No Immediate Afterlife

There is no afterlife for those who have just died according to the Bible itself--not yet.  Literal unconsciousness awaits the righteous and wicked together in Sheol, it says, a complete absence of perception being the state of the mind before resurrection if it even still exists (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, Job 3:11-19, Psalm 88:10-12).  The body decays in or on the ground or with the waters of the planet, the mind as lifeless as the body.  There is no immediate arrival in heaven or hell, and certainly not an arrival of the spirit independent of the mind-body unity.  The Biblical afterlife is a very physical place and not just a realm of necessary truths consciousness, and empty space (see the description of New Jerusalem in Revelation 21, for instance).

In truth, the afterlife for the human dead comes long after most of humanity has died, unless a spirit is temporarily revived before its resurrection as was the case with the prophet Samuel in 2 Samuel 28 and Moses in Matthew 17.  Aside from the multiple passages that blatantly teach the lack of experience in Sheol, such as the explicitly direct Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, there are passages that are more subtle but still literally would describe a sleep of the soul before resurrection (like Daniel 12:2).  Aside from even these, there are passages that could only be accurate if unconsciousness until resurrection is the case.

In John 14:1-4, for example, when Jesus says he will return so that his followers will be with him, what he says outright contradicts the notion that all the saved are with him before his return and before their simultaneous resurrection (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 combined with Revelation 19:11-13 and John 1:1-14 clarifies that these events happen at the same time).  He says his return occurs before Christians are reunited with him.  They cannot, if this is true, go to heaven before their bodily resurrections and be in his presence prior to his return as many believe!

Again, there is no immediate Biblical afterlife (outside the type of exceptions mentioned above).  There is none until the joint awakening of the soul and body potentially millennia or millions of years after one's death according to true Biblical teachings.  The Biblical Sheol would look like no afterlife at all if a person somehow experienced the truest blankness of a total lack of experience, and they could only do this in a partial way because they would have to experience total unconsciousness, an impossibility.  At most, someone could experience a lack of many different aspects of ordinary human consciousness, but they would have no perceptions of even their lack of perceptions if they truly were not conscious.  Even a dream logically requires active consciousness.

As far as conscious awareness is concerned, Sheol is indeed no afterlife at all.  There is no perception, not even the knowledge of self-evident logical axioms or one's own mind and its thoughts, in Sheol.  Just because there is not an afterlife right after death, though, does not mean there never will or could be one, and even billions of years would seem like only a moment at most to a soul that ceases terrestrial life and is resurrected in the future with no experience in between.  A person could in this regard, as far as the experience right before death and after resurrection might make it seem to an assumption-ensnared mind, appear right before God after dying.