Death Response

​The Collective Evolution group on Facebook engaged in a lively discussion of the 'Why do people believe in God?' quote (Death blog post,) which questions the continuation of a person's consciousness after death. Some of the comments follow:

Kendall Katze 
Once you experience the presence of God..there is no longer a need for atheist rhetoric about fear of death. Seek a true master, and prepare to evolve. Or stay in the dark. You are free to choose. ( my experience came in Siddha Yoga. Gurumayi gave me Shaktipat..the awakening of the Kundalini that leads to God realization. The Dalí Lama is also a realized being currently on the planet)

Kendall Katze 
Faith is something that grows from direct experience. It is not an external, mental concept. Each person evolves in their own way..and if they have the good fortune to percieve Grace..it is the most valuable treasure the human soul can experience... A gift..like Life.

Omar Guzman 
According to this quote "....consciousness ends with our deaths...." how do you explain spirits or ghosts then? How do you explain the lingering spirits in a "haunted" building? It has been proved by science that such things do exist.

Gary R. Smith 
Yes, I wrote this story into the Whole Human blog post as part of my response to the quote: 

When I was fifteen, dad and I flew by bush pilot into the remote wilderness of Idaho where he had done Bighorn Sheep studies. He flew out, and I stayed with my dog friend Kiche. She and I hiked the river trails for a summer. Thirty-three years later, shortly after Kati and I met, we hiked together into the River of No Return wilderness.

Late one afternoon, on the way back to our camp by the river, I heard the inner voice say, 'be alert.' That night, Kati experienced terror in her tent. We worked through it together, and the next morning asked our inner guides what it was about. We both felt that earthbound souls had contacted us and wanted to be released. Following intuition, we 'released' them. 

Of course, it could be called a subjective imaginary experience. Two days later we hiked another 30 miles into the wilderness, to what had been the Taylor Ranch in my summer as a boy. Now it is a research center of the University of Idaho. Normally they do not accept guests, but they had a copy of my dad's book on Bighorn Sheep on their shelf, and invited us to stay.

In conversation it came out that where we set up our base camp had been the site of a battle between the native people who had lived in the river canyons for centuries, and the U.S. military.

The couple was well-informed about the history of the region and the peaceful tribe who called themselves ‘tukudika’ or 'People of the Sun'. These Shoshoni-speakers had long remained mysterious and were referred to as Idaho’s shadowy people, the Sheep Eater Indians. During the period of the gold rush in America, the U.S. military waged a campaign against the ‘tukudika’ and destroyed their way of life. 

When I was a boy in 1968, little was known about the People of the Sun. Had their earthbound souls really called upon us? Had we actually released them?

Omar Guzman 
What does your consciousness tell you?

Gary R. Smith 
Omar Guzman, that the experience was an objective reality, as much as there can be one. There is a distinction between 'my' local, differentiated consciousness and pure, non-local, undifferentiated consciousness. The latter, the unmoved mover, the great observer, is the only actuality. It observes all that is. How it distinguishes my experience with earthbound souls from imagination, hallucination, dreams or what we call waking life, I do not know. But to me, the experience was as real as it gets.

Kendall Katze 
I recently had an experience with a rather aggressive ghost in Rome.
People have been experiencing her for years. Quite a fascinating story.

Allen Fitzner 
My wife's uncle died, during minutes following his death I heard a message in my mind that stated, "It is not what I thought it was going to be." He had studied the world religions and was sure his beliefs were correct.

Michael J Ross 
"God" is the consciousness of everything on a multidimensional level. God is not something apart from us. God is part of everything and everything is a part of God. All aspects of physical reality are different ways in which God learns to know his/her self.

Kendall Katze 
Which came first? People believing in God..or the Gods believing in people?

Gary R. Smith 
My speculation is that the idea of humankind on earth was formed in undifferentiated consciousness as a blueprint which would develop in time and space. Pure Consciousness, known by many names, does not 'believe.' Since the One Being does not perceive through our physical five senses, I wonder how it does perceive us? Are we to it ever changing frequency patterns?

Michael J Ross 
There are many dimensional levels of reality. Each level up has consciousness become more more complex and further removed from our physical reality. What we perceive as "angels", the afterlife and such are one level up entities. This is the level of consciousness that interacts the most with physical reality. 

What we would call "God on high" is so far removed from or reality there is little awareness of us. Compare it to how much WE are "aware" of the experiences of the atoms and subatomic particles in our bodies.

Gary R Smith
​Michael, what you are saying is right in a sense:

What we would call "God on high" is so far removed from or reality there is little awareness of us. Compare it to how much WE are "aware" of the experiences of the atoms and subatomic particles in our bodies.

Well, let me ask you this - can you imagine humans evolving to a stage where we ARE aware of the experiences of the atoms and subatomic particles in our bodies? Can you imagine humans evolving to be able to meet 'God on high' halfway - to have direct experience with the primal source of all that is? I can, and feel the 'Quantum Human' is not so far away, as I wrote in the blog post by the same name.

