Death, Immortality and Reincarnation

What is death actually? Is there anything that continues after passing? Can the fact of death be altered by what we do during life? Our whole lives are spent in a state of psychological continuance. The self is ever seeking confirmation of consciousness through activity and possession. We crave the continuity of the known. The known is our possession, it is the image of the psychological and material self. Can the known which is all that memory has acquired, the past, ever understand death which is the unknown. It can only comprehend according to what knowledge it has accumulated. That knowledge is always incomplete and self enclosing. When we engage in the activity of predicting the future we are only projecting the known. Since humanity and all life is habitualistic it is easy to believe in the power or ability to know the unknown. But the unknown is never a repetition it is always the new and never before. The conflict that we experience in life is our need to be constantly adjusting to the lack of 'actual' repetition. Repetition is security. The known is security. Since the unknown can never be the known we are forever in a state of anxiety and confusion.

We want to know the future, to be secure. But life is insecurity, that is the reality. Our escape from it is the result of fear. We cannot fear the unknown. It is not possible to fear something that we have no concept of. Fear always exist in relationship to some ideal. We fear death as the ending of the known of the self. We become obsessed with wanting to know the future, what lies beyond. We seek the counsel of all sorts of fortune tellers, mystics and religious soothsayers.
All in an attempt to find security in the unknown. We see that there is no security in this moment, in this life so we create the fantasy of security in never ending tomorrows, or in the next life, a life after death.

Organized religion plays on our fear of the unknown our fear of death. It is sustained by hope and faith, that is promulgated by religious authority. Inward and outward authority creates a future life that is filled with peace and love. If we are escaping from the reality of this life, of this moment, how will we ever be at peace. If we can observe the self and how that it references the known, the past, in an attempt to create an illusion of security, then we may find freedom that is the starting point for intelligence and understanding. Intelligence is not continuity. It is consciousness that is without conditioned ideals. One dies to the past and to each moment as it becomes the known.

Death is the ending of all referencing to what has gone on before. It is the death of projected reality, of the image of self. Death is change, it is the new and never before, which is the never ending renewal of life. It is the beauty of existence made manifest in human form. There in no ending in death, only change. The conditioned mind is caught in the illusion of beginning and ending. The mind is obsessed with the continuity of the conditioned self. The conditioned can never fathom that which is the absolute moment which is death, the unconditioned. Death is the illumination of life. It is the new person, the new understanding from each moment to each moment. When one is in the moment, existence is an unfolding of the eternal, which is not a movement. Time has no relevancy, there is only that which is immeasurable and unknown.

The concept of immortality is the ultimate refuge of conditioned thought. That what has been will continue in some form in the future. That there is a soul or Atman that will go on though eternity. Immortality is the illusion of security that one is deluded into believing cannot be erased by time. Reincarnation is the concept of an end with a new beginning. That the essence of a being after death incarnates as a new being that has been modified by the activities of prior lives or existences. The new being is the result of karma. But what is it that reincarnates? Is not the concept of reincarnation for this existence and not for anything that continues? Do we not create the concept out of our fear of ending? Reincarnation is the projection of self through time. It is the illusion of conceptual imagery without end. Mind can only think in terms of beginning and ending and to escape from the illusion of self and its ending it creates that which will continue to exist into the unknown. There is great beauty in death, but because we are caught in time we are unable to understand the significance of death that is not a continuity. We only feel the emotion of loss that is the result of our fear of ending, of non-existence.

When one exist in the moment death has no meaning, because one is the deathless, the timeless. There is only the new and never before from each moment to each moment. Death becomes the illumination of life and its realization is peace that is the outcome of freedom.