What happens after death for an atheist?

Hi Robin,As wonderful as a Beatific Vision can be it is transient. It arises and passes away. The awakening of the Buddha, or Bernadette Roberts is not spoken of as a momentary event but rather as a realizing of that which has always been the case. It can be called transcendent in the sense that it is not subject to the change. It is not ecstatic but profound such that the Buddha described it as a turning in the deepest seat of consciousness. I think it is when consciousness is freed from all the identifications that obscured it.It is not something someone experiences. It is what happens when conciousness realizes it never was a someone. The someone can be said to die, but that is a dramatic way of speaking. How can something that never existed die? An illusion is seen through is all.ABE: What happens to a characer protrayed by an actor, say Prospero in the Tempest, when the curtain falls and the actor returns to his dressing room? Shakespeare had some very deep insights to this.lfenThis message has been edited by lfen, 02-04-2005 15:31 AM

Gary,I have it the other way round sort of. Consciousness is the actor. The "stuff that dreams are made on". In identifying with the contents of the mind, the neurological experience of the organism, it experiences itself as an individual, the character. The beatific vision happens when it senses briefly the actual situation but returns to its fixation or hypnosis of being an self separate from the universe. Everything is an object except pure subjectivity of consciousness that is aware of the shifting sensory and mental contents/objects.This is a religious viewpoint from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. At present there is no scientific proof. I think the current research trying to account for consciousness as an emergent property will be very helpful someday as to either establishing what consciousness is, or failing in a way that lends support to the Buddhist notions.lfen