Kendall Katze 
We are all part of the Play of Consciousness

Tim Seamans 
Thanks for the share Gary. :) I am one who is completely intellectually honest with myself and now not fearful of my ultimate expiration from this existence. :) My personal opinion is that we just might be "wired" on a global level to believe in a God or Gods because he/she/it/them created us with that capability. It also could be part of the evolutionary development of humans and our cultures, but to me personally that seems more fanciful. Perhaps "it" all ends with death, but if not, as I believe, this could just be one of many great adventures and trials. Meditation and entheogens as well as a near death experience can provide great insight and knowledge that can't possibly be gained through others' shared experiences. "Time" ,that may just be a mental construct, will tell what is "real" for us all. ;) After our final breath is breathed here, it will quickly become readily apparent if there is more or less. ;) lol

Tim Seamans 
No matter what the case, our "current" lives really do go by in the blink of an eye. We could, in my opinion, waste a HUUUGE and valuable portion of it philosophizing about what comes after it. We were meant to be (in my personal opinion again) mostly experiential beings and use all of our senses to really see, feel and love the beauty of everything around us to the best of our ability. I think that if we miss the opportunity to do that each day we are given then we are missing the real point of it all, ;)

Marcel B 
Love the "Unfortunately" part. :D. The consciousness of the author comes through clearly with the first word. Consciousness never ends with death. It just is. It can't end or be destroyed like any energy. Once it exists it can't not exist. And abolishing beliefs is not only related to being intellectually honest. In fact, Intellectualism and logic is the basis of all consciousness that leads to fear. So it really depends on the belief itself. While I appreciate the perspective, it is one of fragmentation and separation, rather than unity and integration.

Kari Dequine Harden 
I really loved this: “I choose rather to be motivated by my love for the beauty of life's design, which can be experienced to the fullest only by being present in the moment.”

As an atheist and a humanist, the fear of eternal damnation as a life guide has never appealed me. Nor has the reward of eternal bliss. 

I think it a bit arrogant for humans to claim to know what happens after death, as scary as the uncertainty can be.

Gary R. Smith 
It can be scary to think of, unless one comes to love the mystery of life. Then, trusting deeply in the design, whether or not there is a designer, one can blissfully surrender to the unknown.

Wikipedia says of Ayya Khema, author of 'Being Nobody, Going Nowhere: Meditations on the Buddhist Path,'

"According to Ayya Khema's own admission, she had been suffering from breast cancer since 1983. In 1993 after it started giving her trouble she underwent a mastectomy operation in Germany. During a five-week recovery period in the hospital she almost died, but her condition was expeditiously stabilized by the medics. In an interview she expressed a positive opinion of that experience.

“There were two days in the hospital, when I had that feeling, that the energy was leaving, through the feet actually. There was a collapse of the whole system... Losing one's life energy is actually a very pleasant state, because there's less self-assertion, I mean you haven't got the energy to assert yourself. So things are more acceptable, everything is acceptable, it's fine the way it is... One could say that action of dying, if there's no resistance, is extremely pleasant... That seemed to be less and less life energy within the body, and I just was relaxing into that. I was perfectly willing to let it happen, but then these doctors came round... My blood pressure just went way down, waaay down, I mean like almost not happening, and that's when you lose all your energy... It was a very interesting experience and now I can see it's extremely pleasant. It's just letting go and disappearing, and it's very nice."

Andrew Barker 
"To fear death is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils."
Plato

Pete Kelly 
Maybe what you believe in is what happens to you ....as a dharmist ( Buddha Dhamma ) I expect no after life , a propulsion of some concomitant perhaps , and the result of that pending my last thoughts and accumulative cause and effect , but how much of that will be "me" I don't know .. Buddha teaches the art of dying and that your fina moment may come anytime so live life accordingly.. It's beautiful and liberating.. I love Buddhas teachings

Gary R. Smith
Pete, you wrote '... what you believe in, is what happens to you' -- and that is what I have felt for some time. There is no proof, of course. But is it fair to say there is at least a 50/50 chance that there is an afterlife? Then, what makes sense to me is to live *not* according to 'that your final moment may come anytime,' as you wrote, but according to 'how I live (such as how aware and neutral an observer I become, how unselfishly giving I am,) will affect what I experience in the afterlife.' It is self-serving of course, but also serving the plan and play of undifferentiated consciousness, aka Source, One Being, etc.

Michael J Ross 
Some believe that we are in a transitional stage post 2012. The human psyche is shifting from a materialistic focused existence to a more spiritually focused one. Part of this process includes the a change in awareness from our present 4D to a 5D one. While this would be a significant paradigm shift, I do not feel that this would enable us to comprehend what God really is.

In the book Flatland, a 3D sphere visits a 2D reality. All the inhabitants there can see of the sphere is the 2D circle that is where the two intersect. The sphere has a difficult time explaining the reality that exists "above" and "below" the plane of their existence. Presently, while WE do have much evidence of things that are of a non-physical nature, many of us have a hard time accepting/understanding a reality that exists "above" and "below" our 3D plane.

So, I still remain doubtful that we can gain the ability to have direct experience with a God who is many levels removed from where we are now. One step at a time, with no shortcuts to the finish line you might say.

Gary R. Smith
What prevents us from having the direct experience, other than our minds? How many scientific discoveries were 'not possible' until pioneers shifted their perspectives to explore beyond what was unthinkable to the masses? I respect your perspective and continue my exploration, one step at a time. Though it is not a competition, the tortoise may reach the finish line before the doubtful hare.

Carolyn Anderson 
There could be life after death or not. To claim you know there is not, is equally ignorant as someone claiming they know there is.

Kendall Katze 
To reiterate what has already been extremely well stated, it's all about how we live..the personal ego may dissolve at death, but the Self goes back to the infinite Self..just as a river merges back into the sea.. If we are evolved enough, it becomes a Divine celebration.

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