What's after death?

[Heisenberg]

This is an excellent question, and one that is difficult to answer. And the answer depends on one's personal paradigm.

I believe that our existence is related to two substances (I am searching in vain for a better word, I am not a native speaker, sorry for inconvenience) - infinite potentiality and universal consciousness. Some people think that Infinite Potentiality (which, as I think after reading some of P. J. Carroll's books, some call Chaos) is an attribute of Universal Consciousness. But I think that infinite, unlimited potentiality allows also for the existence of the Universe without any consciousness.

However, almost every thinking being can notice that there is at least one consciousness - he or she himself. So if there is at least one consciousness, the concept of Universal Consciousness makes sense - even if it is only a mathematical construction - as a set union or a direct sum of individual consciousnesses. Even if Chaos were the primary substance, we obviously exist in a variant of the Universe equipped with Universal Consciousness - whatever it is. And this should be the subject of investigation (whatever activity we imagine under it) - what properties does Universal Consciousness have. Here, considerations inspired by topology come in handy - is this consciousness continuous, or on the contrary, composed of isolated components?

Now, many concepts and approaches from physics, mathematics and computer science are suitable as inspiration. I believe that all existing things (regardless of how we answer the question of what actually exists) are instances of this Universal Consciousness, limited by the causal conditions of their emergence. Similarly, as differential equations (e.g. Schrodinger's wave equation) can have their initial and boundary conditions. Chaos has no limiting conditions, Universal Consciousness has one that it is a consciousness. We have many more, for example, we are humans, women or men, we were born into a certain environment and time, we are a product of the evolution of life itself, ... and therefore we have an extremely long causal chain or rather many mutually quantum-entangled causal chains of events behind us.

When we die, some causal conditions of our existence are released, but some causes of our existence continue to exist. So a human being will probably be born who is our continuation in some sense. Who is the realization of those continuing causes and conditions also of our origin. That is reincarnation. Or we will gradually manage to cancel the entire causal chain (I don't even know if we should) and we will return to the original substances mentioned at the beginning. To the Universal Consciousness, or the Infinite Potentiality of Chaos.

 

[deci belle]

Um, though decidedly late to this game …wouldn't it have been more appropriate to ask, "what's after life?"

The only reason I bring it up is that death (in terms of reality) does not exist. There is no philosophical speculation involved when I say that people do not have egos, and ditto for souls. As for gods and demons, well, not a one has a leg up on anything created— past, present or future. When the curtain is ripped away, their actual (effective) occupations can come to light in the most endearing way.

The matter of birth and death, taken as a whole, is certainly muuuuch more appropriate to the ongoing premise (of the OP). To wit, one birth and one death equal one change. Just this is true whether it be in terms of microcosm or macrocosm. It doesn't matter should the cycle under scrutiny be collectively or otherwise inanimate, warm or cold-blooded, or those termed inorganic being. The same postulate applies to relationships, situations, ciivilzations, galaxies or creation itself. Why? Because the matter of life and death only pertains to the Creative, carried out impersonally as the result of its (the Creative's) primal organization. One tradition refers to such relative patterning as karmic.

Then again, should one exist and function in terms of the unattributable, what about that? That is, karmic (causal) existence is attributable to incremental and kinetic process; and it's not just past times, actions and resultant psychological momenta influencing the living. That's because creation is playing out its program from an ultimate perspective of all-at-once in perpetuity (making sorcery possible); always so in terms of its primordial organization. To be sure, one's very existence and inertial pattern-awareness is purely karmic. I say inertial pattern awareness, to indicate that susceptibility to the unattributability of enlightening knowledge (having no momenta), is a liberating influence from endless inertial karmic cycles. I say inertial, because even though patterning and projections move, or rather change, Change is endlessly locked within its own patterning of habit energy. Karmic bondage is inertial; its influence relative to its own perpetual flux-state NEVER to resolve, clarify and know reality, in transcendent repose, authentically autonomous of the perpetually subsuming vortex-in-eternity. The everything inclusive of absence-of-everything defines eternity. As such, the relativity of eternity only accounts for the endlessly subsuming elements of the Creative.

For those souls who have experienced the knowledge of nonoriginated absence of absence, there is no thing construing the attributable. Awareness itself is only the quality of awake, uncreate. There is no thing or no absence of no thing to be construed as awake, much less awakened. Awake is the nature of nonorigination; tacitly and ineffably source, unattributably-not-a thing.

In this context, what's to die but a morbid fascination for itself?