Death is a normal, natural part of human life. We’re all naturally born with a fear and an aversion to dying. This instinct keeps us alive, but death is also a necessary and positive part of human life.
Many writers and philosophers have elaborated on what a nightmare life would be if we lived forever. Life would lose all meaning. The short, fleeting, scarce nature of life makes it precious. We want to grasp at life and get as much out of it as we can because we know we won’t be able to enjoy it for long.
Entire religions have been built around the promise of something that happens after we die. These promises can take many forms, but they all amount to the same thing. They promise that death isn’t the end—that we don’t just vanish without a trace as if we had never been born.
As I’ve written before, none of us every vanishes without a trace as if we had never been born. Each of us causes a ripple effect in the lives of those around us. Whether that ripple effect is good or bad is up to us. This ripple spreads to the whole of humanity. None of us lives in a vacuum even if we want to.
Each of us leaves a legacy behind whether we want to or not—whether it’s a good legacy or a bad legacy. If we spent our lives hurting people and causing as much damage to their lives as possible, then we will be remembered that way long after we’re gone. The ripple effect we created in life will live on in the lives of those we hurt. They’ll keep talking about us and that legacy will be written in history for all time.
Criminals have been motivated by this alone. Some criminals have committed heinous acts of barbaric cruelty and evil just to get themselves onto the news. They can’t think of any other way to stand out from the crowd and make themselves memorable.
The same thing happens if we do good and positively affect the lives of people around us. This is the true meaning of the reward that awaits each of us after we die. This reward is entirely dependent on how we behaved and what we did during our lives. It has nothing to do with which religion we belonged to, what faith we professed, or any other superficial factor like that.
Then there are the people who never do anything. They spend their whole lives blending in and making themselves invisible. They never do anything good enough or bad enough to have any effect on anyone. These are the people who vanish without a trace and are never remembered after they die. No one wants that.
This people will become invisible and vanish regardless of what religion they belong to. Professing one faith or another will not by itself make you immortal. Billions of people have professed the same religious faith as you and vanished under the waves of history. No one remembers these people because they never do anything that people can remember.
The non-dualistic worldview takes a different approach to the concept of death. The dichotomy of life and death is one of the dualities that the non-dualistic worldview considers illusory.
Yes, we all live in a world of life and death just as we all live in a world of night and day, hunger and satisfaction, good and evil, and all the other dualities and multiplicities of life.
At its fundamental core, the universe is still one single infinite divine unity—so what exactly are life and death? How does death even work if the division between life and death is just an illusion?
As I explained in Proof For the Existence of God, our fundamental nature is self-awareness. We are aware of our own existence. This reality that we’re living in with all its shades of multiplicity is the vehicle by which we experience our own awareness. We wouldn’t be able to experience anything if not for this world. We wouldn’t feel emotions. We wouldn’t have any kind of relationships. We wouldn’t experience anything. This infinite being would just be there by itself.
This infinite being needs something to interact with, but it’s the only thing there is. That’s what this world does. It provides a mechanism by which this infinite being can experience and be aware. That’s our function in the universe.
By definition, the infinite nature of this divine being means that we don’t exist as separate individuals—not the way we think we do.
This is the concept of the ego that Eastern philosophy and spiritual practice seeks to annihilate. The goal of most Eastern philosophies and religions is to attain an ego-less state where we recognize that we don’t exist as individuals. The goal is to strip away the obsession with our individuality and come to dwell entirely in this universal awareness which is our true nature.
We can come to a brand-new understanding of death when we look at the world and ourselves in this way. We don’t actually die because this universal, infinite awareness cannot die. That’s what the word “infinite” means. It means it never ends. It doesn’t stop and start at the surface of our skin. The awareness doesn’t cease to be when our physical bodies die.
The awareness lives on in other people—but even the concept of “other” people is a trick of the mind. There are no other people just as there is no individual reading these words right now.
There is no I or me or you or him or her. There is only the one infinite being that is constantly aware of itself regardless of what body or personality it happens to be riding along with at the moment.
