 I imagine that if spirituality sought sales advice from Madison Avenue, it would be, 'Scare people about dying.'
This tactic has been working for thousands of years. Because all we can see of death is that once you die you aren't here anymore, this creates deep fear. There has never been a time when people weren't desperate to know what lies 'on the other side of life.'
But what if there is no 'other side'?
Perhaps death is only relative, not a total change. After all, each of us is dying every day, and the moment known as death is really just an extension of this process. St. Paul spoke of dying unto death, by which he meant having such strong faith in the afterlife and the salvation promised by Christ that death lost its power to generate fear. Yet dying unto death is also a natural process that has been going on in cells for billions of years. Life is intimately entwined with death, as you can observe every time a skin cell is sloughed off. This process of exfoliation is the same as a tree dropping its leaves (the Latin word for 'leaf' is folio), and biologists tend to think of death as a means for life to regenerate.
This view brings little comfort, however, when you face being the leaf falling off the tree to make room for next spring's growth. Rather than discussing death in impersonal terms, I'd like to focus on your death, the supposed end of the you who is alive at this moment and wants to remain so. The personal prospect of death is the issue no one likes to confront, yet if I can show you what the reality of your death is, all this aversion and fear can be conquered, after which you can pay more attention to both life and death.
Only by facing death can you develop real passion for being alive
Passion isn't frantic; it isn't driven by fear. Yet right now, at an unconscious level, most people feel they are snatching life from the jaws of death, frantic with the knowledge that their time on earth is so brief. When you see yourself as part of eternity, however, this fearful snatching of crumbs from the table vanishes, and in its place you receive the abundance of life that we hear so much talk about but that so few people seem to possess.
Here's a simple question: When you are a grandparent, you will no longer be a baby, a teenager, or a young adult. So when it comes time to go to heaven, which of these people is going to show up? Most people look totally baffled when they're asked this question. It's not a frivolous one. The person you are today isn't the same person you were when you were ten years old. Certainly your body has changed completely from that of the ten-year-old. None of the molecules in your cells is the same, and neither is your mind. You certainly don't think like a child.
In essence, the ten-year-old you once were is dead. From a ten-year-old's perspective, the two-year-old you once were is also dead. The reason that life seems continuous is that you have memories and desires that tie you to the past, but these too are ever shifting. Just as your body comes and goes, so does the mind with its fleeting thoughts and emotions. When you are aware of being yourself without being attached to any particular age, you've found the mysterious observer within who doesn't come and go.
Only witnessing awareness qualifies as that observer – it remains the same while everything else changes. The witness or observer of experience is the self to whom all experiences are happening. It would be futile to hold on to who you are at this moment in terms of body and mind. (People are baffled by which self they are going to take to heaven because either they imagine an ideal self going there or a self they have attached to their imaginations. At some level we all know that there was never an age that felt ideal, however.) Life needs to be fresh. It needs to renew itself. If you could beat death and remain just who you are – or who you were at the time of life you consider the best – you'd succeed only in mummifying yourself.
You are dying at every moment so that you can keep creating yourself.
The field
We have already established that you are not in the world; the world is in you. This, the main tenet of the one reality, also means that you are not in your body; your body is in you. You are not in your mind; your mind is in you. There is no place in the brain where a person can be found. Your brain consumes not one molecule of glucose to maintain your sense of self, despite millions of synaptic bursts that sustain all the things that self is doing in the world.
So when we say that the soul leaves a person's body at the moment of death, it would be more correct to say that the body leaves the soul. The body is already coming and going; now it leaves without coming back. The soul can't leave because it has nowhere to go. This radical proposition needs a bit of discussion because, if you aren't going anywhere when you die, you must be there already. This is one of those paradoxes from quantum physics whose understanding depends upon knowing where things come from in the first place.
Sometimes I ask people a simple question such as, 'What did you eat for dinner last night?' When they say 'chicken salad' or 'steak,' I then ask, 'Where was that memory before I asked you?' As we've already seen, there's no picture of a chicken salad or a steak imprinted in your brain – nor any taste or smell of food. When you bring a memory to mind, you are actualising an event. Synaptic firings produce the memory, replete with visuals, taste and smell if you want them. Before you actualise it, a memory is not local, meaning it has no location; it is part of a field of potential, or energy, or intelligence. That is, you have the potential for memory, which is infinitely vaster than a single memory but nowhere in sight. This field extends invisibly in all directions; the hidden dimensions we've been discussing can all be explained as different fields embedded in one infinite field, which is being itself.
