Why I Still Believe in the Afterlife as a Non-Religious Individual

There’s more to life than meets the eye

For the first 25 years of my life, I was as religious as they come. I’m talking every Sunday at church without missing a beat, well tailored attire, fully invested in each and every sermon.

Offering buckets would come around and I’d be equal parts excited to contribute to the ministry I was a part of at the time — and grateful to be able to subtly flex through the amount I was able to give.

Copious notes were taken during each and every message, almost as if my life depended on it. I had a folder on my iPhone dedicated to Sunday service notes so I could go back, look over, and reflect on the wisdom that was always readily available.

Cooking skills were improved as a volunteer with Sunday brunch, where hundreds of people showed up in hopes of getting a chicken (or fish) and waffle platter.

And at the end of each service, I was one of the last ones to leave — because I always volunteered to help with clean up.

Now, I know what you might be thinking.

“Why is this guy singing his own praises in the beginning of an article?”

Honestly, I’m not. I’m basically illustrating how devoted I was to living a religious lifestyle.

I grew up with both Christian and Jewish influences, spending my Summers between Brooklyn — specifically Bedstuy (Bedford Stuyvesant), Crown Heights, and Williamsburg — and the Philadelphia and Greater Philadelphia region of Pennsylvania.

Based on my upbringing and the immediate surroundings, being religious in those areas was a conscious choice, and to be honest, it felt kind of cool.

People respected you if you said you were a believer because they assumed you took it seriously. It meant you were different — in a good way.

It wasn’t like living in the state of Arkansas, part of the notoriously famous Bible Belt, where somehow overt racism and discrimination, coupled with Christianity, were allowed to exist.

Look at this example. No further proof necessary.

In the South initially, I looked at it as a place where I’d be able to express myself religiously without restraint. I never felt restrained in the Northeast as a Christian, but I did spend my teen and early young adult years there, when people are usually at their most judgmental.

Sometimes my non-believer friends would cast shade in my direction for the lifestyle I’d committed to living. Most of the time it didn’t affect me, but we’re all human, and there were times when it did phase me.

So in short, the relocation to Arkansas from Pennsylvania was a welcome one in my eyes. I secretly dreamt of finding a Southern belle to embrace a quaint Christian lifestyle with.

Two interracial relationships with Caucasian women ensued, both of which were subject to constant scrutiny and an onslaught of negativity from outsiders, all of them attending the same church as us.

Apparently older white religious people don’t like seeing interracial relationships, especially with black and white people, ESPECIALLY when the black person is male and the white person female.

Neither girlfriend could handle the pressure that came with that territory, leading to the ultimate, untimely failure of both relationships.

I began to ask myself a million dollar question in the aftermath— “How can a state that’s part of the Bible Belt, the epicenter of Christianity in America, be as racist as it was?”

You can’t espouse that God loves all AND hate black people or minorities at the same time. Something isn’t adding up with that logic.

And yet, that’s how things went over the course of my five years down South. In the end, I decided to walk away from church altogether. This was in 2019.

I haven’t looked back since.

I may have lost faith in religion, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forsaken everything I’ve learned about, like the afterlife.

There’s a very good reason why I still believe in that.

Why I still believe in the afterlife

I’ve had two near-death experiences over the course of my twenty-eight years of life. Both of them left an indelible impression on me regarding life after death.

For starters, I became more open to the possibility that there is such a thing.

The first experience

I’d like to preface both of these experiences with this statement; this is the absolute truth, as weird as it may seem or sound.

With the first experience, I had just gotten home from a young adult Christian conference called SALT (don’t ask me what that acronym stands for; I don’t remember). This was back in December of 2014.

I was in a festive mood because of how exhilarating it felt to be around 1,200 other young people all espousing to live similar lifestyles. While I put up my belongings I unpacked, I decided to throw on some music.

I put on Hillsong United, my favorite band from Australia. After I got done unpacking, I decided to go to bed. My older brother and I were housed in the same room in our parent’s house, him on the bed, me on the air mattress on the floor.

As the popular song Oceans shuffled on, I became overcome with pleasant emotions — like joy and gratitude. It’s hard to have a background like mine and not find reasons to espouse gratefulness on a daily basis.

Then, something both equal parts scary and surreal happened. If we have souls, it felt as if mine was being pulled out of my body, like the very life source that gives me energy was on its way out.

I looked down and saw my body on its way down, as if I’d been hit in the face and was knocked out, moving in slow motion. I looked over at my older brother and saw him turn over in his sleep.

That was when it really hit me; somehow I was outside of my body. I felt dead, but not in the sense that life was altogether over, more that my life in an infinitely mortal frame was. I felt somewhat free.

That lasted for an indefinite amount of time before I was sucked back into my body with the intensity of a Dyson vacuum’s suction.

The next morning, when I asked my brother to confirm if he moved at all in his sleep, he told me he rolled over while asleep once.

The second experience

This one took place in the Summer of 2021. I had just left the local neighborhood Target and was somewhat flustered after being accused of attempted theft.

My debit card wasn’t working because I was attempting to spend thousands of dollars at once and needed to authorize the transaction with them beforehand.

The only issue was this shopping spree fell on a Saturday, when customer service wouldn’t be available (I’ve since switched banks). So after dealing with the police and the store manager, I was asked to leave and did so begrudgingly.

Full disclosure: Target later apologized and issued me a complementary gift card.

As I got into my car, I could tell my severe anxiety disorder had been triggered, as my hands couldn’t stop trembling. I tried to get a grip on it for quite some time while proceeding to drive.

By the time I did, I failed to notice the green Ford Escape that had ran a red light and was headed directly for my side of my black Honda Accord sedan.

Next thing I knew, my car was headed for a traffic signal pole; the hood and front were obliterated, as was the side, totaling the vehicle.

As I watched my car careen toward the traffic pole, completely out of my control, I said a silent prayer. I had no idea if I’d survive the crash, and this was with my seatbelt on.

After impact, like in the first near death experience, I felt as if my soul was being extracted from my body, only this time much faster, as if on fast forward compared to the slow motion feel the first time around.

I landed on another plane of existence, almost like a rocket landing on another planet. It looked like a combination of the skies in the picture above and the ancestral planes T’challa walked through in the movie Black Panther.

A loud, indistinct voice asked me if I was ready to come home. I replied even louder that I wasn’t.

That was when I was whisked away, back into my body, only to wake up scraped and bruised, covered in glass shards, with a torn rotator cuff and cracked ribs, but alive.

I haven’t been the same since.

The evolution of caterpillars

One of the most radical transformations amongst all living organisms is that of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. A caterpillar is born and immediately starts eating nothing but leaves and twigs. It gets bigger and bigger on a daily basis while simultaneously shedding its skin.

Then one day, after what may feel like a lifetime, it hangs itself upside down on a leaf or twig, stops eating, and spins itself into a silky, shiny cocoon.

It is here that the caterpillar remains until, one day, it radically transforms its body and emerges as a butterfly.

You don’t have to be religious to look at this transformation with awe. For me, with my curious mind, I then wonder if it’s possible that humans somehow transform in a similar capacity.

The correlation/Final thoughts

All things under the Sun were created somehow. What if life on Earth isn’t a finite experience where we merely live and die? What if, it’s part of a larger, more detailed existence?

If a caterpillar can evolve into a butterfly, what can humans potentially do? The only way to find out?

By living life to the fullest in the here and now, making the most of each and every day until your number is up.

Hopefully, if we’re lucky, it’ll simply be the end of one level and the beginning of another.