Post-Mortem
AS an Absolute Idealist I haven’t quite decided whether death is followed by a great conference of ‘dead’ souls, each zipping around in a parallel realm like a swarm of merry fireflies, or whether we are immediately projected back again as something altogether ‘different’. What should we expect, a perennial playground or a temporary reassignment zone?
What I do believe, however, is that everything is One and when we enter this world - either as humans, animals, plants or minerals - we are only ‘finite’ in the sense that we leave it again once our earthly form either decays naturally or is prematurely destroyed. Picture, if you will, an unceasing production line of spirit-into-matter-into-spirit-into-matter. Ad infinitum.
Although, at some point, I do hope to greet those whom I have loved and lost in the formless absorption of the Ungrund, perhaps it is superfluous for us to desire such a ‘reunion’ in the sense that everything is already connected and that this eternal link is never broken? Two trees are never really separate, not at the most fundamental level, so when one is chopped down by the axe of Fate the sadness that follows is tempered by the common wind that forever moves through the branches of that which remains.
The seeming disparity between a visual object and one which has become invisible to the naked eye, thus conceals the mysterious identicality of something far greater. We dwell at the heart of an immanentised God.
Interesting question. I've been reading the books of Anthony Peake these last few years and he sees us as being in an eternal cycle of reincarnation. From what I've researched, we do retain a form of identity post-mortem, including memories of our most recent life. We can even communicate with those alive. I remember you had an experience along those lines.