Where Do We Go From Here?
"What's fascinating is that there is a time, only after you and I die, that the cells inside our bodies start to gradually go toward their own process of death," Dr. Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at New York University Langone Medical Center, told Newsweek. "I'm not saying the brain still works, or any part of you still works once you've died. But the cells don't instantly switch from alive to dead. Actually, the cells are much more resilient to the heart stopping—to the person dying—than we used to understand."
THE Bible promises us that one day “death will be no more.” (Revelation 21:4) In Chapter 5, we learned that the ransom makes it possible for us to have everlasting life. But people still die. (Ecclesiastes 9:5) So one of the big questions we ask is,
What happens to us when we die?
Different teachings offer different answers to these questions. Science details how the body decomposes when we die. In general, the discussion around this topic falls into two main categories:
- People who have had near-death experiences and lived to describe what they saw and felt;
- Religious beliefs, philosophies and other theories offering concepts about the afterlife, reincarnation and consciousness.
- People who have survived clinical death have reported a range of feelings, such as a sleep-like nothingness, a peaceful floating sensation in the sky or in a tranquil scenery like a garden, a bright light or a tunnel heading toward a bright light, seeing and speaking with loved ones who had passed away, as well as out-of-body experiences where they could see what was happening in the room where they were pronounced clinically dead.
- They are all sensations of freedom from the corporeal body. In near-death experiences, the corporeal body is no longer a disturbance. People feel as if they belong to something other than what they identified as their body. The mind continues working and processing corporeal information, albeit differently.
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When we die, we lose awareness of everything we sensed in our corporeal lives. However, does it mean that we lose it all? No. It is being passed on in the form of personality attributes. This explains why, in every new generation, children are better adapted to life than adults. For example, children are instinctively proficient with the latest technologies and gadgets, while the older generation finds them more complicated.
In each successive generation, the will to receive undergoes an upgrade. If the will to receive fails to bring a person to spiritual development, then it shifts to a new stage, to another opportunity. All the problems, pains and knowledge gradually accumulate from one generation to the next, toward the need for spiritual development.
“We’re all conscious, thinking beings. Everything we do starts with consciousness. Yet we don’t know fundamentally where it comes from.”