If you think about it, this life, or the embodiment of this conscious experience, is far more unusual than death (or the absence of this embodied consciousness). And yet our tendency is to fear and mourn death and what’s beyond it in a way that’s not always useful to us.
We human beings have only been around for .01% of the time that there has been life on this planet (and far less in the scope of the universe). And of that each of our individual lives are just the blink of an eye. Or as Shakespeare said a “brief candle”. In these terms a single human lifetime is the equivalent of us walking in and out of a movie theater (of which, we tend anyway to only remember the good and inspiring parts).
There is so much information anecdotal and otherwise on the death experience from all over the world and different parts of history. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as an example, which is a poetic collection of alleged accounts of monks meditating through the dying experience. Or another favorite of mine, Many Lives Many Masters by Brian Weiss. Or another profound account, Dying to Be Me, by Anita Moorjani. If you are struggling with this topic in any way, I strongly recommend seeking out some of these great books. There is a voluminous number of accounts on the NDE or Near Death Experience from many different parts of the world, cultures, and times in history.
So, as we know energy is neither created nor destroyed. And energy and consciousness are what we are composed of. So there is no doubt then, whatsoever, that we (at least our physical selves) are re-incarnated to some degree. The word reincarnate coming from re (meaning to go back to or again) and carnate (meaning to make flesh or in my interpretation to take form). So everything that composes you and I physically will reincarnate and at some point compose something else, just as everything that composes you and I, all the atoms and molecules, once belonged to something or someone else. The question then remains, does the consciousness that results in the “me”, the “I”, the “you” continue on… and I believe the evidence most strongly suggests that it does.
Again, it’s out there if you choose to look, it’s in our literature, the great religions, and in countless personal accounts; seek and ye shall find. But either way, if we can agree that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, why would we think that consciousness can? That would be a very inefficient use of experience and the Universe doesn’t appear to be that inefficient. So just like a broken-down, abandoned house will eventually return to the Earth and become the home for something else, the inhabitants of the house will move on to find another home. And I have found when we accept believe and surrender to this possibility, to this probability, it transforms the way we see life and death and in particular the way we mourn.
I believe we should surrender to our fears around death and just make the best movie of our life that we can. You are the hero of this saga. Love it and live it fully, and don’t get too caught up in fear or uncertainty. None of us are here for long.