“For either death is a long sleep, the best of sleeps, or a journey to another world in which the souls of the dead are gathered together, and in which there may be a hope of seeing the heroes of old–in which, too, there are just judges; and as all are immortal, there can be no fear of any one suffering death for his opinions.”
– Socrates (c. 470 BCE – 399 BCE) contemplating his impending death

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What manner of metaphysicians would we be if we ignored the subject of the afterlife? Pretty lousy ones, that’s what kind! So let us take a whack at it…

Scientists tell us that energy neither gets created nor destroyed. Does this mean we survive after the demise of the body? If so, in what manner? Does our core energy remain – shaped by centuries of existence on Earth? Or does the personality everyone knows and loves stay intact?

Omar Khayyam, obsessed with this topic (and with wine, but that’s another story), mused skeptically:
Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us pass’d the door of Darkness through
Not one returns to tell us of the Road, 
Which to discover we must travel too. 

Or, as I put it on the page CONTACT THE DEAD:
People we met during that vacation in Yosemite, people who promised to keep in touch, never got back to us. That charming couple you spent time with on the cruise never returned your post-vacation emails. Your old army buddies who swore friendship forever…. Some interesting people you knew from that time on Jury Duty… from college… from your last job… You hear from none of them. Sound familiar?  – people on the Earthly Plane hardly ever keep in contact with others, so why do we expect people who have moved on to an entirely different plane of existence to get back to us?

For a look at many aspects of this question, we can do no better than to turn to the 20th Century’s foremost philosopher,  the great Manly Palmer Hall (1901 – 1990). In this talk, Hall all but dissects the topic with his customary wide-ranging knowledge of all aspects of civilization: “Do We Chose Our Lives Before We Are Born?”