Although intellectually we all know that one day we shall die, generally we are so reluctant to think of our death that this knowledge does not touch our hearts, and we live our life as if we were going to be in this world forever. As a result the things of this world - such as material possessions, reputation, popularity, and the pleasures of the senses - become of paramount importance, so we devote almost all our time and energy to obtaining them and engage in many negative actions for their sake. We are so preoccupied with the concerns of this life that there is little room in our mind for genuine spiritual practice. When the time of death actually arrives we discover that by having ignored death all our life we are completely unprepared.

What is death? Death is the cessation of the connection between our brain and our body. Most people believe that death takes place when the heart stops beating; but this does not mean that the person has died, because his subtle mind may still remain in his body. Death occurs when the subtle consciousness finally leaves the body to go to through a spiritual process that eventually leads to the next life. (For Bible lovers, this is what Christ means in Matthew 11:14 and 17:12-13, concerning the return of Elijah as John the Baptist.) Our body is like a guesthouse and our spirit is like the guest; when we die our self-conscious awareness has to leave this body go through a lengthy process until we enter the body of our next rebirth, like a guest leaving one guesthouse and traveling to another.

Thinking is neither physical, nor a by-product of purely physical processes, but is a formless continuum that is a separate entity from the body. When the body disintegrates at death, thinking does not cease. Although our superficial conscious mind ceases, it does so by dissolving into a deeper level of consciousness, the very subtle mind; and the continuum of the very subtle mind has no beginning and no end.

Do we need religion to know that we do not die? What does the Bible say about death?

We don't need religion to know what death is. We just have to practice various exercises so that we can stay awake while we are asleep and experience for ourselves what existence is like without our sense-perception reality. Or else through various exercises we can learn how to think without reference to our environment or heredity: pure sense-free thinking. This state of spiritual self conscious awareness does not die. We can know this and attain to it more and more continuously during our life on earth.

Superficially, the Bible has us recognize that death is the most natural of things: "it is appointed for humans to die once?" (Heb. 9:27). But this refers to the personality, not to the spiritual individuality. Our bodies are part of the natural world, whereas our souls and spirits are part of the supersensible world. Death is necessary for bodies constituted as ours are. Physical decay and ultimate dissolution are inescapable.

The Bible speaks of death as the result of sin, as in Gn. 2:17, "in the day that you eat of the tree of good and evil you will die." Yet Adam did not die physically on the day that he disobeyed God. He lived to a very ripe age. So what does this eating mean? This "eating" by Adam and Eve meant that they went through a stage of spiritual evolution so that their whole organism of body, soul and spirit was transformed. In modern terminology our soul is our feeling (astral) body. Our physical body does not feel, just as a mineral does not feel. Our spirit is our thinking body. Our physical body does not think - It is just the vehicle for our thinking spirit. This spiritual transformation gave birth to the individual self - the ego.

Before Adam and Eve's transgression, Humankind was at one with the Universe, just as we are as babies. With the birth of the ego we have both the birth of egotism and the birth of error (sin). The consciousness of death and death itself came into existence at this same time. Our sense-perception world requires the experience of death so that we can renew ourselves each life-time, and gradually develop into more perfect beings.

To rectify the disobedience of "eating" by Adam and Eve we must learn to follow the angel's advice in Revelation 10:9,10 - "And I went unto the angel and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey. And I took the little book out of the angel's hand and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey; and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter."

To help us with this "eating" so we can understand fully what life and death are, let's learn to digest How to Know Higher Worlds - A Modern Path of Initiation, by Rudolf Steiner.

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