Sages, the real ones, from a number of traditions, tell us that a supernal consciousness, like an infinite ocean of mind, permeates the universe in a sort of matrix of interpenetration. This mind, which arises from the nature of things as they are, is “not a person but not less than a person”. It does have a desire for inquiring and experiencing and self-understanding, and over billions of years it influences the chaotic energy forms and particles of the substrate into just enough order so that the likelihood of reproducible systems will manifest, impinging a degree of order (without cancelling the general chaos), and increasing the possibility of discrete biological life. That oceanic mind then experiences the cosmos more intimately through the device of biological life. It’s as if it has infinite senses which it extends like tendrils into every manner of creature. It sees what we see (or what is seen by bees, or octopi, and so on); it experiences what we experience. It is “that which sees”. We are its mirror. *It* is deathless. So when we die, dissolve away, it remains. We’re like a billion billion roses on its endless rose bush. The roses fade, the bush remains. It is said to keep records of all of us, in some wise.
However, there is another process, which perhaps it has willed into being, with which we can create enough selfhood, enough being, so we can continue after death as something akin to individuals, within this ocean of mind. We then have a “subtle body” that can move about within the levels of the body of the Absolute. The oceanic mind experiences what we experience there, too. These selfhoods cooperate to create an intermediate being, a sort of enormous collectively-created Bodhisattva, between the subjective “living” world and the ocean of mind. This intermediate being prefers a kind of positive pro-generative spin, and it emanates on a level enabling some people in the world, if they’re sensitive enough, to be linked to the ineffable, indefinable source-mind. This intermediate being tries to help us evolve, in the spiritual sense of evolution, but can only do it rather obliquely, and it can only help those open to it, and those who make the effort…We have, then, possibilities beyond the death of the subjective self; the possibility that the subjective self, which tends to disintegrate at death, can keep a sort of subtle template that still remembers its selfhood…and it can become an objective self. And it might have, stored within it, the memories of its life…