Every great spiritual teacher has taught there’s no such thing as death. Since the last post touched on the subject, and essentially gave away the answer, let’s spend a few keystrokes further exploring how we can survive death.
You survive death every day
Let’s recall our earliest memories together.
When we were a toddler, our favorite stuffed animal was a deer. We had our favorite outfits and some pre-school friends. We’re pretty sure we learned to write left-handed because we could never remember which hand to hold the crayon and always reflected across the table the choice of the kid opposite us (honest memory).
What happened to that little person? How many of our personality traits have survived since those early years? Our distaste for dry chicken definitely survived – it never felt ready to swallow so our parents made us sit at the table chewing after everyone finished and left. Our knowledge of the English language certainly has grown, but that’s something else to point to. We can’t remember our address there, but we do remember the phone number.
For the most part, that little person has been dead for a long time, slowly replaced by who we are now with many intermediate versions along the way. Were they murdered? Kind of but in a non-dramatic legal kind of way. What could have been done to prevent it? Would anyone want to? Wouldn’t it mean stunting our growth going forward?
What wouldn’t you want to survive death?
Debt! Debt and other commitments. Obviously, you don’t want anything bad to survive death, right? We bake in the wedding vow loophole because neither the bride nor the groom knows who or how or when or where they’ll reincarnate.
“Till death do us part.”
married folks
Your profession probably outlives its usefulness, so would you want that to survive death? What does your inner being need to know about cooking if it has no stomach? Does source energy need to know accounting rules? Mechanical engineering principles? Computer programming? The mathematicians might be the only ones bringing along anything useful, careerwise, but who really knows?
Are health professionals useful when there is no physiology? You wouldn’t want your diseases or whatever other physical ailments to survive, and rightly so those remain behind with the dead body. The flip side of that is weightlifters leave behind all their muscles. In fact, all tattoos, piercings, etc stay behind. Pretty much anything invested in the body gets buried. However, everyone can agree that a healthy fit body is quite helpful in living a happy life experience. Nobody’s climbing Mt. Everest with anything butt.
Just as some of the 5-year-old’s personality traits won’t survive the next 15 years, many of your traits won’t survive physical death.
Everything gets remembered, so that’s something
Abraham and Seth, at least, tell us that all thoughts continue to exist after you stop thinking them. So it is true that those all survive physical death as well. It’s entirely accurate to say there is no such thing as death, but then what? There’s a difference between being recorded in the history books and being alive today. If a vantage point isn’t being occupied anymore, it just kind of sits there somewhat lifeless but always existing and recallable.
“Every thought that has ever been thought continues to exist.”
Abraham
Our bodies are our foothold into 4-dimensional space-time. Just as a deep sea diving suit is necessary for interacting meaningfully with the bottom of the ocean, an automobile body is necessary to interact meaningfully with the freeway. Just as space suites are necessary for interacting with the moon’s surface, human bodies are used for interacting with this physical world. When we leave our bodies behind, our access to this virtual, err, physical world becomes severely restricted.
Imagine your deep sea diving suite was single-use only. Would you keep it in your living room and try it on nightly? No, you’d take a picture and bury it out back.
Unstunted survival
So the question is… how do we survive as many aspects of ourselves as possible without stunting our inner being’s development?
The obvious answer is that we can’t possibly know that from here. Nor can your inner being know where it’ll end up in its “future.” Even God doesn’t know everything yet, so how could your inner being know anything beyond that?
The real way to survive death
The less obvious answer is to work your way, little by little, toward what your inner being has already become. If 99% of your personality characteristics are exactly in alignment with your inner being at the time of death, then it’s trivial to say that 99% of your characteristics survive because they already exist outside the body. If this is the goal, then meditation is the way to accomplish it, at least in the beginning. Over time, someone who meditates often and effectively will more and more become a mouthpiece for their inner being. They’ll lead a wonderful charmed life along the way and eventually unfold into their larger perspective.
This happens to a lesser extent whether or not we try. If 95% of your personality is aligned with your inner being, then 95% of it survives in the same way. Whether it’s now or at the moment of physical death, some aspects are being left behind. Some of those aspects are necessary for living a physical life, so they’re important to keep cultivating. Other aspects can be dropped sooner rather than later because they don’t serve any purpose. We all get to choose, and there’s no wrong answer.
So you’re tempted to ask how aligned the average person is to their inner being, and we’re tempted to shrug and say, who knows. It’s probably one of those things where it depends on how you measure. How would you measure? It turns out, we already have the perfect yardstick for this. Learn the actual rules, and pay attention to how you feel most of the time.
