Nihilitarianism

I think the idea of an afterlife originates from the look that people saw in the eyes of the dead, which made it feel as if their last moments would reverberate for eternity — and whether someone dies peacefully or remorsefully depends largely on whether or not they think their life was a failure or success. If they were purely selfish, then their death itself makes their life a failure; if they were also altruistic, then it depends on what they did for others. The last words of the dead gave a special meaning to their echo in our memory, making us think that because we still feel them inside they are still alive somehow. It's impossible for life imagine an ending to life, only of it changing in form, as if the soul were a butterfly emerging from the cocoon of the body — that's why the ancient Greeks had the same word for butterfly and soul, "psyche". Some ancient Greeks believed in metempsychosis, that whatever happens to our brain is whatever happens to our soul, and the soul travels with that matter and energy until it becomes something else… so that the reverberation that we see in the eyes of the dead doesn't actually last forever, only until their eyes and brain have decayed, at which point it changes in form, to something more basic, primal, primordial: pure substance — earth. As far as afterlives go it makes more sense than most. It places the divine light at the end of the tunnel not somewhere in the sky, but beneath our feet, a return to mother nature: that light is the energy of the world's particles seeping in through the cracks of our organism, returning us to the original state from which we arose: formless, pure, empty, and one with all things, just another clod of earth in the ground.