Life, Death, and Afterlife
Examined rationally, in earthly language
This post will contain no Tibetan, Sanskrit, or Pali words. It will contain no religious language except for a few words in common usage, like “pray.” And this is probably the last time I’ll make those promises.
We’ll be addressing huge issues such as life, death, and what happens next, but we’ll start small — with particles. I’m no physicist and welcome corrections in the comments section, but I understand that every particle in the universe arose from the Big Bang. Also, I understand that what we call a particle is actually, at least in theory, a disturbance, or an excited state, in a quantum field. The image below was generated by artificial intelligence (what else?) to depict fields and particles. The image is here just for visual fun. We’ll focus below on particles.
Thinking about all those particles that surround us, I asked my research assistant, GPT-4, three questions: 1) How many breaths does the average person take on an average day? 2) How many molecules get taken in with every in-breath and expelled with every out-breath? 3) How many atoms get taken in with every in-breath and expelled with every out-breath? Here (without the long scientific details) are the conclusions:
“So, the average person takes about 20,160 breaths per day.”
“So, each in-breath and out-breath involves about 1.34 × 1022 molecules of air.”
“In summary, each breath exchanges about 2.68 × 1022 atoms of air.”
And, of course, every atom is made of particles. So, in short, we are constantly exchanging trillions upon trillions of particles with the rest of the universe with every breath. And that doesn’t include all the particles we shed from and absorb into our bodies through other forms of contact. We are constantly exchanging particles with everything else in the universe, particles that arose out of the Big Bang and get continuously recycled. So it’s not poetic hyperbole for me to say:
Existence is a dance with the stardust of the universe.
What we can see and what we can’t see, what appears as solid and what appears as liquid or gas, are all made of fields and particles, which are believed to be disturbances in those fields. None of it is truly solid.
To take one more step, the Wikipedia entry on quantum entanglement begins this way:
Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon of a group of particles being generated, interacting, or sharing spatial proximity in such a way that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of the others, including when the particles are separated by a large distance.
Somehow, the state of one particle continues to relate to the state of the other simultaneously, regardless of the distance between them.
Given that we all exist in the same sea of particles and constantly trade them, might our actions and thoughts have a not-yet-understood impact on people and happenings near and far? Might praying, blessing, meditating, and just doing good have an impact beyond our immediate environment?
We know what happens when our life ends. Whether we are buried, cremated, or left out in the elements, eventually, every particle in our body gets recycled, or maybe reused is a better word. But what happens to our minds?
Here, I’m going to turn to a philosopher/scientist for his answer. I’m not saying that his answer is the right one, but it’s a model, one way to look at reality. This is from Why Materialism Is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup, who holds dual PHDs (philosophy and computer engineering):
My hypothesis is that mind is a broad and continuous medium unlimited in either space or time; a canvas where the entire play of existence unfolds, including space and time themselves. Your egoic mind — that limited awareness you identify yourself with — is, in this context, merely a segment of the broad, universal canvas of mind….
He sees Mind (I’ll give is a capital M) as creating an overall reality and, within that, forming individual, egoic minds (those are our minds, in lowercase) along with our brains and bodies, which have limited access to Mind. Then he adds:
…if reality is a kind of shared dream, then it is your body that is in the dream, not the dream in the body. Therefore, there is absolutely no reason to think that your consciousness will end when your body dissolves into an entropic soup; at least no more reason than you have to believe that you physically die when your avatar in a dream dies within the dream.
I know those quotes are hard to fully grasp out of context, but Kastrup builds his model entirely out of logic. He strongly believes that our minds continue to exist after our bodies and egos stop functioning. I’ll have more to say on that process, but I want to keep my posts short.
I believe that all subscribers may leave comments, and I welcome them, especially if I’ve gotten my science terribly wrong.
For now, I’ll leave you with a poem:
Forget about enlightenment.
Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be,
Not the saint you are striving to become,
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you. All of you is holy.
You are already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out,
Touch in,
Let go.
-- By John WelwoodAnd a song: