If There Is an Afterlife, How Should You Live Now? - John Glanvill - Anxiety Specialist

If There Is an Afterlife, How Should That Change This One?

I do not know whether there is an afterlife. I hope there is. I have found no proof, only reports, traditions, personal accounts, and the unusual experiences that can arrive in sleep, meditation or altered states. None of those have given me a clean, waking, engineer-friendly frame of reference. Part of me would like the kind of blind faith some people seem to have. Another part will not accept a story just because it is comforting.

That tension is useful. It keeps me honest.

Descartes pointed out that we live in two places at once: an inner experience and an outer world. I would put it this way. I have a subjective life, running through limited senses, inside a universe I barely understand. What I do with that inner life is the part I can actually work with.

So the useful question is not “Can I prove what happens after death?” The useful question is: if I treat death as either a full stop or a transition, how does that change the way I live now?

I am all right with both possibilities. If the lights go out, this life still mattered because it was the one I had. If some part of me continues, this life still mattered because it was the training ground. Either way, the body does not go with me. That thought used to be bleak. Now it is oddly freeing. It means the point cannot only be to keep the body comfortable and the reputation intact.

I do not follow the internet version of spirituality that says the universe will deliver whatever you hold in mind. A model still has to survive contact with ordinary life. If I want work, I need to engage, learn, apply, and become employable. If I want better relationships, I need to become someone it is possible to be close to. Hoping is not the same as contributing.

The model I find most useful, true or not, is this: I am here to learn. Caroline Myss called it Earth School. David Hawkins described this place as unusually good at presenting challenge after challenge so a person can grow toward acceptance and love. I like that metaphor because it puts the attention back on conduct rather than speculation.

If I cannot stay reasonably calm here,
if I cannot make or keep a friend,
if I cannot let go of some control,
if I cannot accept another person without needing them to change first,
if I cannot sit with not knowing,
then I am not preparing for anything larger. I am only rehearsing fear.

That is why I do not want to dwell on the next life. I want to become more fit for this one. Calm enough to meet what happens. Honest enough to stop blaming the outer world for an inner state. Brave enough to act before I have a guarantee. Loving enough that other people do not have to be perfect before I can treat them decently.

Death, considered this way, has a practical effect. If this is not the whole story, then clinging so hard to comfort, image and control looks a little absurd. If this is the whole story, then wasting it on rumination looks equally absurd. Either interpretation points in the same direction: live more cleanly now.

Love changes as a person grows. Early on, “love” can mean trying to feel warmly toward everyone, even while being used, and then attacking yourself when you cannot. Later it becomes simpler. You accept people as they are without requiring them to regulate your emotions. You can still leave. You can still say no. Acceptance is not the same as staying in harm’s way.

The same movement happens with self-love. First you try hard. Then you see the old programming. Then something quieter appears: you can be with yourself without constant improvement projects and self-prosecution. That is not vanity. It is the end of an internal war that was never going to produce peace.

Video 32 sits underneath a lot of this. The outer world is happening. Your inner reality is what you actually inhabit. Two people can stand in the same event and live two different lives because of the story, the fear, and the meaning they attach. You are responsible for that inner weather. Nobody else can manage it for you, and waiting until death explains itself is just another way of postponing the work.

I still like evidence. I still dislike sloppy mysticism. I also no longer need the afterlife to be proven before I will practise the attitudes that make this life larger: less fear, more acceptance, more willingness to not know, more action toward what I actually want.

If something continues after the body, those qualities will not be wasted.
If nothing continues, they were still the best use of the time.

That is enough of a reason to keep going.

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