What survives death? CE Vol 8

On non-duality and personal survival

Does personal life continue after death?

The usual non-dual answer to personal survival after death is blunt: no, not really.

The little self dissolves. The story of “me” falls away. The wave sinks back into the sea. What remains is awareness without content, pure knowing, the unbounded ground. There is an afterlife, perhaps, but not the sort most people mean. No continuing person or consistent viewpoint.

No “Andrew” or “you” or “my mother.” Just awareness.

I understand that answer. The personal can be seen to die many times through-out the day, as it disappears in awareness and only the unbounded field of knowing remains.

But I think that answer might be a bit quick.

It confuses two different things: the ego and the person.

The ego is the anxious little manager in the head that we think we are.

It’s the story that we tell ourselves, and the face that we think is presented to the world.

It is the one trying to protect its image, explain itself, hold things together, and keep a firm grip of control on its life.

That ego-self isn’t solid - it comes and goes.

That ego-self dies all the time.

It dies when absorbed in the flow of life, or in something beautiful. It dies in deep prayer or meditation.

It also dies in the mundane, fleeting, moment between thoughts.

And yet you do not disappear.

Still, something remains.

Photo by Jacob Mejicanos on Unsplash

There is a simple knowing underneath all of it. Not knowing about some object. Just knowing. The bare fact that experience is here.

You can notice it directly. Close your eyes. Let your surrounding and thought fall away, along with any thought-story about what you are.

There is something still here.

The non-dual traditions point here for a reason. Awareness without content. Knowing itself. The ground before the world divides into “me” and “everything else out there.”

Because this awareness has no age, no location, no personal history, no obvious dependence on the little drama of thought, there is no reason to assume it is produced by the body.

Rather the body appears in it, along with thought and the world.

So if I am forced to start somewhere when considering the question of life after death, this is a good place to start: awareness continues.

The question is what follows from that.

Many non-dual teachers suggest that anything experience of self with a story and a history dissolves. The finite life disappears into the unbounded.

But that view assumes that the unbounded is the default state - when the personal disappears then it returns to unbounded, impersonal awareness forever.

But right now this impersonal ground is not sitting there as a blank absolute. It is pouring itself out as a personal life.

It sees through these eyes and remembers a childhood. It loves these discrete people and lives in a world with a certain life.

The infinite is not embarrassed by the finite. It is not waiting for the person to go away so it can get back to being pure.

The person is one of the ways the infinite becomes visible.

Christian language helps here, and informs my perspective. The Father is the silent ground, the hidden depth, the source beyond image. The Son, the Logos, is the Word spoken out from that depth: the invisible made visible, the silence taking form without ceasing to be one with its source.

I find this pattern in my own being.

There is the silent ground of knowing.

And there is the life spoken out of it.

There is no enemy there and no awkward join between two substances. One movement: depth expressing itself as form, form returning to depth, depth pouring out again.

It all shares the same aware space.

So when death comes, yes, I expect the constricted little “me” to dissolve. I expect many of the egoic defensive structures to fall away. But do I think the personal field of awareness, the soul, the particular viewpoint that God is living as this life, simply vanishes?

No - I don’t.

I can imagine it changing and widening beyond recognition. I can imagine a lot of what I call “me” simply burning off. But extinction of personal life doesn’t feel inevitable or even something to be sought after.

Such a desire expresses a subliminal dualism - that unbounded, impersonal knowing is somehow more perfect and holy than the embodied life we live. True non-dualism in my view is a harmony between both aspects of knowing - form and emptiness, emptiness and form.

The evidence we have also points in the same direction. The strongest clues come from two places: people who come back from the edge of death, and children who remember lives they should not have known…