18. What is Death?

And now we come to the great question, a question on a subject so thoroughly contemplated and pondered throughout the ages in all cultures and within all walks of life – the subject of death.  What is death?  So many of us contemplate whether or not there is “life after death,” which is really just an expression of our desire for the continuation of our egos after our physical organism ceases to breathe.  It is perfectly natural for us to want this continuation.  After all, we cannot contemplate being without our human relationships, our pets, indeed the whole of existence as we know it.  Most of us are naturally afraid of death since it is the unknown, the end of everything we know, which is our ultimate fear, but it is ironically in the unknown where true Life is to be found since what is “known” is dead because it is the beaten path, of time, only “real” in a temporal sense, but not Reality.  

If what lies outside of the known and of time is true Reality, “Nirvana,” “Heaven,” or whatever we want to call it, than death guarantees we will not be disappointed since death is the end of all which is known since the brain and its collection of memories will cease to function.  If the self-concept, the ego, arises from thoughts in the brain as stated previously, then its disintegration will assure the end of my ego, which is True Freedom.  But it is a freedom I will not be able to “experience” since “I,” being the “experiencer” will no longer exist.  But does the “experiencer” ever exist in moments of true oneness? No. Death is the ending of time, the awareness of Oneness with the end of the dualistic ego.  Since suffering only exists within time and the dualistic self, and death brings an end to all ego, self, time, duality, and therefore suffering, how bad can it be?  At the moment of orgasm, for example, there is no self nor other.  There is only that.  It is interesting the French expression for orgasm is “le petite mort,” or “the little death.”  Has death ever been more delicious than in that moment of selfless bliss?  I smile humorously at this realization, now thinking of the scripture passage from 1 Corinthians 15:55.

“Where O death, is your sting?”

I now seek to look at death actually, not romantically or with illusion, but in truth.  When I took the class in college called “Belief and Unbelief” in which I looked at various religions, including atheism and agnosticism, I was confronted with the very real, and for me at the time, convincing prospect of becoming nothing more than worm food after death, as in death, there would only be an annihilation of “me.”  This realization brought me to my knees in despair, as I wanted more than anything to somehow believe “I” would survive death, when I knew deep down inside I would not.  This is the scariest proposition for virtually all of us since the totality of life as we know it appears to be experienced through the ego, the self, which is why death is the ultimate insult to us all, as death guarantees the end of our egos, since the ego is the self-concept put together by thoughts arising in the brain, which will rot after death, thus destroying the “thought” of “me,” the “I,” as separate from “other.”

Aside from what is put together through thought arising in the brain as the “self,” which is a collection of memories, experiences, prejudices and beliefs, is there any such thing as a permanent “self-essence,” like a “soul?” Within several religions there is a belief in an essence of self, or a “soul,” while in Buddhism there is a denial of the existence of the soul or “self-essence.”   Since belief in the soul validates the ego, I am skeptical of this notion since anything which validates separateness, self from other is mistaken, since the only True Reality is One, as stated previously in this book.  Since the only True Reality is One, then essence is of One, not many, and therefore no “individual essence” can exist.  The notion of individual “souls,” individual “essences” contradicts the fact and truth of Oneness.  Still, we cannot deny the multiplicity, the sheer variety within this oneness.  Consciousness is the essence of all things seen and unseen, as also stated previously in this book.  It is this alone which lives on forevermore, not our limited egos.  True immortality is knowing our True identity as consciousness itself – the uncreated Oneness of All.  That Oneness of All is timeless, and since it is timeless it is never born and does not die.  It never began and will never end.  There was never a time it has not been, and nor will there be a time when it will cease to be, for the Oneness of All is always.

That which is multiple is not Truth itself. However, the multiple can be said to be many mirrors in which truth is reflected, as found from John 14:2.

“In my Father’s house are many dwelling places…” 

Every single being is just that – a “dwelling place” if you will for “God” if you will.  But these things are not so much “dwelling places” as they are mirrors for truth.  God’s “house” in this John 14:2 passage is existence, and every being is His “dwelling place.” But these “dwelling places” which live are many, temporary, and ever-changing.  The Truth is always One, never changing, never beginning and never ending.  For oneness is the essence of All.  As quoted from the words of Jesus found in one of the books that didn’t make it into the Bible, Dialogue of the Savior 23:2.

“Whatever is from the truth does not die; whatever is from woman dies.”

