A Ramble About Death and Passing On

 A brother I knew from Cursillo just passed away today. He was an older man, a Vietnam veteran, but still, it was sudden and unexpected. Looking back, I feel like I've seen almost too many people I've known pass away. Death really hasn't been a stranger. One day they're there and talking to you, and the next they're not, and it makes me remember how short this life can be every time. All of my grandparents, my dad, my nephew, my sister, classmates from college, a professor who died while I was in attendance, people I served as a minister, people who had become close. I feel like I've seen far too many open caskets, and heard about far too many more.
     I've made no secret about my found belief in the passing of one's consciousness from one's life to the next, or my belief in a final resurrection. I see no contradiction between the two. There are parts in the Gospels where Jesus and His disciples assume this possibility, and the idea of a kind of reincarnation in the western world dates back to Pythagoras, though is really expounded on by Plato. The possibility was just as much a part of the Hellenistic understanding of death as was Hades, Elysium, and Tartarus. From the studies done of kids who remember their past lives up to about five or six years old, to the many, many testimonies of NDEers, and of course the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, it's clear to me that one's soul, or consciousness, is not tied to the body and does not cease to exist when the body shuts down and dies. This is what the evidence which I've studied and read has led me to.
     What is often quoted here in rebuttal to the view I've come to hold is the verse in Hebrews which says, "For it is appointed for a human being to die once, and after this the judgment." After all of my study and ruminations on the subject, I've come to understand that there is more than one way to understand this verse. The question which must be asked is, "What comprises a human being, or 'anthropos' in the original Greek?" Is it the consciousness of the person alone? Or is it the consciousness and the body?" Is each separate human life which the consciousness inhabits an individual human being with their own experiences, thoughts, memories, and so on? If so, than this concept that an individual human being can only die once can and does coexist with the consciousness living multiple lifetimes inhabiting different bodies and assuming different personas.
     I've described it before as a person creating an avatar in a massively multiplayer online role playing game. They play that character up until the character dies, and then a new one is created. Each time, there's an amnesia which takes place so that the new person is unaware and unconscious (most of the time; with the exception of those aforementioned kids) of any of the previous "player characters" before them. One character might be a rogue and a scoundrel, another might be a saint or a paladin. One might be a man, another might be a woman as the consciousness, the "player" itself, knows no physical gender. There will always be some hints, some unconscious tells, some choices which the player simply will or will not make regardless of which character they're playing, but otherwise, each character is a separate individual.
     This understanding brings both comfort and a sense of tragedy to me. On the one hand, no one is ever truly lost, as the consciousness itself is immortal and eternal in nature. On the other, each combination of consciousness and body into a unique human being is in itself special and worth knowing with their own stories, their own memories, and their own triumphs and tragedies. These individual characters live on only in our memories while the consciousness behind them moves on to a new avatar and a new experience.
     All those people, all those characters whom I have known for whom the game has ended, were worth knowing. Their stories meant something, and each one was intriguing. Some were tragic, others were triumphant, and still more were both. Even as the consciousness of my friend from Cursillo has moved on from the character it was playing, I wish I had known more of the story of that character and the life he led.
     At some point, I will move on as well from this body and this character's story, and that's okay. When that happens, I hope my story inspired and entertained and gave people pause to think and reflect. That is, as I understand it, the point.