After death we die? No way.

What happens to living creatures when they stop living? The earliest undisputed human burial dates back 130,000 years and gives us an insight into just how far back humans believed in the existence of life after death. A belief the road doesn’t end when the body gives up. That physical life is just a stepping stone with lessons and experiences to be accumulated before we move on to a different plain.

Theories to what’s in store for us when we die seem to branch out into three main ideas. The first and arguably most popular is that after we die, our soul finds its way to heaven, hell or purgatory. If we have lived our lives according to how a certain ancient holy doctrine dictates then we reap the rewards in heaven. If we fail to adhere to policy stated therein then we end up in the gutter of the universe aptly named hell. However if we fail to make the cut for neither paradise nor its extreme adversary, we end up in limbo. Purgatory is its name and wafting around in sub-existence is the game.

Another equally noteworthy and amazing hypothesis suggests we keep coming back in a different form in correspondence to how we lived in the former life. And that this cycle of life and death ends only when we have learned from our mistakes and have thus achieved enlightenment.

The third theory proposes that we are pure energy and when the physical body dies this energy changes form, escapes its once proud vessel and floats free to roam wherever it may.

A fourth possibility had to be mentioned apart from the three illustrated above because of its bizarrely hopeless finale. The heart stops, brain starves, body shuts down, the dearly departed gets buried, the body becomes worm food.

We’ve come so far in terms of technology; blurring the borders of science and science-fiction. We’ve colonised earth, cloned living things and are now building hotels in outer space. Fascinatingly, a shaman presiding over burials in the Neolithic era had an uncanny similarity with the modern day priest; theories of life after death. A vision that all is not lost upon cessation of the physical being and the unity with our loved ones again.