Is Consciousness immortal?
Question on physical death and consciousness
A brief answer to an oft-asked question that someone sent recently:
If your body dies, your consciousness is gone right? I ask this because many enlightened people say that “Self/Awareness/Consciousness” is immortal. But how can consciousness exist after physical death?
What we call “our” consciousness is its content — whatever we are conscious “of”…objects, thoughts, emotions etc. Now is any of this truly “ours”? We acquire through conditioning (both genetic and environmental) the ability to name, think, feel etc. And that conditioning lives on through all the human brains in various forms. So “our” consciousness is simply an instantiation of the human consciousness at large and it continues on in various forms, but the specific instantiation dies with physical death. So what we call “our” consciousness is indeed gone in one sense when the body dies, but in another sense it lives on in other forms through all the conditioning we have ourselves passed on to others.
But is consciousness only its content, which is all the names, thoughts, emotions, knowledge, experiences etc that we have collected over time? What is there when consciousness is purged of all its content? When there are moments of complete silence with no movement of thought in any direction on any dimension, what is there? The total silent presence of simply being, which is not ‘ours’. This is what is called Self, Awareness or Pure Consciousness. Because it is the complete absence of any content, it has by definition nothing to do with any quality associated with ‘me’ or ‘you’. It is not ‘our’ consciousness. It is simply consciousness. And because it is totally empty of any content, it is identical in everyone of us. And therefore it has nothing to do with the physical birth or death of an individual either. That’s why it is said to be immortal.
A more detailed exploration into the related question which is called the “hard problem of consciousness” can be found at: