Beyond Belief

Is There Life After Death?
by Nick van der Leek

Believe it or not, you’ve been dead already. Well, lifeless, anyway. Think of the time before you were born. Where were you? Were you a ghost in the darkness? Were you seeing life as a snail? Where were you? If we follow your family tree, we might be able to provide all the branches and twigs, but can you really suggest that you were a matrix of existence, waiting in the wings, or rather, hanging in the branches? It’s uncertain. But before you were alive, you were dead. The question emerges then, after life, what happens?

I know there are plenty of people who can quote bible or other texts. These texts describe heaven as a city, and hell as a lake of fire. Well, if they can be described, how could we get there right now? Do we really believe in these symbolic representations? There are a few variations, but essentially we’re talking about being in paradise, or nothing.

Instead of looking to secondary sources, I wonder if we might use our own experience. I mean, as soon as you read something, it’s not firsthand knowledge; it’s secondhand, or thirdhand, or in the case of the bible, a few thousandhand. The most powerful reality is firsthand experience. An original thought, an original word, our lives, firsthand, is the most powerful reality, and it is exactly that: real. It doesn’t have to be described, just known. Just lived.

So, using your being, go back as far as you can, to the very first memory, the very first inklings of existence. For all practical purposes, the period before consciousness is, in my case, and I’m guessing in yours too, a lot like sleep. A lot like, unconsciousness.

And in our daily lives, we practice life and death as part of our existence. We’re active and living in the day, and then, as night falls, our bodies and minds shutdown. We lie thoughtless and motionless for hours, and then, when we’ve rested, we’re reanimated. Of course, we have some memories of yesterday, so there is an appearance of not quite eternal life, but day to day existence, which sometimes seems eternal.

Of course, it isn’t. Have you ever seen anything dead? I’ve buried one or two pets, and it is hard to imagine that a parrot ghost is twittering away in heaven. I once saw a cyclist lying on a road, a black stream of blood flowing down from his body. The body lies there, broken, and unconscious, and it was plain to see, it would never wake up again. In that very moment, where, I wondered, was this person, while I pedaled past. It was hard to really believe then, that people are different from parrots and lower life, like mosquitoes and flies, that we bludgeon and squish on a daily basis. But there is asubtle sense, when someone dies, that their spirit has joined a greater consciousness.

Nobody knows what really happens after we die. People who have died and come back have reported seeing lights and tunnels. It’s compelling, but it could never really have been a decent death if they managed to make it back. I suppose, it is our best hope that something happens when we die. It’s very difficult to know that what we believe about death is not guided by wishing and longing, and a deep yearning for comfort in the face of extinction.

I believe it is entirely possible that when we die, that’s it. This is all our lives are, and all we’ll ever be. To an extent we live on, in our children, in the memories we made and sowed upon the Earth, but our identities, our names, our clothes, all these die when we die. For how can our energies maintain their identities when they flow back into the currents of the universe? How can we, with nothing at all, no phones, no cars, no money, no name, no address, no home, and still be who we are?

At the end of the movie 21 Grams, Sean Penn provides the following voiceover for a dying character:

How many lives do we live?
How many times do we die?
They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death.
Everyone.
How much fits into 21 grams?
How much is lost?
When do we lose 21 grams?
How much goes with them?
How much is gained?
How much…is gained?
21 grams: the weight of a stack of 5 nickels.
The weight of hummingbird.
A chocolate bar.
How much does 21 grams weigh?

Author-sage Eckhart Tolle takes readers to a place beyond words in his brilliant book, The Power of Now. In a section titled Conscious Death, he suggests that, if we have experienced enough of what he calls the ‘Unmanifested’ in our lives, if our spiritual identities are not tied to sensory experiences and things, if we have more love than fear in our being, if the light inside is strong, then the end of life ushers you into a new dimension where there is deep peace, and your inner light is added to it.
Tolle describes death as the end of our illusions, and painful, only when we cling, out of a sense of fear, to our bodies, and to things. But we are not our bodies, and this part begins to make sense. We have all experienced that sense of an ancient spirit within us, that does not grow old, that is within our bodies, but does not change as our bodies change.

People have compared life to the flickering flame of a candle, a flickering, fiery burst of heat and warmth. Visible light though is only a small proportion, a narrow band of light – with fairly mediocre energy – in the spectrum. On the far end, is infrared light. This light is quite close to visible light, and has very little energy. On the other end, is ultraviolet, and as the name suggests, the energy here is rich and dynamic. Ultra violet is also invisible to our faculties. Much of the energies of the universe and outer space is hidden in this realm. It is in this dimension that I believe we disappear when we die. When our form loses its power, we fly out. Nothing that is of value, Tolle writes, nothing that is real, is ever lost. The desert of the real is that place I mentioned at the end of the third paragraph. It is the firsthand experience of life. Being awake. Being connected and conscious. If we live this way, we will not lose consciousness when we die. We get to go to a place of higher consciousness, and Earth will seem like kindergarten by comparison. Being awake is how we get to live forever.