Bookmak 2025

Afterlife

When I was a very small child, I didn’t understand the fact of being a separate person. I repeatedly asked my mother “Why am I me?” who never really understood what I was getting at, but being a separate individual confused me, and I thought there had to be a reason. Though I never found an answer or an absolute reason for being, I have thought about the idea that being separate felt unnatural to me which feeds my current sense that we’re not as separate as we think, and that our consciousness may return to its original unity. In an interview about his recent novel “Secret of Secrets”, Dan Brown stated firmly that though once he was sure there was nothing after physical death, after researching this book he was convinced that individual consciousness survives the death of the body. He said that interviewing people that had had Near Death Experiences, they “walked the talk”, that the experience changed their view of death completely and restructured their lives accordingly. Having watched many videos of people talking about their NDE’s since my husband died, I’ve been impressed with their sincerity and desire to help others understand that we are more than our physical body. Sri Yogananda stated that “Death…is an experience through which we are meant to learn that we cannot die.” One reason I’m receptive to that idea is because I always felt that what looked out from my physical being was the same consciousness as it was when I was a child, an unchanged witness within that lies beyond this particular personality and physical body. No scientist has been able to locate a place for consciousness there. Basically, science can’t prove there isn’t anything after bodily death any more than that there is. In his novel Brown reviews the many factors that suggest a non-local consciousness and studies that support the idea of the brain as more a receiver/transmitter, a vehicle for consciousness to use what we learn, a portal to a larger stream of consciousness. In an article published in Frontiers in Psychology the authors suggest that none of the primary materialist theories explain consciousness as well as a non-local approach. To think of consciousness as fundamental, pervading everything, makes room for experiences that don’t fit materialist models. A growing number of scientists are looking at the intersection with quantum non-locality in their exploration of consciousness. What creates subjective experience is one of the hurdles a materialist model can’t get past. Art as the expression of subjective life is testimony to the importance of the qualities of being and not just the facts. Though the brain is involved in what we experience as consciousness, it can’t explain everything. Consciousness as the foundation of reality is an area to be explored that would benefit from more art to help us see it.