Death and Metamorphosis

Climate change, biodiversity loss, Arctic melt: These terrifying things are happening at a far faster rate than most scientists predicted even a few years ago. Meanwhile the pandemic is not under control; nobody knows where we go from here. Democracy is waning. The economy seems to be floating on air. Authoritarianism — intensified by technocratic systems of control — rises. Natural resources are in steep decline.

The world seems increasingly off the rails. When it comes to our individual and collective destinies — plans we had for our future — all bets are off. Can we imagine what this world will be like in five years, or ten, as present trends continue?

According to the old adage, “Crisis is opportunity.” But what exactly is our opportunity in this current crisis?

We have the opportunity to make an existential reckoning — to confront those difficult subjects that we generally push out of our minds. If we find the courage to confront the circumstances facing us, we can find inner liberation in the midst of danger. Rather than terrifying us, the deepening crisis of human civilization and the ecological meltdown become, in some ways, a gift: An opportunity for accelerated evolution.

One essential thing that we put off, in this post-industrial secular civilization, is reckoning with death — mortality, transience — and what perhaps lies beyond it. Renaissance alchemists instructed us to do the opposite, to Die before you die. Buddhist practices focus on preparing for death, which they see as the gateway to enlightenment or reincarnation.

While death is inevitable for everyone, our society makes it the ultimate taboo, the thing we never discuss or investigate. This is because of the reductive materialist ideology which dominated over the last two centuries. Almost every culture up until modern industrial civilization recognized some form of afterlife. But the modern worldview of scientific materialism tells us that consciousness is entirely based in the brain, that physical death equals oblivion.

For the last centuries, humanity has sought to construct a morality and a civilization based on this materialist belief system. And we have failed. We have ended up in an abyss of moral relativism, of nihilism, and an ecological doom spiral. Many believe that transhumanist technologies — cut off from nature, devoid of soul — are our only shot at attaining immortality.

But we now know that the ideology of scientific materialism is wrong. A century of physics experiments revealed what Eastern mysticism and aboriginal shamanism have said for millennia: Consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental reality. As physicist James Jeans put it: “The universe looks more and more like a great thought rather than a great machine.” We are, it would seem, the emanations of an infinite, indivisible consciousness that takes myriad transitory forms and expressions. We are that consciousness, exploring its creative possibilities in these separate vehicles.

At the same time, through centuries of careful research into the outermost edges of the human experience, dedicated researchers have found powerful evidence that human consciousness — parts of our individuality, our essence — survives physical death and continues onward. The evidence makes sense when it is accompanied by a quantum leap in our worldview and belief systems. Superseding scientific materialism, we can reach a new worldview, which the physicist Amit Goswami and the visionary philosopher Rudolf Steiner named “monistic idealism.” Other theorists use terms like biocentrism or the quantum hologram theory of consciousness, but they mean the same thing.

My hope is that my new online seminar, Crossing the Threshold: Realms of Consciousness Beyond Physical Death, helps participants to fully make this leap — to anchor a new understanding of reality that, in itself, may have subtle yet deeply transformative effects on the world around us. If consciousness is the primordial ground, and we are that consciousness in its ongoing activity of discovering and reflecting upon itself, then our understanding of the world is a constituent element, a part of reality, in itself. A change of perspective can bring about a transformed world.

We are just at the beginning of learning about the other dimensions, the metaetherical¹ realms, surrounding us. As the neuroscientist Eben Alexander discovered during his protracted Near-Death Experience (NDE):

I saw the abundance of life throughout the countless universes, including some whose intelligence was advanced far beyond that of humanity. I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but that the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly. They cannot be known, or understood, from lower dimensional space. Cause and effect exist in these higher realms, but outside of our earthly conception of them. The world of time and space in which we move in this terrestrial realm is tightly and intricately meshed within these higher worlds. In other words, these worlds aren’t totally apart from us, because all worlds are part of the same overarching divine Reality. From those higher worlds one could access any time or place in our world.

When we look into the near future, there are two likely outcomes: Either humanity drives itself to collapse and extinction, or we initiate some kind of planetary transformation, executed with enormous speed and precision, through a mutation of collective consciousness and behavior. In either case, all of us will benefit greatly from integrating the new paradigm of monistic idealism which allows for the continuity of consciousness — identity or essence — beyond death. This new worldview dignifies our individual lives as well as the life of our species; it gives us a cosmic context along with an implicit ethos.

If we can integrate logic and intuition, science and mysticism to attain a comprehensive, evidence-based understanding of our intrinsic nature as consciousness itself, we can relax into our archetypes and roles. We can reach peace and acceptance of what is, while we liberate our creative powers for today’s challenges.

When we understand our lives are part of a vast continuum of consciousness that exists in many dimensions simultaneously, death loses much of its sting, its power over us.

I hope you will join Crossing the Threshold: Realms of Consciousness Beyond Physical Death. I hope that, together, we can make this leap of understanding, this transformation of awareness, to reach a new worldview. Taking the time to reach a new level of clarity is the precious opportunity that the deepening global crisis offers to us.