No, not life in a general sense.
What you are referring to is thought, which occurs in
Mind, and is NOT a product of brain chemistry. Your radio does not generate the music that it plays, but it is the reception instrument. Your brain does not generate its content, but it is a key part of the bodily reception-apparatus. If you are really interested, I can send you something about:
-- perceptual mind (and the processing of bodily inputs)
-- conceptual mind
both of which presume the being to be associated with a
particular physical body.
The "ego" continues after death, but not in association with that body. From the "vantage point" of that experience, the now terminated "life" appears much as a
dream state appeared to waking physical consciousness while still embodied.
The Urantia book describes the after death process rather
nicely.
urantia.com
If you have not read the whole book, the terms will be strange and it has a sort of science-fiction feel to it.
If you read the whole book you see things differently.
Adi Da has much to say about this subject, here are a couple of snippets:
<<<In between deaths, the usual man hardly sees anything, just as, when he dreams at night, he flashes through the dream and hardly remembers anything in the morning. Almost none of you remember your last life. Very few of you are certain that there was a last life. And all of you, whatever you may think in your reveries, are bereft of the certainty that you will survive this life. Even if you think that you may have lived before, you are not certain that you will survive the struggling, shaking, nervous mortality of this life. And you are fast approaching the moment of death. In the meantime, you know the things you can do to feel pleasure, to be distracted from the vision of mortality. But you do not enjoy certainty that you will survive. You are still thinking that this whole cosmos with millions of universes is a machine of death, and that you are dying, that everyone is dying, and that everyone who has ever lived has died and come to an end.
You do not enjoy the Vision that transcends the experiential cycle of life and death. You do not have that Vision, that Intuition of Eternal Life. You suffer all the impositions of experience in the ordinary fashion, possessed of mortality. But in your Nature and your love you are always already identical to that Vision of Eternal Life. Therefore, you may respond to me and to this Teaching, and you may become listeners. But you are not certain yet, until you hear me and become a living sacrifice through love rather than a fixed self struggling to survive. You may play with that certainty from day to day, but until you yield all conditions in love you are not certain that you are Immortal, that Bliss is Truth, that Happiness is the Condition of the universe, and that God, or the Real Process of the worlds, is at Play as us eternally in the paradox of endless changes.>>>
from: The Way That I Teach
and:
<<<The great message of the universe is not that you survive. It is that you are awakened into a process in which nothing ultimately survives. Everything ultimately changes. Everything that rises also falls. Everything in its process of appearance is inevitably locked into a cycle that is changing. The Law we perceive in this life, then, is the Law of the obligation to be a sacrifice, to yield one's independent position. To hold on to one's position is a torment, producing all kinds of illusions and false hopes. It also makes us self-possessed and loveless. Therefore, such clinging prevents our life, even while it continues, from becoming a creative form of participation and action.
As long as we are essentially possessed of ourselves and afraid, we look for consoling knowledge. We want to hear that we survive, we want to hear that there is something we can do in our rooms for twenty minutes morning and evening that will make us happy. Because we do not want to go through the sacrifice, the moral change. We do not want to fulfill the Law. We do not want to lose face. We are always seeking to know in order to protect ourselves. We want to save ourselves and continue. And we cannot.
When you become aware of the message of things, and the Law of things, and the Truth of things, then you become combined with this affair of existence in an entirely different way. You see that the ultimate communication of the universe is Eternal Life. It is an Eternal Process. However, it is Eternal Life paradoxically expressed through a procession of infinite changes in which we are fundamentally without knowledge. If you can come into this certainty of Ignorance, you will feel profound relief. You will be already mindless, bodiless, beginningless, endless in your feeling, in your certainty, in your awareness itself-while at the same time paradoxically present in the mechanics of things. And through that Intuition you will become animated by the Law that obliges us, the Law of Sacrifice. You will fulfill the Law through love rather than pursue knowledge, certainty, and survival.
It is only when we are not certain of Ignorance that we pursue survival in the conventional sense, that we fail to make this sacrifice through love. Spiritual life is moral transformation through love, through Intuition. It is not a matter of gaining knowledge. All knowledge passes. There is no way to have any fixed certainty about whether or how you survive your death. You will never acquire any ultimate certainty through the means of knowledge. Yes-it is true that we are not smothered, ended, murdered. The universe is not a machine of death. But you will not become certain of Eternal Life through any egoic pursuit of certainty, knowledge, or information. All the forms of information ultimately contradict one another. You will realize that certainty only through submission, through intelligent response to this Teaching, through your moral commitment, through love, through the energy of the whole body-being. You will enjoy a different Vision, not a vision realized through knowledge or egoic independence, but the Vision realized through the paradoxical disposition of the devotee: the Vision of Eternal Life, the Vision of God.>>
Also from The Way that I Teach.
I hope this in some way answers your question, or at least
moves the discussion along.
Namaste!
Jim |
