The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [70]
If you are conditioned to think in terms of heaven and hell, going to one or the other will be your experience. (Remember that the Christian conception of these places isn’t the same as the Islamic version or the thousands of Lokas in Tibetan Buddhism, which makes room for a multitude of worlds after death.) The creative machinery of consciousness will produce the experience of that other place, while to someone who has led the same life under no such belief system, these images might appear to be a blissful dream or a reliving of collective fantasies (like a fairy tale), or the unspooling of themes from childhood.
But if you go to another world after death, that world will be in you as much as this one is. Does that mean heaven and hell are not real? Look out the window at a tree. It has no reality except as a specific spacetime event being actualized out of the infinite potential of the field. Therefore, it’s only fair to say that heaven and hell are just as real as that tree—and just as unreal.
The absolute break between life and death is an illusion.
What bothers people about losing the body is that it seems like a terrible break or interruption. This interruption is imagined as going into the void; it is total personal extinction. Yet that perspective, which arouses huge fears, is limited to the ego. The ego craves continuity; it wants today to feel like an extension of yesterday. Without that thread to cling to, the journey day to day would feel disconnected, or so the ego fears. But how traumatized are you by having a new image come to mind, or a new desire? You dip into the field of infinite possibilities for any new thought, returning with a specific image out of the trillions that could possibly exist. At that moment, you aren’t the person you were a second ago. So, you are clinging to an illusion of continuity. Give it up this moment and you will fulfill St. Paul’s dictum to die unto death. You will realize that you have been discontinuous all along, constantly changing, constantly dipping into the ocean of possibilities to bring forth anything new.
Death can be viewed as a total illusion because you are dead already. When you think of who you are in terms of I, me, and mine, you are referring to your past, a time that is dead and gone. Its memories are relics of a time passed by. The ego keeps itself intact by repeating what it already knows. Yet life is actually unknown, as it has to be if you are ever to conceive of new thoughts, desires, and experiences. By choosing to repeat the past, you are keeping life from renewing itself.
Do you remember the first time you tasted ice cream? If not, look at a very young child encountering an ice cream cone. The look on the child’s face tells you that she is lost in pure delight. But the second ice cream cone, although a child may beg and plead for it, is slightly less wonderful than the first. Each repetition pales by degrees because, when you return to what you already know, it can’t be experienced for the first time. Today, as much as you may like ice cream, the experience of eating it has become a habit. The sensation of taste hasn’t changed, but you have. The bargain you made with your ego, to keep I, me, and mine going on the same habitual tracks, was a bad bargain—you have chosen the opposite of life, which is death.
Technically speaking, even the tree outside your window is an image from the past. The instant you see it and process it in your brain, the tree has already moved on at the quantum level, flowing with the vibrating fabric of the universe. To be fully alive you have to inject yourself into the nonlocal domain where new experiences are born. If you drop the pretense of being in the world, you will realize that you’ve always lived from the discontinuous, nonlocal