One of the most asked spiritual questions on the planet is what happens when we die. Behind it sits a quieter question we don’t always say aloud: does anything of us continue, or does it all simply end. What I can offer is not certainty but what I have seen in facilitating this transition with others and in practicing death myself.
Nobody Knows, and That Is the Honest Starting Point
If death is our final initiation of awakening, what are we initiated to? Do we dwell in the cosmos, with God, in ever expanding love. What are the sensations there. What happens to our soul there.
Nobody really knows the answer to these questions. Anyone who tells us they do is selling us the shape of their own hope. I would rather be honest about the edge of what can be known.
So what I share here is closer to pointing at the sun than describing it. I can point. I cannot tell you what the sun actually is.
The Vision of Ramana Maharishi
In one of the deepest realms of death I have ever encountered, a vision came to me. I was giving a massage, a modality I am trained in, to Ramana Maharishi, the guru who founded the ashram in India where I had studied. He died in 1950, so I never met him in the flesh. But in the vision, I was massaging him.
While I was holding his head in my hands, I felt him die. He simply stopped breathing. At first I thought I had killed the spiritual teacher, and I panicked.
After a time I understood what he was teaching me. Only the body died. I could still feel his spirit alive as ever, radiant. He had simply taken off a shell and traveled into the mystery. The body died but the spirit did not.
The Shell and the Identity
That vision showed me something specific about what dies. Death is the death of the body, which is our shell. And it is the death of the mind, which is our identity in this lifetime.
These are the two things we are most afraid to lose, because we mistake them for ourselves. We think we are the body. We think we are the running commentary of the mind that names us and keeps our story.
But when the breath stopped in that vision, the spirit did not stop with it. What remained was not the identity and not the shell. It was the thing underneath both, the thing that was there before either arrived.
The Place Before Life or Death
Earlier in that same encounter, I held onto my spirit at a moment when everything in me wanted to let go. What ensued was the deepest, richest realm of death I had ever known, despite innumerable prior glances.
In that place, if someone had shaken me and asked, are you alive or dead right now, the question would not have made sense. I was in the place before life or death, the place where our spirit always resides. It was equally terrifying and magnificent.
Slowly the fear subsided, and what remained was a profound realm of rest in what I can only call the world of the spirits. This is where I would look for heaven and hell, if we are going to use those words at all. Not as destinations we are sentenced to, but as the terror and the magnificence we meet in the same place, depending on whether we are still gripping the shell or willing to set it down.
Practicing Death While We Are Alive
We do not have to wait for the body to stop to visit this. There are many ways to practice spiritual death. A medicine journey is one. Breathwork is another.
There is also deep self-inquiry, such as Ramana Maharishi’s own technique of asking, who am I. We make a regular practice of it by becoming still within ourselves. With experience, we can ask it anywhere and anytime, before sleep, in the shower, standing in line at the grocery store.
The first answers are never who we really are. It is only when we ask the question enough times that we run out of answers and are met with silence. That is the moment the mind has met its match. All of these practices carry the same potential, to push awareness past the brink of the mind’s domain and into the domain of death while we are still breathing.
What Continuation Actually Means
People who return from the edge often report the same thing, an initiation through a portal of light and an intense sense of homecoming. I take that homecoming seriously, because it matches what I have felt. It does not feel like arriving somewhere new. It feels like returning to what was always there.
So the continuation is not the survival of our personality in some other room of the house. The identity is exactly the part that ends. What continues is the spirit that the identity was covering over the whole time.
Death is not an end. It is part of the everlasting cycle of ending and beginning of our soul. If we can welcome that as an invitation rather than only a threat, it gives us a new power to truly embrace this life while we are in it.
The Quiet Truth
When I felt Ramana Maharishi stop breathing in my hands, the fear I felt was the fear of having killed something. What he showed me instead was that nothing had been killed. Only the shell was set down, and the spirit walked on into the mystery, radiant as ever.
That is the whole of what I can honestly say. The body dies. The mind that named us dies. The spirit that was there before both of them does not.
In Everything We Trust, Sylvia Solit