You are the field.
We all make a mistake when we identify with the events that come and go in the field. These are isolated moments – single blips as the field momentarily gets actualised. The underlying reality is pure potential, which is also called the soul. I know how abstract this sounds, and so did the ancient sages of India. Looking at creation, which is filled with objects of the senses, they came up with a special term, Akasha, to fit the soul. The word Akasha literally means 'space', but the larger concept is of soul space, the field of awareness. When you die, you don't go anywhere because you are already in the dimension of Akasha, which is everywhere. (In quantum physics, the tiniest subatomic particle is everywhere in space-time before it gets localised as a particle. Its non-local existence is just as real but invisible.)
Imagine a house with four walls and a roof. If the house burns down, the walls and roof collapse. But the space inside isn't affected. You can hire an architect to design a new house, and after you build it, the space inside still hasn't been affected. By building a house you are only dividing unbounded space into inside and outside. This division is an illusion. The ancient sages said that your body is like that house. It's built at birth and burns down when you die, yet the Akasha, or soul space, remains unchanged; it remains unbounded.
According to these ancient sages, the cause of all suffering, according to the first klesha, is not knowing who you are. If you are the unbounded field, then death is not at all what we've feared.
The purpose of death is to imagine yourself into a new form with a new location in space and time.
In other words, you imagine yourself into this particular lifetime, and after death you will dip back into the unknown to imagine your next form. I don't consider this a mystical conclusion (in part because I've had discussions with physicists who support this possibility, given all they know about the non-locality of energy and particles), but it's not my intention to convert you to a belief in reincarnation. We're just following one reality to its hidden source. Right now you are bringing up new thoughts by actualizing your potential; it seems only reasonable that the same process produced who you are now.
I own a TV set with a remote control, and when I push a button I can change from CNN to MTV to PBS. Until I press the remote, those programmes don't exist on the screen; it's as if they don't exist at all. Yet I know that each programme, complete and intact, is in the air as electromagnetic vibrations waiting to be selected. In the same way, you exist in Akasha before your body and mind pick up the signal and express it in the three-dimensional world. Your soul is like the multiple channels available on TV; your karma (or actions) picks the programme. Without believing in either one, you can still appreciate the astonishing transition from a potential hanging around in space – as TV programmes do – to a full-blown event in the three-dimensional world.
Like changing channels
What, then, will it be like when you die? It might be like changing channels. Imagination will continue to do what it has always been doing – popping new images up on the screen. Some traditions believe that there's a complex process of reliving karma when you die so that a person can learn what this lifetime was about and prepare to make a new soul bargain for the next lifetime. The moment of death is described as having your life flash before you, not at lightning speed as experienced by people when they're drowning, but slowly and with full understanding of every choice one has made since birth.
If you are conditioned to think in terms of heaven and hell, going to one or the other will be your experience. (Remember that the Christian conception of these places isn't the same as the Islamic version or the thousands of Lokas in Tibetan Buddhism, which makes room for a multitude of worlds after death.) The creative machinery of consciousness will produce the experience of that other place, while to someone who has led the same life under no such belief system, these images might appear to be a blissful dream or a reliving of collective fantasies (like a fairy tale), or the un-spooling of themes from childhood.
What is real?
But if you go to another world after death, that world will be in you as much as this one is. Does that mean heaven and hell are not real? Look out of the window at a tree. It has no reality except as a specific space-time event being actualised out of the infinite potential of the field. Therefore, it's only fair to say that heaven and hell are just as real as that tree – and just as unreal.
The absolute break between life and death is an illusion.
What bothers people about losing the body is that it seems like a terrible break or interruption. This interruption is imagined as going into the void; it is total personal extinction. Yet that perspective, which arouses huge fears, is limited to the ego. The ego craves continuity; it wants today to feel like an extension of yesterday. Without that thread to cling to, the journey day to day would feel disconnected, or so the ego fears. But how traumatized are you by having a new image come to mind, or a new desire? You dip into the field of infinite possibilities for any new thought, returning with a specific image out of the trillions that could possibly exist. At that moment, you aren't the person you were a second ago. So, you are clinging to an illusion of continuity. Give it up this moment and you will fulfil St Paul's dictum to die unto death. You will realize that you have been discontinuous all along, constantly changing, constantly dipping into the ocean of possibilities to bring forth anything new.
From The Book of Secrets, copyright 2004 by Deepak Chopra, published in the UK by Rider Books.
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