What happens after we "die?"
It was last year that I first came up with this idea for the afterlife. It was just a spontaneous thought at the time, which I decided to say out loud, and then forget about for a year or so: Instead of Hell being eternal punnishment for any size of fuck-up, I figured it's more likely that everybody lives the life of those whom they had touched in some way during this one. Thus if someboey treated everybody else with love and compassion, this period would really be quite pleasent, like "heaven." On the other hand, if the person hurt others during life, he or she would have a very painful afterlife, like "hell." Of course, we don't just have an effect on those relatively few people with whom we interact directly, but all those with whom they interact as well. Thus we would actually have to live many peoples' lives after our own. Perhaps this is some type of reincarnation. It's like Liz suggested: we're all incarnations of the same person. Everybody is always living every life. There is no time, because that's only in the individual mind. Maybe this being whose billions of lives we are living is actually God Itself, or whatever you want to call it. After all, our actions don't just affect other people, but the entire universe, albeit fairly imperceptibly. But this can't be called God, because that is nirvana and is free of the dukkha (suffering) which is created by ignorance. The being we are all a part of, because it is living all our lives here, is not nirvana, but samsara. This is the realm of unending suffering. Every incarnation of this Being is still stuck with the notion of self, even though they're all part of the single whole. Only when we realize that we're not separate beings, that everything we do is connected with everything else and that these connections can't possibly be destroyed or lessened in any way, can we free ourselves from this eternal suffering. We are "re"incarnated as what we believe is "another" person over an over "again" until we can finally awaken to Reality and free ourselves from the cycle of suffering caused by these notions and concepts which try to fit an ever-changing Reality into a rigid framework of duality (belief/doubt, good/bad, life/death, existence/nonexistence, etc.). These things which we all believe are separate are actually wholly dependant on the other. Good and bad are the two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to have a one-sided coin, so believing something is good implies that other things are bad... (see my page discussing good versus bad).