Your Afterlife as a Fictional Character

Finding the self that survives every story

Dear Living Dark reader,

What follows are words overheard in some spaceless space at no particular time. They are apparently part of some lecture or teaching that could be categorized as “spiritual.” We can infer from their content that the transcript picks up in the middle of an extended metaphor in which the speaker is using the idea of novels and movies, and the fictional worlds they posit and portray, and particularly the thought of the subjective experiences of the characters in these narratives, to make a point about life, death, and ultimate identity. Toward the end, in the context of talking about life’s pains and tragedies, there is a brief discussion of suicide, with reference to a real-life literary death, that some people might find upsetting. I’m not really one for trigger warnings, the whole idea of which I find troubling and troublesome. But I felt led to mention this anyway, out of concern for you, as I know from firsthand experience, both my own and that of people I have known, that this particular subject can cause distress.

More broadly, the text below just stands as it stands.

Warm regards,

What almost no one does is to project these situations beyond their imagined end. All of the tragedies, calamities, and disasters that befall people, the awful endings that we have stuffed our minds with since we were born, not just the “real” ones but especially the imaginary ones, the deaths and disasters of novels, movies, folk tales, urban legends, all those imaginative hashings-out of desire and fear—the desire for happiness, the dread of death—we let it end too quickly in our mind’s eye. The awful loss occurs. The child or spouse dies. The disease wins. The building blows up. The monster emerges triumphant. Or actually, dramatic climaxes on the other side of the scale illustrate the point just as well: The loss is averted. The child or spouse lives. The disease heals. The hero defuses the bomb. The monster is slain. The deep point is the same in all these cases, and in every case.

We can phrase it as a question: Then what? What happens after the event, after “the end of the story”? We just don’t go there. We ignore that part in our mind’s eye, and in our emotions, and more importantly, in our stock-taking of just what’s going on and in what kind of a world it is happening. The hero or villain lies there vanquished, bleeding, and then dies. Okay—then what? There are at least two levels. One is the world of the story, where things just keep going, only now this world and the “things” that compose it gain the added element of the sub-tale just completed, the ballad or saga of the hero or villain who recently died. But nothing is fundamentally different. Nothing has changed. That particular life and death, all those dramatic events, are now just something that once happened. Life goes on. So what is the ultimate import or significance of the whole ruckus?

Leave that thought there for a moment, and let’s come back to the dying hero or villain, and instead of watching from the outside, let’s enter his or her mindspace. Let’s consider this person and this final event from the inside: “Oh, no! I’m dying! I’m defeated! I’m lost! This can’t be happening!” Maybe these thoughts and emotions are accompanied by great physical agony. Or maybe not. In any case, they swirl for a while, and then it’s all over. The lights go out. The curtain falls. Death. And … then what?

This is the point where fantasies of an “afterlife” and whatever it might involve are likely to crop up for many of us as we think this through. This reflex is understandable, given the depth and prevalence of cultural programming. But notice how those divine and infernal imaginings are all absolutely tangential and inconsequential. Remember, we’re dwelling in the inner space of that dying hero/villain, seeing and experiencing from his or her singular point of view. We’re not trying to project an image of someone as another movie that we watch from the outside. Death arrives. The curtain falls. Darkness, known from the inside. So, what’s next? What do we see? Do eyes open again on some visual scene, whether a heaven or a hell or a reincarnated existence in some other form? Do physical senses return? Or is it just darkness, blankness, nothing? Either way, who is seeing that? Can we remain self-aware in this thought experiment, enough so to turn our attentional gaze back upon ourselves as whatever new vista opens up, if any, beyond the end of the story that we previously inhabited and that we just now exited? If so, what lies behind our seeing?

Our gaze is like the light of a lamp projected outward. Formerly it illuminated the world of that dramatic story where we won, or lost, and in any case ended up dead. Now there has been a transition, a discontinuity, as the light grew dim on that world, and as we saw and experienced that dimming from the inside. Now our sight—whatever sight really is, whatever that faculty really consists of—illuminates whatever has come next, whether new scenes entire or a perceptual nothing. Whatever the case, seeing is still here. We are still here.

And this raises the signal point, the explosive question, that has been uncovered or at least gestured toward by this transition, if we will only pay attention: Who or what are we? Sight is “attached” to something. Sight has just gone through a transition, a shift, a journey, a phase shift from one set of objects to another. Everything looks different, whether because each thing is new or because no things appear at all. No matter. The point at hand is: What has remained constant? What has not changed? Who are we, the seer, the deep inner point, locus, self to which sight is attached? If sight is a beam of light, what is the bulb or lamp that emits it? In what does it originate? What projects it? And in the interest of remaining true to our intent of considering and examining the matter from the inside, subjectively instead of objectively, watching the movie as a character instead of an external viewer, what kind of knowledge is this firsthand, first-person, subjective view?

