If there is one "spiritual" belief I have that I feel is worth sharing with the world, it is this: your last moment is your eternity.
Our minds sense time as linear, and the way we do this is by comparing one moment to others before it. Let's say we strike a note on a tuning fork, listen to it, and start counting, "1...2...3...4..." until we no longer hear the note. The moment of silence afterwards is different than when the note was audible. But even while the note was audible, there wasn't just a single moment. There was one where you were hearing the note and hadn't yet started to count. Then there was another where you heard the note and said, "One," and so on. There were many moments, all different, that all occurred while the tuning fork was singing, and they happened one at a time, in sequence.
Now suppose that while you were counting, you suddenly ceased to exist. No disembodied soul looking down at a corpse with a tuning fork in its hand, just POOF, you're vaporized into atoms incapable of thought or perception. It is my assertion and sincere belief that because your consciousness never experienced a moment beyond its last one, it has no perception of it being "the end." There was no experience of darkness or silence afterward. No "...three". It's just frozen there, unable to experience any such thing as "after."
The reason I use that illustration is because when you think of being frozen in some moment for eternity, you're probably thinking of something interminably boring, like being stuck in a waiting room forever. But the reason being stuck in a waiting room forever would feel boring--the reason it would feel like a long time--is because you'd have numerous distinct moments. There'd be one where you sigh, another where you look at the clock on the wall, another where you glance down at magazines scattered on a table, another where you look around the room, another where you think, "This is really boring," and so on. While the waiting room and your presence in it would continue throughout, you'd really be experiencing many separate and distinguishable moments. The more of these you have, the longer it feels. Even if your body just froze in place in the waiting room, you'd have moment-to-moment thoughts. "What's happening? This is weird. Is everyone else frozen, too?" Many moments, all different, just like the numbers counted while the tuning fork is singing.
But I'm talking about being stuck in a single instant where your thoughts never change, because there's no space in which to think them. The movie reel just cuts off and there's not a single frame more. Your consciousness, from its own point of view, is frozen in that last frame because there is no "after." It experiences the last thing it's capable of experiencing as lasting forever.
I think this phenomenon is what underlies Christian notions of Heaven and Hell, and of the importance of dying in a state of grace. One does not wish to spend eternity experiencing terror or regret with no possibility of redemption in a later moment. It would be far better to see a light, feel love and acceptance, and believe that you're about to experience some great and unimaginable bliss, and have that be the last frame in which your mind is stuck for eternity.
You might say, "But you wouldn't experience anything, because there's no brain there to experience it." But you're thinking from the perspective of a third party there, an outside observer watching someone else die. Yes, it's objectively true that if brain activity ceases at 23:54:05, then there simply wouldn't be any thought, feeling, or experience at 23:54:06. But the mind that exists in that last frame at 23:54:05 doesn't know that and has no way of experiencing it. It doesn't even get to feel trapped, because that would require a separate moment to think about. It simply feels a neverending is, crystalized into the snapshot of a single instant.
What does it matter if you cease to exist in the next moment if you never experience that moment? If you experience, instead, a single, last frame that, from your perspective, lasts forever? If your experience of it is of it being eternal, then it doesn't really matter what comes after. You're not privy to it.
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There is a belief, popular among many sci-fi nerds and gamers, that human experience is simply the brain receiving electrical impulses from various sensory nerves, and so we could be brains in a jar experiencing a computer simulation, and to us, it would be the same thing, indistinguishable from reality. And many of these folks are okay with this idea. Many even prefer it, wishing that they could just retire to being a brain in a jar spending the rest of their brain's natural life in a much cooler, more interesting simulation than the one they're experiencing walking around here in meatspace.
I think it's important we see this for what it is--the alienation of reality.
Marx wrote of the alienation of labor--how workers don't get to decide what their work is or what purpose it serves, because all those things are decided by a boss. They just do a task that, especially in a factory, may seem meaningless all by itself. "Push this button, and then put the plastic thingy in the box." That's not an adequate purpose for human existence. Nobody wants to spend their life doing that and then have as their epitaph, "He pushed that button and put the plastic thingies in the boxes really well."
Here, we see people experiencing that same joyless disconnect, not just from their work, but from the experience of reality itself. They're caught in a loop of ennui, and would readily have their brains removed to be stuck in a jar if it meant that they could have a fantasy experience that felt real for the rest of their lives.
I reject this notion, though, that all life is is the brain experiencing those nerve impulses. The reason those nerve impulses have value is because they're a reflection of the world as it really is. We get to experience reality in real time and interact with it. We've got front row seats to existence in the real world. The brain activity isn't an end in itself. It's a means to an end. The thing that matters is that we get to experience reality and have the chance to affect it. Simulations, whether through virtual reality or hallucinogens, is just that--a fake, a way to distract a brain and keep it busy and out of the way so that it can't make any real impact on other beings.