Since the truth of consciousness is never self and its limitations, then the self, the “soul” is an illusion, not Truth, not Reality, and must therefore perish, as all which is not Truth dies.  There is only consciousness, which is always, and existence is the “machine” through which consciousness, “God” if you will, experiences itself.

Some believe consciousness is nothing more than matter, the brain, but that is not correct for reasons stated previously. Consciousness is One, All, universal, not material, never beginning and never ending. There is therefore only one consciousness, which means there can therefore be no permanent “personal consciousness,” or a “soul,” as also stated previously.  Consciousness needs manifested existence to see itself, as without the mirror of manifested existence, there is no self-consciousness – that is, the One can have no consciousness of itself without the mirror of the ever-changing manifested existence. Consciousness – that which is All is One, forever, and always.  That which is manifested of that consciousness is many, ever-changing and not forever, as every being is dying all of the time, every day. When you look at a person, at what point does a person cease to be a person? Is it when the brain is gone? When the heart is gone? When the eyes no longer exist? The point is, there is no one unique essential component to any given individual besides the same essence of All things – consciousness.  What makes an individual unique is an assembly of several components which temporarily come together to produce a unique “individual.” But when those components are dismantled through death, the “individual” no longer exists, and is shown for what it is – an illusion produced within time as just another one of an infinite number of manifestations of the One.  The individual ego is therefore an illusion, like a dream.  A dream is a real experience, but not Reality, just as the individual ego is “real” in an illusory, dreamlike way, but not Reality, not Truth.  Life as we know it, is indeed but a dream – nothing more, nothing less.  Our lives, our egos, and the whole of manifested existence is both “God’s dream” and “God’s nightmare.” And just as we have no conscious “control” of our dreams and nightmares, so too “God” has no control over the “dreams” and “nightmares” of manifested existence.  God, consciousness, All, simply IS.

Words are so limited because words are designed to express separateness, distinction, separation. But all distinctions and separations are ultimately not Truth since they are all ultimately illusions.   How then, can one ever speak of Truth when all words exist to express separation and distinction, which by definition is not Truth?  It boggles the mind.  Since the “I” is at the very center of all distinction and separation, then the first question is, what am I?  The physical organism called “me” is a machine through which consciousness sees itself.  Indeed, “God” sees Himself through all of existence, as existence is God’s “mirror” if you will. God, or consciousness, is All.  Being All, one cannot say God is “only apart from me” or “only within me,” because to be All is to be All… everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing.  Buddhists call it the Uncreated.  They do not call it “God” per say, like the “creator God,” as a being separate from His creation, and I use the word in a general sense, along with the words “Love” and “Truth,” all of which I often define as metaphors for the same thing.  Again, because Truth is not differentiated and fragmented, one cannot really speak of it.  Being “born,” being “created” is an illusion because it is the appearance of “beginning.” But since there can be no beginning and no end to All of which all things are a part, then death and birth do not truly exist in the big picture of Allness and Oneness.

Still, we cannot deny the birth and death of organisms, as well as the finite nature of physical existence.  We cannot deny our personal sense of “self,” as all of these things are very real to us.  In Truth, all of these things are illusory since all of these things appear to only “exist” within time.  Since time itself is an illusion, then all of these notions of distinction are also illusory.  I have defined time in the past as the intelligence of measurement – the measurement of change, and I have come to modify that definition once again.  Indeed, animals too have an innate sense of fear, death, and the need to survive.  And while they have a sense of the limit of their physical lives, which is in a sense, a notion of “time” as we do, and a sense of “I” as separate from “other,” they cannot measure change as we can – that is, they cannot create clocks, calendars, and other devices for measuring change.  Nor do they have within them a sense of questioning, of asking, “What does it all mean?” The limitations of their intelligence prevent this, and so their lives are in many ways, “simpler” than ours.  They have no money, no “moral codes,” no intelligence of measurement as human beings do.  So, there is a distinction between animals and human beings.  But to deny we too are animals, whose only difference from them is a higher degree of intelligence is arrogant and illusory.  Even some Biblical scripture reflects this fact in Ecclesiastes 3:18-20.

“As for men, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other.  All have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal… All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.” 

