Death doesn’t Exist

Recently I read a book titled “Death doesn’t exist” written by “The Mother”, supposedly a disciple cum co-worker of Sri Aurobindo of Auroville Pondicherry. The content of the book do true justice to the title. The Mother posits that death is merely like a transition from one room to another. Our supramental consciousness needs some time to come out of the body, once dead. And she can converse with the so called supramental consciousness or psychic spirit and lay them to rest in peace and content. There are many instances of such happenings mentioned through out. From a cursory glance, it seems all of it is purely result of some psychological aberrations or hallucinations. But interspersed with some scientific strands, it could be worth a deep introspection.

If science is anything, it stands for disproving charlatan claims. The prospect of consciousness surviving physical death and can be channeled by mystic yogis, opens a flood of extraordinary claims. A materialistic brain cannot have anything non-materialistic arising out of it. But when we analyze deeply, there could be more to it. The issue is the term “materialistic”. What appears to be materialistic doesn’t seems to be very material in nature. An electron is not a material. It is some field and some property of the field called wave function once collapses give rise to something that resembles an electron. And weirdly, a field is not materialistic. It is not like any classical object, which our brain is accustomed. It is some non-materialistic entity giving rise to materialistic matter by some unknown phenomenon. The boundary between what we consider to be materialistic and non materialistic is really fuzzy and constant transformations happens between these two states. This complex interplay between materialism and non-materialism may have something to do with the emergence of consciousness. Consciousness depends on the materialistic neural substrate, yet how now the fully “explainable” neural mechanisms gives rise to consciousness is really unknown.

Another weird, but extremely exciting concept is panpsychism, which suggests that every materialistic objects have some kind of consciousness. Or in another words, the consciousness is not the monopoly of our brain. Every matter feels it. An electron feels to be “something” rather than “nothing”. That conscious feeling is subjective and private in nature. It can be easily dismissed as a stupid idea, but I feel it could be genuinely true. As the subjective conscious experiences of particles and objects are their own private reality, there could exists constructs which connects private subjective experiences to make it shared. An extreme corollary of this would be finally a conscious sentient universe, aware of itself.