Last month I watched the San Francisco 49ers beat the Denver Broncos with two dear friends. We had recorded the game so we could skip the commercials and in those gaps our talk turned to deeper things. At one point we each shared what we believe survives after we die. It was such a rich conversation that when I got home, I sat down to write about where I stand. The question feels especially close to me now. This month I turn 84 and death is slouching patiently by my window.
Reflections on My Definition of God and the Survival of Consciousness
My spiritual journey has taken me through many houses of faith. I grew up Episcopalian. I joined the Southern Baptist denomination, then became a Jehovah’s Witness, then sat with a Buddhist sangha. Most recently I have returned to my ancestral roots in Judaism. Under all of it is a long love of Vedanta. Through every one of those rooms, the practice that has held me most steadily is singing in a chorus.
Each tradition gave me a different answer to the question that sooner or later finds all of us: What happens when we die?
The Baptist church of my youth had a clear answer. There was heaven, there was hell, and God, the sovereign judge, would decide. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had their own map of the end times. The Buddhists spoke of rebirth and release. Judaism, my ancestral home, speaks softly of Olam Ha-ba, the World to Come, and has never insisted on many details. I have carried pieces of each answer with me. Lately I have been asking a different question: if I take my own definition of God seriously, what does it say about death?
My Working Definition
Here is the latest version of my personal manifesto, which I keep revising:
“God is the quantum field of infinite intelligence and animating force of love: a pervading, responsive, and dynamic co-creative energy in which all life is embedded, including us. A force that exists within everything, enlivens everything, and from which everything is made manifest. And we are here to experience with wonder and awe at it all.”
Part of the inspiration came from the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Max Planck. In 1931 he said: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
When I first read those words, something in me relaxed. Most of us grew up with the opposite assumption: that matter comes first, and consciousness is a flicker the brain gives off, like heat from a lamp. In that picture, death is simple and final. The lamp goes out, and so does the light.
Planck turns that picture upside down. Consciousness doesn’t come out of the lamp. It is closer to the electricity running through it. And if that is true, death means something very different.
The Wave and the Ocean
The image that keeps coming back to me is one I first met in Vedanta: the wave and the ocean.
A wave rises. It has its own shape, its own height, its own moment in the sun. It might even believe it is separate, a “me” moving across the water. But it was never anything other than ocean. When the wave falls back, nothing is lost. The water hasn’t gone anywhere. Only the shape has changed.
If God is the field “from which everything is made manifest,” then I am a wave on that ocean. My body, my personality, the particular way I laugh, and the songs I love are the shape. The awareness looking out through my eyes is the water. By that logic, the water does not end when the wave does.
I find real comfort in this. It means that death is not a fall into nothing. It is a return to where I came from, and that place was never anywhere but here, inside everything, enlivening everything.
But Will It Be Me?
I have to be honest, though. That image doesn’t settle everything for me.
It has been hard for me to let go of a “personal God.” I still have prayerful conversations with what I call emanations of Divine Presence. One is the Buddhist goddess Tara. My license plate reads “Om Tara.” I love her because she is the mother of all the Buddhas, and when she stamps her foot, all the universes shake. She is a fierce protector. I also include Jesus in my prayers, because for centuries people have turned to him to learn how to forgive, how to love our enemies, and how to care for those who are forgotten.
I suspect the same longing that keeps me talking to Tara also makes me ask about death in a personal way. It isn’t enough for me to know that “consciousness” goes on in some general sense. I want to know whether I go on. Will my memories survive? Will the people I love, the ones who have already crossed over, still know me? Will I still know them?
My definition doesn’t answer that question for me. It does keep the door open, and I think that matters.
What the Thinkers Offer
I have found company among people who have wrestled with the same question.
The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, who believes everything is ultimately consciousness, describes each of us as a kind of separated pocket of one great universal mind. At death, he suggests, the walls of the pocket dissolve, and our “lifetime of memories and insights” pass back into the larger mind of nature. He calls death “an expansion of consciousness, not its end.” I like that phrase very much. It suggests that whatever we become, we will not become smaller.
Process theology, which describes God as a responsive, co-creating partner, much as I do, speaks of “objective immortality.” Nothing we have ever been or done is lost. Every life is received and held forever within the divine life. Some process thinkers go further and leave room for the self to go on experiencing, not only to be remembered.
And then there are the reports from the edge. Researchers led by Dr. Sam Parnia followed hundreds of people who suffered cardiac arrest in hospitals. Some of those who were brought back described clear experiences from the time when, medically speaking, they were gone. Scientists still argue about what those experiences mean. I don’t claim they prove anything. They do suggest that the boundary between life and death is stranger, and perhaps more porous, than we were taught.
Love as the Clue
When I go back to my own definition, the word I keep landing on is love.
I did not describe God as a field of energy alone. I called it an “animating force of love,” and I said it was responsive. A field that only gathered back its waves might be indifferent, the way water is indifferent to the shape of each wave. Love is not indifferent. Love notices. Love remembers. Love cherishes the particular: this face, this voice, this song.
If the ground of all being is truly love, then I have a hard time believing it would simply erase the beloved. It seems more likely that each of us is held, the way a mother holds a child, or the way a chorus holds each voice even while every voice joins into one sound.
That last image may be the truest one I have. When I sing with a gospel choir, I don’t lose my voice. I can feel my own breath, my own pitch, my own small part. And yet something bigger happens when we sing together. The sound we make belongs to none of us and all of us at once. Maybe death is something like that: not the end of my voice, but the moment I finally hear the whole choir.
The Jury Is Still Out
I don’t know what happens when we die. Nobody does, not with certainty. My definition of God is not a proof. It is closer to a prayer, a working hypothesis of the heart.
But I notice that it has changed how I feel about the question. In the theology of my youth, death was a courtroom. Now it seems more like a homecoming. If consciousness is fundamental, if we are woven into a living field of intelligence and love, then death is not consciousness ending. It is consciousness changing form.
Whether I will go on as Justine, or as something wider than Justine, I can’t say. For now, I am content to keep the question open. Meanwhile I’ll keep singing, keep praying to Tara, keep learning from Jesus, and keep doing what I believe we are here to do: live with wonder and awe at it all.
