People often ask, "What do you think happens after you die?" Instead, I think a more interesting question is, "What would you like to happen after you die?" I think I just want to rest, awareness severed and gone - no thing, mu. It is comforting to believe that there is nothing to fear in death because there is nothing to feel fear in death. Pain and suffering as an illusion / pain and suffering as a signal - (Sidenote: I so badly want to know what an ascetic believer in transient suffering does on a 12 hour vehicle ride. Do they just stare at the back of the seat because once you're done it's as if it hadn't happened?) - In the moment seeing, smelling, tasting, feeling something gross is only so because of the human perspective to prevent disease etc. It is not objectively gross, it just is. A rock does not find a rotting corpse gross (and neither do the vultures).

Is there any chance my hope for the afterlife is true? It feels like the old, wise mindset to take: accepting the transience of existence and being at peace with that. But can I know for sure? Beyond the typical, "it's like before you were born" if we take it that you were created as you know yourself from the development in your environment making something arise from complexity, can it be that, that's all there is and there is and that there is no Animism / Brahman / Panpsychism that you will dissolve back into and be forced into continued awareness? Before biological sentience on earth, did rocks and planets and atoms really move around in a cosmos without a spectator? It feels wrong imagining the dance of the stars existing without some consciousness to witness them, how is that possible? Well, today something as mundane as a rock shifting in the wind or a single chloroplast photosynthesizing in algae does not have a human witness and never will be seen, and that doesn't feel like some big thing being missed out on (we just can't know for sure if all these litte things have their own perspective witnesses). I'll have to resort to faith in the unknown if I want my comfort, but it feels safe: I just need to remember that the subject-object / will-representation, is an illusion and the vulture's meal is too.