Consciousness Beyond
So often, grief is seen as something to survive or overcome. But in my recent experience, I've learned that it is also a sacred threshold. When we allow ourselves to feel grief fully, not just the pain, but the love beneath it, we enter a space where the veil thins.
In the days that followed my loved one's death, I noticed a deeper sensitivity to the spirit realm. His energy did not feel gone. It felt redistributed, around us and within us.
What does it mean for a soul to transition? What happens to our consciousness after death? Let's explore.
Researchers and spiritual thinkers have explored these questions through many different lenses:
Near Death Experiences
End of Life Experiences
Instrument Based Energy Studies
Quantum Consciousness Theories
Each of these perspectives pulls at the threads of mystery, unraveling what we think we know about life and revealing something far more layered. Near death experiences, for example, often begin with the sensation of floating above one's body, but no longer inside of it. Is this suggesting that consciousness is located outside the body and exists independently of the brain?
Many people also report moving through a tunnel of light, experiencing a life review, and encountering deceased loved ones while communicating telepathically. There is often a profound feeling of peace, love, and unity. Time dissolves and then comes the choice or command to stay or return.
Similarly, those who walk beside the dying often witness something unexplainable. A sudden burst of clarity before passing. Speaking in metaphors - "I'm getting ready for my trip." Reaching towards someone who isn't physically present. A gaze that no longer anchors in this world but stretches beyond it. These moments hint that the soul begins its transition before the last breath. That dying is less of an act and more of a reorientation of consciousness.
Biologically, death is the cessation of all vital systems. The body fails without oxygen, but it's curious, isn't it? Oxygen is the first thing we lose, does that mean oxygen is consciousness? Or is it simply the gateway consciousness uses to travel through the physical form?
Science offers its own explanations for these experiences: oxygen deprivation, surges of endorphins, dream like states, and temporal lobe activity. There is a paradox here. If consciousness is purely a product of brain activity, how do we explain Dr. Sam Parnia's studies, in which patients with no measurable brain function recalled detailed events that occurred during cardiac arrest?
Dr. Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose purpose that the mind taps into a non-local field of awareness. That consciousness exists beyond the brain, and the brain acts more like a receiver than a generator. Similarly, Dr. Konstantin Korotkov's use of Gas Discharge Vizualization showed images of what he interpreted as the life force leaving the body in stages. Not in chaos, but in pattern. First, the head and navel, then the heart and groin. Could we interpret these images as holographic energy exiting the chakras? In cases of sudden death, the energetic release resulted in irregular patterns, suggesting confusion in the soul's exit.
So, where is consciousness located? The answer is no so simple. Science demands proof. Spirit asks for faith. Can both, somehow be true?
Consciousness may not be located in one single place. It may exist inside the body, outside the body, within our electromagnetic fields, and possibly beyond that. The idea that the brain acts like a radio receiver, then consciousness is the signal. The brain doesn't produce it. It interprets it. This way of thinking aligns with Aldous Huxley and William James' theory that proposes that the brain limits the vast field of awareness so we can function in this dimension.
Some speculate that even the Earth's magnetic field stores and transmits information, as though the planet itself holds a collective memory grid. If Earth is a conscious, breathing being, then it makes sense that her field and ours would interact. Especially during large global shifts.
Research by the HeartMath Institute shows that the heart emits an electromagnetic field that is much stronger than the brain's. This means the heart may be transmitting information emotionally, inter-personally, and spiritually. Consciousness might not only be received through the brain, but also felt through the heart, suggesting multiple layers of interaction between the body, soul, and the unseen world.
If this is true, then the body becomes a temporary vessel. Not the source of consciousness, but the translator of it. This would mean that memory, awareness, and intuition could also exist outside the body, persisting after physical death, and that means that we are all part of a vast, interconnected network of awareness.
This is where the idea of redistributed energy becomes vital, but also comforting.
When someone dies, their energy doesn't vanish. It moves. It becomes unbound. What was once a centered in one vessel now diffuses into everything. Their presence is no longer limited to a single body. It lingers in the breeze, in music, in our hearts, in the stillness between worlds. Their essence spreads through the field that connects us all. We feel them in our dreams, in sudden warmth, in memories.
This redistribution doesn't mean dilution. It means expansion. Their consciousness is now everywhere we are open enough to sense it. Our grief becomes a tuning process. We adjust our frequency to hear them differently.
I believe this is why the body feels heavy in grief. Because the soul is learning a new way to hold what it once held in touch, in voice, in form. We begin to learn how to feel them in silence. In the sacred unseen.
Even still, I had to ask... How could memory exist outside the body, when I experienced it here, in the flesh?
Thankfully, a biologist named Rupert Sheldrake asked the same question. His theory of Morphic Resonance suggests that memory is inherent in nature. That all living beings inherit a collective memory from those who came before them. This memory is not stored in the brain, but accessed through resonance. Our brains become tuning forks for information already encoded into the field. This mirrors the ideas of Henri Bergson, who saw memory as something rooted in time, not space. It also aligns with Carl Jung's collective unconscious theory.
When all of these theories are integrated, we begin to see the hippocampus as responsible for our personal experiences, while the EM fields and quantum processes may hold deeper, broader memory. Memory that is intuitive, ancestral, or even of the soul. This could explain those moments when we just know something without learning it, or feeling something we never lived through. It offers a language for those strange, beautiful moments when something ancient wakes up within us.
To me, consciousness is both local and non-local. Personal and collective. Tangible and ethereal. It flows through the brain, heart, and beyond. The soul is not housed in a single location. It moves, remembers, transforms, and when we die, it redistributes.