We are asking about the very source of our sight, even as we are that source. Notice how the same principle is immediately and effortlessly applicable to our other senses as well, both physical and mental. Who hears? Who tastes, smells, touches? Who knows, imagines, considers, remembers? What exists “on the inside” of all these faculties? And for you as this character who has now either gone to heaven or hell, or transmigrated to another story and role, or fallen into the blank absence of story altogether, what kind of knowledge is it that you have of yourself as this whatever-it-is? You cannot see, hear, touch, taste, or smell it. You cannot think, imagine, or know it. For you stand behind all those things. You are upstream of mental and sensory knowledge. So, if you can’t grasp or know your own existence and identity through those faculties by which you know anything and everything else, how can you know yourself?

Because, in fact, don’t you already know yourself? You know that you exist. You know that you are. But you don’t know it perceptually or intellectually. You just know it. You know it by being it. In fact, you are knowing it right now, because you are it right now. You have never not been it. You were it when you were the hero/villain whose projected beam of sight saw a world in which you lived out a drama and were then slain. You were it during the experience of dying. You are it right now as your beam of sight illuminates whatever new vista or emptiness lies before you. You have never not been, nor can you ever not be, that—whatever that is: that self, that identity, which you can never see or know or grasp, but which is the necessary element, the sine qua non, the irreducible reality of an identity from which all perceiving and knowing projects and in which it all subsists.

So, this is all a thought experiment, a fantasy. We have entered into the mindspace of a fictional character and found what we’ve found.

And now: What about you? What is the application to your own “real” life? If, by the way, you thought you heard me enclose the word “real” in scare quotes just now, you weren’t wrong. In any case, I won’t lead you through the consideration in the same wordy way that we just took to think about other fictional characters. Instead, I will just let your own ruminations carry you along to the obvious, inevitable, inexorable conclusion, if in fact you’ve caught the drift, and the bug has bitten you, and the engine is now turning, and the ice is thawing, and the penny is dropping, and the unstoppable recognition is dawning.

By the way, and on a slightly different tack: This all means that tragedy in real life, however dreadful it appears and however awful the feelings that go with it, is ultimately redeemed. In fact, it’s redeemed right in the moment, not sometime later. Robert E. Howard, as his mother lay on her deathbed, went to his typewriter and typed the following four-line couplet:

All fled, all done,
So lift me on the pyre.
The feast is over
And the lamps expire.

Then he went outside, locked himself in the family car, and shot himself in the head with a pistol. He died eight hours later. This was the man, the writer, who had invented savagely heroic characters such as Conan the Barbarian, and who had grown up in the rough-and-tumble world of the Texas oil boom, and who had written boxing and Western stories, and whose colleague and pen pal H. P. Lovecraft had affectionately nicknamed him Two-Gun Bob because of all this

To all outward appearances—not to mention within the subjective mental-emotional experience of Howard himself—this act of self-ending represented a wrenching tragedy and loss. This arrival at a suicidal level of grief and emptiness, where one’s life no longer has meaning or value, where perhaps it even has a positive anti-value, and in which the motivation arises to take effective action to end it, to bring the curtain down voluntarily, to take active steps to exit from one’s story—this is a thing so poignant and wrenching that nobody can deny its pathos. So are all the other sufferings and tragedies visited upon each and all of us in the worlds of our separate and shared stories through events not of our own conscious choosing.

In all cases, it may be difficult for some people to hear that the same principle and truth uncovered in the thoughts above holds steady throughout. When Howard pulled the trigger, and in the moments after, what did he know? What did he see, experience? For us who count as “other” from him in this world drama, as people/identities separate from him and from each other, there was the sight and horror of the bloody body, which was dragged out of the car in the immediate aftermath by Howard’s father and a family friend. There was and is the story of his life and its culmination in this sad death—which he had in fact planned for days. But for him, on the inside of it, what exactly did he see and know? For that matter, what does he see and know now? If you judge the question as fanciful and meaningless because you want to say something like, “Well, he saw and knew nothing afterward, because that’s what death is,” you’re still viewing it from the outside.

It’s a good idea to get past that habit, because you won’t always have a choice. Someday you, yourself, will die. Your story will end in some way, in some setting and set of circumstances, through some event. What will you know, at that moment and afterward? What will you experience? What will you see when this happens?

Here is the real point: You don’t have to wait for that moment. You can ask the question presently. What are you seeing and knowing right now? How is it that you are seeing and knowing it? And who or what are you that stands right now behind the seeing and knowing? Who sees? What knows? What is the unchanging witness to every ending, even—especially—yours? And how is it that, as a matter of presently verifiable fact, this is not affected by anything, not even birth and death, because it was never born and therefore cannot die—just the same as it is with every nominal “other” whom you have ever seen or known in fiction or life?