Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
Life after Death
There is something that I have wanted to write
about for a while, but my state of mind (or plainly being busy with
other things) prevented me from doing so.
But I thought I'd give it a shot now.
This is about life and death or rather about life after death. Not
so much in the traditional way of going to heaven or hell, but from
a spiritual perspective for which you need to realise the basic
foundation that I am thinking from. Note that this is all pretty
experimental thinking, but that's what I am doing in this blog
anyway...
In a blog entry from a couple of years ago (http://www.vanderhaven.net/blog/20080129.html)
I have described my vision of the non-dual based on a few authors.
Particularly A.H. Almaas's definition of the Soul as a "Field of
Consciousness" stuck with me profoundly. I concluded that the core
of humans beings, the core of Life itself is simply that field of
consciousness. Noting more, nothing less. Everything around us pops
up in our consciousness, is part of it and generated by it. So are
we ourselves: we observe the field of consciousness that we are part
of ourselves, hence consciousness is the ultimate expression of
non-dual reality.
I realise that the preceding description may be pretty brief, so do
read that other blog entry or rather, do read Almaas's "The Inner
Journey Home" for a far more extensive view.
In any case, this model of consciousness as the ultimate non-dual
core of life can now be extended to life-after-death as well.
What I started to realise (from the moment my mother died in
December 2008) is that, given the continuity of consciousness across
life and death (consciousness really doesn't care about whether
something is alive or not, it just *is*), there is really no way to
distinguish between a person's being alive or dead apart from
his/her body stopping functioning. All we can observe when someone
dies is that "life" disappears from the body, which, having been
very close, has been clearly visible. For people who look beyond a
definition of life that is purely mechanical or based on biological
functioning, what happens at the point of biological death is
consciousness escaping the body. Given her situation, my mother was
literally *released* from her body at that point.
So where does that consciousness go to? Well, I'd say, nowhere. The
person's consciousness has always been part of the universal
consciousness, so upon being separated from the physical body, the
individual consciousness just remains part of the universal
consciousness. It is as if the big ocean is added to with a small
drop of water. Individuality is lost, the person has gone back to
the state that it originated from in the first place.
So what is life after death then? Why is there this belief in many
cultures that people who die will survive in one way or the other
after death? I belief that life after death for an individual is
only possible when the people that are left behind keep that
person's memory alive. Whenever I think of my mother, it is nowadays
mostly with a smile and not always with the pain of loss anymore. I
believe that by doing so, I keep her alive after death, for she pops
up in my consciousness, which is part of the universal consciousness
that my mother is also part of. Heaven must be when people remember
you after death with a loving smile. Hell must be when they only
remember you with hate.
I wish that most people who are alive right now manage to be
remembered with love by those that they leave behind.
