What happens when our physical body and our ego consciousness dies? I personally don’t worry about it anymore because I reached the conclusion that we are an expression of Source, inseparable from It, so we are eternal.
But still, I spent so many years thinking about it that I want to sum up my understanding of how people have tried to cope with their perception of death. How do they deal with such an existential threat to their ego consciousness and their physical body.
Let’s start with the idea that we go to a heaven after we die. People who are attached to the worldly plane find this to be comforting. They feel that they have invested so much time in this life, that it can’t just end suddenly and for no purpose. It’s interesting how people picture themselves in a youthful body, enjoying themselves in the heaven realm. Seeing their old friends and family. They still have a strong attachment to their egos. I wonder if they’ll get bored living like that for eternity?
Related to this is the belief in reincarnation. When we die our consciousness goes looking for another womb to be born into during conception. We do this over and over for many lifetimes. The only out is Nirvana which is the ending of all thoughts, perceptions and consciousness.
Re-incarnation can be complicated. Relies a lot on Karma. I think the Buddha said somewhere that you shouldn’t waste too much time sorting out the details because you’ll get lost in them.
You can produce good or bad karma according to your thoughts, words and deeds. There are so many variables in this that you can’t keep track. Your child in the last lifetime, may have been your grandfather in this lifetime. Some people believe that you can go to heaven for hundreds or thousands of lifetimes and then you have to go back to live as a human being again and repeat the process. Others think you can come back as an ant if you’re bad and a king if you’re good.
You may have been really good in this lifetime. But you end up in a wretched rebirth. Why? Because you were terrible for the 4 previous lifetimes and your karma is now only catching up to you.
Or, you may have collected all kinds of bad karma for centuries, and at the end of this life you may change your ways and become totally enlightened, a saint. The past negative action then has no affect and you go to a heaven for 500 years or reincarnate into a beautiful life.
I was open to the philosophy of reincarnation, but for me there were too many questions. And how do we know at our death that it’s time to jump to another life? And think of all the pain you have to experience over and over again. What if you keep being born into lives where you keep getting physically tortured? Who wants to come back to that?
I don’t see much of a difference when it comes to going to heaven or being reincarnated. Both are reliant on belief systems that are based on the fear of annihilation.
And what about the people who don’t believe in heaven or reincarnation? They get a bad rap sometimes because they are considered to be soulless or evil. Some may be nihilists or atheists who need the concept of an afterlife to negate it. But not all. Stoics for example are in tune with natural law and have a strong connection to their place in the universe. They enjoy their lives and accept death when it’s their time. They are moral and upright. You don’t need to believe in an afterlife on this or any other plane to have meaning.
I think the meaning of our lives is to live. That’s it. We don’t need the justification from society’s institutions or to be remembered in history books, or to have eternal life.
The best way I can explain my view is that during life, our pure consciousness or universal mind is trapped by our mundane mind, and at death it is freed and can then return to Source. It’s like an invisible energy that you can’t measure in any way. It doesn’t fly away or stay. It just merges again with the universal energy. But of course it was an illusion that cosmic consciousness was ever trapped or separate. Our ego consciousness only made it seem that way.
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