We are still at the core instinctual animals, while at the same time constantly being “governed” by so-called “morality” and external notions and pressures, both explicit and implicit of what we “should” and “should not” do. That is the difference – we live under egotistical self-made “moral laws,” not solely on pure instinct as an animal does, hence our conflict.  Existence, the material world, is the ever-changing stage upon which the distinct and the indistinct, the many and the One play out and converge at the “crossroads” of Life.  This is “Jesus Christ,” “Gautama Buddha”- the human (divided), and the One (undivided).  By this definition, “Jesus Christ” and “Gautama Buddha” are metaphors for All, as will be further explored in an upcoming chapter, and is reflected in one of the more truthful passages in the Gospel of John, from John 1:3.

“Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

It is no accident the symbol of Christianity is the cross, and while not a perfect symbol of truth as the yin and yang symbol is in my opinion, it is still a profound symbol of the dual aspects of All – seen and unseen.  The vertical may be viewed as the “unseen,” One, “spiritual,” and the horizontal may be viewed as the “seen,” the multiple, material, earthly.  It is a shame almost no Christians examine the true richness of their religions’ symbolism, instead opting for ancient dogma which contradicts so much of what we know to be truthful, loving, and in line with reality, and sadly makes little if any sense.

So, since we cannot deny the existence of our self-concept, as it is very real to us, and we have all kinds of “ghost stories,” “near death experiences,” reincarnation tales and theories, stories of Jesus’ resurrection and the like, what can we make of all this?  I have no doubt many people have genuinely extraordinary, life-changing experiences. I have even had some such experiences myself. Yet while we cannot dismiss another’s experience, just as we cannot deny another’s dreams they say they had while sleeping, we can question what these phenomena actually are. The believer tends to jump to the “extraordinary claim” conclusion on pure emotion and opinion alone, without taking a step back to honestly observe what actually took place. Just because an experience is “real” to someone and even life-changing in a positive way does not automatically make it “evidence” for God, the supernatural, life after death, or any other extraordinary claim.  As Carl Sagan famously said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  One’s opinion of “what” they experienced without genuine third-party evidence for what their experience actually is does not constitute evidence. It only constitutes an opinion of “what” they experienced in the absence of objective third-party evidence to back up a given claim.  Hitchens’ razor well illustrates why such extraordinary claims in the absence of genuine evidence can be so easily dismissed.

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

There are many possible explanations for these experiences.  They may well be a kind of “vision” of “others” and experiences our human psyche subconsciously and involuntarily “creates,” just like dreams, to assure us of the Truth that we, at the core, are the Oneness of All – that All is never born and never dies, since the essence of All is One.  It has been said “visions” are simply “waking dreams” – that is, they are not “objective reality” like something within the material world whose existence can be confirmed by others, but something subconsciously created within the mind of the individual, to tell us deep truths about ourselves.  Since that cannot be “expressed” to us without symbolism, as truth can never be expressed except through metaphor and symbols, then our psyches create images, “visions,” “apparitions” of people, notions of “ourselves surviving,” much like dream imagery, symbolism and parables – whatever we as individuals need to digest this much-needed truth.  There is a fascinating scripture passage illustrating a hint of this, from the Gospel of Mary, 7:2-6.

“I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to him, ‘Lord, I saw you today in a vision.’  He said to me, ‘Congratulations to you for not wavering at seeing me.  For where the mind is, there is the treasure.’  I said to him, ‘Lord, how does a person who sees a vision see it-with the soul or with the spirit?’ The Savior answered, ‘The visionary does not see with the soul or with the spirit, but with the mind which exists between these two.”

Still, the egotistical mind often sees and interprets these visions as a guarantee of personal, ego survival instead of seeing it as a metaphoric representation of All continuing on forevermore, not our personal, egotistical selves.

