Where Do We Go after We Die?
By Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP
One of the main reasons that any religion or spiritual tradition exists is to reassure us about dying. Fear of dying is universal but hidden from view in daily life. Religion and spirituality offer hope that this fear is baseless. Something happens after death — this is the primary message — and this something is good, or at least it is better than nothing.
Despite all of its advances, science has stripped away any reassurances about life after death, and most people in the modern world accept the scientific model. In doing so it logically follows that when the physical body dies, in all likelihood the immaterial aspects of being human — mind soul, memory personality, thoughts, feelings, etc. — are extinguished at the same time.
What this set of beliefs doesn’t offer is proof, in the form of facts, data, information, and so on. In place of religious certainty, modern people face death, not only with fear, doubt, dread, and foreboding but without a shred of empirical evidence about what happens after death. The reason that we casually believe that life ends with nothing isn’t because that’s true. Nothing is simply the absence of facts. When facts end, science has nothing to say.
If you follow this train of thought, both worldviews, the religious/spiritual and the scientific, amount to stories built around assumptions that can’t be proven. When you ask, “Where do we go after we die?” the two main stories — we go to heaven/hell or we vanish into a cloud of atoms and energy waves — are hollow. They confront a mystery that refuses to reveal its secrets.
Where this leaves us is really where we begin, with the individual knowing that death is inevitable but leading a life dedicated to avoiding that fact. Fear of death isn’t necessary. At worst, we go to sleep just as we do every night, and going to sleep isn’t fearful. “I’ll know what happens when it happens” is a good working attitude, but let’s see if there is a better way.
A better way is hinted at in T.S. Eliot’s famous line of poetry, “In my end is my beginning.” This isn’t a religious or mystical statement, although Eliot was deeply religious. What these words mean is true for everyone, atheists and believers alike.
You can’t know how things end until you know how they began.
This looks like a simple statement of cause and effect. If you observe that putting a jar upside down over a candle makes the flame go out, you cannot explain this until you know the laws of chemistry, which reveals that fire needs oxygen to keep going. Use up the oxygen, and the flame goes out.
But there’s a deeper meaning to “You can’t know how things end until you know how they began.” What really matters about death is the survival of consciousness. We observe the flame (the physical body) go out (die), but the mystery revolves around what happens to the non-physical part of ourselves. The things previously listed — mind soul, memory, personality, thoughts, feelings, etc. — are all experiences in consciousness.
No matter how unique anyone’s life is, consciousness brings every human being together in the same place. Life is experienced in consciousness. Therefore, if we know how consciousness begins, we know how it ends. The opposite is also true. If we don’t know how consciousness begins, we can’t possibly know how (or if) it ends.
Suddenly there is an opening for a true revelation. If consciousness has no beginning, then it has no end. In other words, the cause-and-effect model doesn’t work when it comes to consciousness. It can only be explained as existing on its own, independent of everything that does obey the rule of cause and effect.
Can anything really be outside the realm of cause and effect? Absolutely. The universe sprang from a state preceding the Big Bang that offers no clue about matter, energy, space, or time. Without those things, there is no cause and effect. At the smallest scale of nature, the quantum field creates the physical universe through ripples of potential that emerge as subatomic particles and energy waves. There is no cause for this to happen; it just does. Existence has no cause, an obvious fact once you think about it.
The New Age phrase, “Be here now,” isn’t a goal. You cannot help but be here now, since that’s the definition of existence. There are more controversial examples of things that have no cause. Many of your thoughts aren’t caused by the thoughts that preceded them. Thoughts spring up unpredictably from a state that isn’t a thought. It is a silent domain of possibilities.
Here we are at the crux of the answer. If you don’t know how thoughts arise from total silence, you can’t possibly know how or if thoughts end. You already rely on the domain of silent, invisible possibilities all the time. You fetch memories from this domain, along with your vocabulary, your next desire, and your identity, which is nothing more than a constant process of filing away the experiences you identify with, calling them “me.”
The nice thing about existence is that it can be relied upon even when you have no idea where it came from. “To be or not to be” is the wrong question. We are, period. Packaged in with being here now is consciousness. In a basic, irrefutable way, existence and consciousness go together. They are our home. We didn’t invent or create this home. It is our beginning and therefore our end, wrapped into one.
Except that the words “beginning” and “end” are deceptive. There’s no reason to assume that existence had a beginning. Whatever you imagine as non-existence is a concept, and concepts, being mind-made, exist. Trying to nullify existence becomes circular. We are all at home here and now. We couldn’t be conscious without consciousness, the infinite, causeless, invisible, inconceivable origin of everything.
Where do we go after we die? Nowhere in physical terms. We never leave home because there’s no alternative. Non-existence is a fantasy born of fear. I realize that making existence the same as consciousness sounds alien. I’ve tried to state the argument in simple statements that anyone is free to ponder. The answer has to be personal. You have to look at what life is, here and now, to gain anything like a stable set of conclusions. Explore what it is like to be at home, and you will realize that you can never leave home. A new worldview emerges if you look deep enough.
DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, FRCP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution for the last thirty years. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Digital Dharma: How to Use AI to Raise Your Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Well-Being. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com
