Life Everlasting
Photo by Niilo Isotalo
The following is an excerpt from What Happens After You Die? by Sara Yoheved Rigler, originally published March 31, 2022, on aish.com.
What happens to you after you die?
Well, it depends on what you consider to be "you."
If you consider yourself to be your body—height, weight, BMI, hair, figure, and features—then when you die, it's all over, kaput. You're finished, without even the chance to regret that you didn't have more fun while you were here.
However, if you consider yourself, your essential identity, to be your soul—a non-physical, spiritual entity that inhabits the body—then death is the beginning of a trip that outdoes any drug trip one can imagine.
As Steve Jobs' sister Mona Simpson described him on his deathbed, "He looked like someone whose luggage was already strapped onto the vehicle, who was already on the beginning of his journey…."
As he looked over the shoulders of his family members, Steve Jobs' last words to something he apparently saw past them were: "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow."
So, what exactly is this soul that outlives the body? According to Judaism, it is a projection of the One Ultimate Reality that some choose to call God. Just as the sunbeam is an emanation of the sun, you are an emanation of that One Ultimate Reality. Although the sunbeam is not the sun—either in size or heat—it is nothing other than the sun; so you are not God, but you are nothing other than God….¹ — Sara Yoheved Rigler
The real does not die, the unreal never lived.
Imagine a big building, collapsing,
some rooms are in ruins, some intact.
But can you speak of the space as ruined or intact?
…Once you know that death happens to the body
and not to you, you just watch
your body falling off, like a discarded garment.
The real you is timeless and beyond birth and death.
The body will survive as long as it is needed…²
— Nisargdatta Maharaj
Waves of the Ocean
[1] Sara Yoheved Rigler, What Happens After You Die? • https://aish.com/what-happens-after-you-die/ • 05.12.2022
]2] Sri Nisargdatta Maharaj, I AM THAT: Talks With Sri Nisargdatta Maharaj, (Kavi Arya, 1973), front cover
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