i won't die (part 2)

Image by Ilona Ilyés from Pixabay

How many ways can I understand the experience of "I won't die"?

I suggested one way: that having had that brief experience, I directly understood how the prospect of dying--the guarantee of dying--colors every moment of my life. That is primarily a psychological interpretation. As I went through the day, I realized there are several other ways to extract meaning from it or to interpret it. All of these are grounded in my worldview(s), my culture (time/place), my spiritual/religious background, and my personal history.

1. Retrocausality

   Everything that happens has already happened, is happening, and will happen. That doesn't make sense from the perspective of linear time, but time is imposed on reality, not inherent to it. We infer time. So, in that brief window of knowing I wouldn't die in the coming minute, a veil that is cast over experience to create linearity was lifted. Future Me (for lack of a better term) was in contact with Present Me, and Future Me relayed back the information to Present Me that, "Hey, there's still a you a minute from now."

   
   

2. Precognition

   This isn't not related to retrocausality, but it's a different twist. In that moment of knowing "I won't die," I glimpsed the future. I think this is like standing on one side of a divide. From side A, this experience was backwardly caused, as in 1. above. From side B, it was a precognition that, "Hey, I will still be alive a minute from now." It's a subtle difference, but it is different.

   
   

3. A Preview of Coming Attractions

   Another possibility is that this experience in my youth was a preview of experiences I would have decades later. In that minute in 197_, I was indestructible. Ridiculous, right? The human body is nothing if not unreliable and destined for extinction. No one can say that their physical body is indestructible.

   
   

   In inner (or spiritual) experience, however, we can know ourselves as indestructible. There is something here that isn't tied to the biological expiration date. Mostly, we use the word "consciousness" to label this "something," but I am not a big fan of that word. How about instead that "je ne sais quoi"? Some people use this as a basis for understanding rebirth or reincarnation.

4. Truth

   Wait? Didn't I just say that believing the physical body is indestructible doesn't make sense? It doesn't, except when it does. It merely requires redefining "physical." Physical isn't always flesh-and-blood, right? What if it is possible to have a different kind of body that is indestructible, that is "me"?

   
   

   This experience is an accepted part of several spiritual traditions. The ones with which I'm most familiar are Buddhism and the Diamond Approach. In Buddhist Mahayana texts, the term is often translated as "adamantine body" and is associated with the Buddha. Among the questions that the Buddha wouldn't answer during his life was, "What happens to a Tathagata (an enlightened being) after death?" (Put in the traditional Indian way of framing such a question, "Does a Tathagata exist after death, not exist after death, exist and not exist, neither exist nor not exist?") The Mahayana tradition explained the post-physical-death Buddha as having an adamantine (i.e., indestructible) body, so he continued to exist in a certain mysterious but fundamentally knowable form.

   
   

   In the Diamond Approach, this indestructible body is seen as an evolutionary development of the individual soul (or consciousness, if you prefer). It is known by different names: the Freedom Crystal, the Vajra Body (also occasionally used in translations of Buddhist texts), or the Freedom Vehicle. I won't say much about this except that it is part of the territory of this path.

There's quite a bit of potential nested in a brief decades-old experience. It isn't as if any single understanding is correct; rather that many understandings are possible and none excludes any other. Perhaps you can think of another way to unpack this experience, to understand it? And how would your explanation reflect your own worldview, etc.?