Another possibility is that of another realm of existence altogether, a kind of “spiritual, unseen twin-world” behind the manifested physical universe – a realm where our “heavenly twin” picks up where we left off upon our earthly, physical death. This makes little sense to me because since All is One, there cannot be more than one All.  All is All.  It therefore cannot be divided into “separate and independent” realms or whatever other make-believe abstractions we come up with. I am also skeptical of any “explanation,” whether it is reincarnation, resurrection, eternal souls or whatever have you, which attempts to somehow “explain everything,” and put a neat, tidy “bow” on the package of All, when All is clearly beyond the limits of such convenient explanations which once again, merely serve to validate our egos.  These afterlife theories are all extremely suspect since they serve at least two very strong, primal ego needs – the need to answer the question of so-called “justice” – that is, the need to know that everyone will “get what they deserve”  in the end, “good” or “bad,” which is really nothing more than the desire for revenge and personal vindication; and to extend the life of the ego, which instinctively knows it is not permanent. What we call “Heaven” is a place where those who please our ego are “sent” after death, and “Hell” is a place where those who do not please our ego are “sent” after death.  This clearly illustrates “Heaven” and “Hell” as understood in traditional terms, is obviously nothing more than a fabrication of the ego to serve its interests, and has nothing whatsoever to do with truth. No matter what the explanation for near-death experiences, reincarnation theories, out of body experiences, visions of apparitions and the like, the bottom line is – all of these things are not truly “death experiences,” but life experiences since they are remembered from the physical brain, which upon true death, will cease to function.  If you can remember it, then it is a life experience, not a death experience.  There can be no true “death experience” since there is no “thing,” to experience or remember it – no brain, no “immortal soul,” no essence to the self besides that which is the essence of All –  consciousness.  So-called “afterlife” experiences as reported by many are more likely a part of our survival mechanism to calm the dying who are still living, in much the same way endorphins make one feel better while enduring great physical pain.

There are those who claim that death robs life of all its meaning, and that death without an afterlife makes what we do in this life meaningless.  I do not agree with nor understand this way of thinking.  For it is precisely because our lives as we know them are not permanent which gives life all of its meaning and precious significance.  If anything, the notion of one’s ego living on indefinitely can make us undervalue this life, and distort the way in which we live it.  To live with love, with purpose, with every single moment filled with significance, urgency, and importance because this is the only life we have is the true key to “eternal life.”  For eternal life is not about time.  It is about living every moment now – in the present moment, where time does not exist.

All this being said, death will forever be the baffling mystery of life.  And since one cannot live without another dying, just as one must die so another may live, at least one fundamental truth is clear – life and death are One, not two separate things, but two aspects of the same One.  As Jesus is quoted in Thomas 22:4, 7, and as quoted in the Introduction of this book.

“When you make the two into one…then you will enter the Father’s domain.” 

There are no doubt aspects of existence we can know nothing about, but that does not change the fact that what we can know for sure is that in all things, no matter what, the only Reality is Oneness, and ultimately All is consciousness.  The manifested forms of consciousness, such as our egos and bodies are ever-changing, passing, and illusory. This is the reason why we don’t have to “know everything” to understand the fact all ego-based religious ideas are false.  We are almost certainly lacking myriad details about the universe and existence – an excuse many believers often give as a “defense” for the possibility of God and the supernatural, but the Truth of Oneness and timelessness, and the fact that All is consciousness, is all we need to know to see all egotistic religious and spiritual ideas for the illusions and fictions they are.  It’s as simple as that, because no matter what details we discover about the universe and existence, it will never change the fact and the Truth of the Oneness and timelessness of All, which invalidates all egotistic religious and spiritual concepts such as a “separate God” from existence, the “supernatural,” the “soul,” etc., since these very concepts depend on the reality of “time,” separation, hierarchy, etc. to be true.  Since time, separation, hierarchy and the like are not Reality, then these religious and spiritual concepts which depend on these things to be true are therefore also not Reality.

The very notion of “what happens after death” is irrelevant since now is eternity.  This very moment has always been and will forever be.  This very moment is the Truth.  This moment is “eternity,” as the present moment, right now has always been and always will be.  Time lies to us and tells us “eternity” is “forever,” when it is actually nothing more than now – Right Now, the present moment. Truth does not live within the limits of time, nor in the demand for answers.  It lives in the timeless, the now, the question, the open.  That is why we must always question, to be forever in that Oneness of All; that state in which there is nothing to hold on to, as Truth has no object, and as such, illustrates the fact that life, like death, is about letting go if we are to find any peace in the reality of our circumstance.

Asking what happens after death is the same as asking who Jesus “is.”  The question is not so much the issue as is the insistent demand for an “answer.”  This demand is again, the demand for assurance and security for our egos.  While understandable, it is still an illusion.  When true awareness of the timeless, choiceless, Oneness of All dawns, and identity with the self ends in letting go of the self, then these questions matter little.  Time, and the belief that life is a “line” with a beginning, middle, and end is of the ego.  Time is the lie which convinces us things “begin” and “end” when in truth, there is never truly a “beginning” or an “end” to All and its oneness. This truth is beautifully reflected in the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Thomas 18:2.

“Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end?  You see, then end where be where the beginning is.  Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death.”