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22 January 2012

On Life After Death


I have thought about the concept of a spirit world. Do I believe there is a world of spirit where we/our souls go after we die? Do I believe we have a spiritual body in which our soul/spirit resides for eternity and which resembles our physical body as it is when we are young and healthy? -- No, I do not believe this! -- This does not mean that I believe it is impossible.

I think that when we die - when our physical body dies and decays - our spirit dissolves in the ocean of universal consciousness, which is what God is to me. However, there remains a residue of a memory within God - a memory of us as we were when we were alive. As I have written before, I believe time - the "flow" of time - is really an accumulation of memory or memories within God. It expands ad infinitum, which is probably also why our universe seems to expand. When we die, then, the memory of our life remains as part of this ever-growing universal memory. In this way we will continue to exist - but we cannot create new things or learn or grow because we will no longer be conscious as a separate entity. We will be fully assimilated or merged into the whole whence we came, a grain of salt dissolved in the ocean - still salt and still contributing our specific flavor to the ocean - at least to the tiny part of it that we have been able to influence during our lives - but no longer a separate entity and no longer able to expand our influence.

I may be wrong, of course, but it would be very hard if not impossible for me to return to a belief in a spiritual world like the one described by Swedenborg and others ...