Every human being on the planet has two things in common: birth and death. We are all born and we will all die. Beyond that, whatever else our lives might share in common depends on our culture and conditioning, and there will be very little consistency in this area when you consider that there are almost eight billion of us.
Actually, there are three things that we all have in common: birth, death, and consciousness. The beauty of consciousness is that it isn’t subject to the laws of time and space. Our body-minds are born into a world, live for a period of time, and then perish. But consciousness is always present, and therefore is never born and never dies.
And what is this consciousness? It’s that element of our being that knows all experience, but is not itself an experience. The element of our being that allows us to say unconditionally, I am, or I exist. The element of our being that knows the coming and going of all things, yet doesn’t come and go with them.
Most importantly, consciousness is the element of our being that exists prior to our being, and then manifests as a body-mind, allowing us to experience thinking, feeling, sensing, and to perceive the world through sights, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells.
And what a world it is! As manifestations of consciousness, we have this unique moment in time and space to think myriad thoughts, feel intense emotions, sense pleasure and pain, and see, hear, taste, touch, and smell the extraordinary world around us.
And then it will be gone. Not consciousness, but the body-mind, with all of its fantastic abilities, limited as they may be, and the world, with all of its wonders.
Consciousness, as it is everywhere and, therefore, everything, never goes anywhere. It never appears or disappears. It just is. Can you find any place, any object or thing, any self, where consciousness is not present? No. It would be like saying you can find a wave without an ocean.
Look at your experience and recognize that consciousness is not in you, us, but that you, we, are in consciousness. Therefore, none of us are ever born and we will never die. Yes, our body-minds appear at birth and disappear at death, but the stuff we are made of, consciousness, is ever-present and unchanging. Infinite and eternal.
As you, I, we, are that . . .
. . . be that.
All that is.
Centerless Center 
I understand that consciousness is present in everything. It is reassuring to consider that consciousness that we ‘enjoy’ while alive in our physical body continues after the discontinuation of our physical body. However, I struggle (or perhaps my Ego struggles) with whether it somehow it is possible to know the form of consciousness that is experienced (?) after physical death, while we are still alive in our physical body. Of course, most neuro-scientists would assert that consciousness can not continue once the physical body (and thus, brain) has died.
Any thoughts about this would be welcome..
It seems that humans always have come up w/ variations on immortality: the concept of heaven, ideas of reincarnation, and so on. The question I’m having re: this blog post is: is it possible, while the bodymind is still alive, to have experiences of the consciousness that continues beyond and well after the death of the bodymind? I think most neuro-scientists would assert that anything resembling consciousness, for the individual, ends with the death of the bodymind.
Hopefully my question/wondering here is clear enough. Any thoughts in this regard welcome!