My father died recently and yesterday we buried his ashes. As I gently poured the ashes into an earthenware pot, a gust of wind whipped a few of the ashes up and whisked them away, scattering them far and wide.
After death, we can see what happens to the physical body, the way its constituents are broken down and dispersed, to be taken up by myriad other forms of life, in time becoming a part of many other beings. That is the visible, manifest aspect of death. What of the less visible aspects of life? What happens to consciousness at death? Does it cease to exist? Or does it, too, disperse in some way? And what of our essence, the spirit? Does it simply become non-existent? Or does it disperse in its own way, returning to the source whence it came?
In the short blink of an eye which is a human lifetime, various constituents come together to form a human being. Yet even during life, these constituents are changing, coming and going. Even life is an ongoing process of melding and dispersal. There is nothing solid in life, nothing unchanging anywhere to be found, and nothing separate from the rest of existence.