This awareness manifests itself in every living thing that is capable of awareness. We don’t actually know for certain if animals are self-aware. We don’t know if planets, nebulae, and galaxies are self-aware. There could be countless alien races out there in space that are self-aware and we just haven’t found out about them yet.
This self-awareness must exist because we exist and we’re self-aware. The universe exists for the sole purpose of someone somewhere experiencing this self-awareness. If the sun went supernova right now and wiped out the Earth, some other species somewhere would continue to interact with itself so its members could continue to experience this self-awareness.
It isn’t possible that the universe could exist without this. Self-awareness is eternal. It cannot be created or destroyed. It will always exist. Who is being self-aware doesn’t matter. The self-aware being doesn’t have to be human, but there does have to be at least one self-aware being. There has to be a lot of them so the infinite unity can experience the full range of emotions, relationships, extremes, and possibilities.
Many Eastern philosophies and religions focus heavily on escaping the cycle of reincarnation. These belief systems promise that “enlightenment” will stop the process of the self reincarnating in another human form and experiencing this life all over again in another body and another sequence of experiences.
In one sense, this is true because the enlightened person will become pure awareness. The person recognizes their true nature as a manifestation of this infinite being. The person loses their fear of death, but they also lose their fear of rebirth.
The enlightened individual might not be reborn, but someone will be. We can hold a debate about when in the course of human development a child becomes self-aware. It might happen in the womb. It might happen at birth. It might happen at eighteen months of age or two years of age or three or four or five depending on when the person develops their first memories.
The truth is that the universal aware being will always reincarnate. It isn’t capable of doing anything else. The awareness will enter the fetus or baby or young child at some point. Even severely intellectually disabled people will develop self-awareness. These people can be so unable to function in daily life that they can’t bathe, dress, or possibly even feed themselves, but they’re still self-aware. They still participate in this continuum of experience that is a part of the universal whole.
Their awareness interacts with everyone around them and heavily impacts those in whom these people come into contact. Parents and siblings of intellectually disabled children have their lives irrevocably altered by the experience. These people produce an undeniable ripple effect that persists long after the person dies.
Anyone seeking to escape the cycle of reincarnation should ask themselves what exactly it is that they don’t want to be reborn as. The individual you are now will not be reborn. Your individuality will die at the end of your life regardless of how enlightened you become. You personally can attain a level of awareness that you lose your sense of self and dwell entirely in the universal consciousness of infinite oneness.
That part of you will die at the end of your life.
The awareness itself won’t die. It will be reborn in another body and start living another life. The non-dual nature of reality makes it impossible that this awareness could ever not reincarnate. It has to. One individual attaining this level of awareness can’t stop the process.
None of us can escape death. We all know that. What we fear is the loss of our individuality. It doesn’t help to know that our awareness will continue on after we die because the individual I or me or you or him or her will be gone.
We have other ways to make ourselves immortal. We all know who Gandhi was. We know who he was because of the tremendous good that he did in his life. We all know who Mother Theresa was because of the immense positive impact she had on the world.
We can all think of people who made such an incredibly positive impact on the world that they’ll be remembered and talked about for centuries after their deaths.
We can all think of people who made an incredibly negative impact on the world. They’ll be remembered and talked about for centuries after their deaths, too.
This kind of immortality is available to all of us. Disappearing after death and being forgotten to time is also a choice that’s available to us. We have to make a deliberate effort to live that kind of life—a life completely devoid of all effort and achievement.
This is the only way to preserve our individuality. It’s the one avenue available to us to sooth our egos and make sure everyone remembers who we are and considers us important.
The bliss of Heaven and the torment of Hell are also entirely our own choices. We live Heaven or Hell every day—either in bliss or torment—depending on how we go through the world and the choices we make.
We can live in a Hell of our own making or a Heaven of our own making. We can create Heaven for the people around us—a Heaven that continues long after our deaths—or we can create Hell for the people around us.
Our true nature survives after death and continues the function for which we were created. Our awareness will continue to struggle to understand itself, to ask the questions of why we’re here and what is our purpose in life, and we’ll continue to strive toward the fullness of our own awareness and universal, infinite unity.
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