can never truly connect beyond our little solar system? What about the other planets? How do we know there aren't beings inside of them? How do we know the planets themselves are not spiritual in essence? Could we consider the Sun a god and Earth a demigod, since it needs the Sun to survive? So many questions. What if what's waiting for us on the other side is nothing? Or what if it's not the reality we want, like eternal happiness or some form of heaven? It could be hell. Or what if it's related to your state of mind at the time of death? What if that controls the reality you experience post-mortem? Or what if evil people, such as serial killers, don't get what they deserve like people think? What if the god or creator doesn't punish them for their wrongdoings, and we've given this energy source or creator human emotions that it does not have?