Brian D. Smith, a grief guide, argues that after death we don't fully merge into a collective consciousness or stay completely individual. Instead, he says we experience both simultaneously, like a water molecule joining the ocean while keeping its identity. He uses Rumi's line, "we are the ocean in a drop," to explain this duality.
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I want to talk about what I think is a misperception of what happens when we die. Some people say that when we go back home, when we cross over, when we transition, that we merge back into the One. Some people say that when we go back home, when we transition, that we remain who we are. We maintain our individuality. I think that neither one is necessarily right, necessarily wrong. I think that there's a limitation of language. And that's where the misunderstanding comes from. And I'm going to talk about that in this video. Hi, I'm Brian D Smith. I am a grief guide and a mental fitness trainer. And I help people who have gone through tragedy, who have gone through grief, to return to a life of joy and purpose through my Grief to Growth program. And I'm going to talk about this today because I know this can be confusing. I know this can be scary. And confusion and fear are not the things you want to have when we're here. So when I see apparent paradoxes like this, I like to look at it, what if it's both/and? So I was at a conference recently where some people who had had near-death experiences were debating this. And some experiences were that they, when they'd gone back home, when they transitioned, that they felt connected to everything, so much to the point where they felt like they had merged into the all, that they were everything. Others said that they maintained their individuality, that they retained who they were when they crossed back over, and they insist that nothing is lost when we cross back over. So I think the reason for the confusion lies in the limitations of language. When we think about the way language works is we can only describe what we have experienced in some sense. Try to imagine describing the color orange, for example, to someone who's never seen— how would you ever even begin to describe what this color is to someone who's never seen any color? When we cross over, when we leave these bodies, we have senses. We are not limited by the 5 senses, or 5 or so senses that we have when we're here. We have senses that we can't even imagine when we're here. So I think what happens is we can't describe it to people in earthly terms. We can't even put it in ourselves in earthly terms, the feelings or the experience that we had. When we're in the body, we are very much separated from other people. We can see clearly a delineation between ourselves and the person sitting next to us. We can very clearly sense the difference between me and the chair that I'm sitting in or the tree outside. But I think when we're in spirit, that those barriers are knocked down, if not eliminated, at least reduced. And we can sense things in a way that we can't even describe when we're here. We sense this connectedness to everything and everyone around us, to the point where we feel like maybe we've lost our individuality. But logically speaking, is that even possible? How can we have an experience if we're not ourselves anymore? How can we remember this experience of being everything if we didn't experience from the perspective of being ourselves? So I think in the spirit world, we are both individual and collective consciousness. We can somehow be both at the same time, maybe even shifting quickly between the two. I don't know, but I don't think it's possible for us to lose our individuality and still have any experience at all. I think that's logically impossible. So whenever someone tells me they've had an experience, to me that means that they're still an individual. There's a great analogy that people use for us and Source, or collective consciousness, and that's the, the drop in the ocean. A drop of water in the ocean. Let's pretend for a second that the ocean is made of pure water, pure H2O molecules, right? So the thing about this analogy, it breaks down when we think about a drop going in the ocean, because when we drop a drop of water into the ocean, it loses being a drop. It It's no longer a drop. But if we think of ourselves more as H2O molecules, as water, water molecules being dropped in the ocean, that molecule retains its molecule-ness. It's still an entity, even though it's back in the ocean in a larger body of water, even though it's surrounded and connected to everything else. I think that's a much more accurate analogy. I love Rumi's quote that we are not only a drop in the ocean, but we are the ocean in a drop. But Rumi might not have known about water molecules. I think the water molecule thing is a little bit more accurate. So that's the way I reconcile these two things. Again, I don't think either side is right or wrong. I think when we go back into the collective consciousness, we will have an experience like we can't even imagine right now. But I also believe that we will retain our individual experiences, our individual personalities, our minds, what makes us who we are. What are your thoughts?
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