After death I don't think our individual selves or souls are subsumed into a universal soup of consciousness, which I regard as being close to the extinction of the individual. Perhaps we survive as distinct entities, but acquire an infinite telepathic identification and empathy with all others, or at least of those souls similar to oneself. So a kind of joining together. This of course need not happen immediately after death, but may be the ultimate destination.
There is an interesting episode in one of Rosalind Heywood's books, where she experiences contact with a friend who had recently died. She tries to ask what it is like where he is, and gets an image of a white bird flying in a vast blue expanse. This would seem to support your view.
ReplyDeleteTime is the essential question here. Advances in physics seem to be continually pointing to the idea that spacetime itself is merely a projection (or "Spacetime is Doomed" as Nima Arkani-Hamed at Princeton would put it), and the notion of an entropic arrow of time along w/ it.
ReplyDeleteIf this is indeed the case then the natural question arises to whether the concern over whether we dissolve into the universal ocean upon our physical death is even an issue to begin with. If there's no entropic arrow of time with which there could be a potential point in the future that we could be subsumed, then our existence *now* is enough to postulate that our 'individual' existence is, in some sense, set in stone.