Eckhart Tolle – Consciousness is manifested by taking form (human being). The question of what happens when you die. Why do we need to awaken because we all die anyway. Is it still that you are awakened after death in the next lifetimes in eternity?
If you sit with someone who is dying and you are able to surrender to that moment, it is a very sacred thing a very sacred moment. It is the moment when the transition happens when this body being inhabited by this field of consciousness and then suddenly, the body is just a body. You can immediately see that this body was never that being.
What we see in another person is a body, which is insignificant and destined to die. The person or sense of self does not survive. But that which is deeper than the person in you, which is a spark of consciousness; first you are the physical form, deeper than the physical form, you are the consciousness that inhabits the form. Consciousness is inseparable from the one consciousness. There is no separate consciousness because consciousness does not have a plural, there are no consciousness’s. There is only one consciousness. You are this ray of consciousness. As a ray of consciousness it is not subject to births or deaths. It is timeless. This ray of consciousness as you appear as this particular person does not necessarily immediately dissolve into total anonymity. It remains as a particular ray. It is not a person anymore. What happens then is that it returns briefly to the source in the same way a bee returns to a bee hive and deposited what it has collected. Every human is one consciousness experiencing and learning by evolving in some way in the most insignificant life form is the one consciousness evolving and learning; what it has learned, not the details, but the essence. It contributes something to the whole. If your growth in consciousness becomes one part of the consciousness; the one consciousness, which is the consciousness of God. The transcendence of God is totally beyond time and does not evolve like evolution, because evolution would mean time. So the transcendent is in the transcendent dimension. So you can’t even conceive of it or talk of it. That is God. The emanation of God shines into our dimension and creates our dimension. God is an evolving being when God enters this dimension. There is no doubt that there is an evolutionary process happening in our universe. I can’t explain the ultimate purpose of it all. I don’t know it, but we can only have little glimpses of it. You can never comprehend it with your limited mind or talk about it. So who you are in your essence survives and ultimately there is no death.
When you die as an ego in this lifetime, it is called die before you die, then you already know as a living experience that you in your essence are beyond death. That is a beautiful thing when the ego goes; you die before you die and experience the glory of God. You can sense the essence that you are; so I am never going to die and we are not going to die either. OF course, the body dissolves. What is your level of consciousness throughout your life and as you die, that is an important factor in what happens after that.
There are people who say they do not want to reincarnate. I don’t want to come back. It’s so hard. Please don’t let me come back and then there are others who say, I don’t want to come back and disappear into nothingness. I really hope I am going to come back. Is reincarnation a fact? Yes but I would like to bring into reincarnation as what you can experience first hand now. The deeper meaning of reincarnation as I see it is you identify with form, then you reincarnate. Carnate comes from flesh and flesh means form. You reincarnate which means you identify with form and then you reincarnate into form. So Buddhist striving towards the end of reincarnation your consciousness is no longer compelled to reincarnate into another form to go through another lifetime of problems and suffering.
So the Buddhist are cycling towards the end of this consciousness by striving for whether you are conscious enough to choose whether you would like to reincarnate or not and say no, I have had enough, thank you. Reincarnation is identification of form. How do I go beyond reincarnation? You have to do that now and that means what we are doing here. Do not identify with thought forms in your head. That is the most basic reincarnation that happens continually to human beings is complete identification with every thought form that comes into their head and then they become it.
But if you have gone beyond the compulsion to reincarnate this lifetime, which means identify with every thought and notion that comes up; when you recognize the essence of who you are beyond form; that realization does not leave you. When you die is a freedom that comes, because the freedom you have already found in this lifetime is that you have died with the identification of this form (you no longer identify with the body and the thoughts in your head). It is very important on how you experience the after life is intimately connected with your state of consciousness in this lifetime.
So if you reincarnate, another form comes into being, and then you enter the womb, and start all over again. Buddhist say if you are doing good things in this lifetime, you will have a better incarnation next time, but you are still compelled to reincarnate. The important thing is for us, what we are talking about, to keep it practical and immediately verifiable in your own experience. When death comes, you will almost welcome it. The rest you will see. We can’t predict what we will experience afterwards or what you can do with it afterwards.
So the liberation from death is the realization of you as one who does not die. I wish you well on your journey to the infinite.