If birth as the entrance to life is fraught with complexities, death as the opposite must surely be a less than straightforward process of leaving the world.
The interaction of physiological, social and psychological conditions underlying birth suggests that each person’s identity reflects the multiple levels of experience that determine his or her emergent path of consciousness into the world. When this path of consciousness exits the world, It is likely to be no less complicated than its coming into the being at birth. Thus, dying cannot simply be a collapse of consciousness into nothingness because such nihilism cannot account for the emergence of identity in the first place.
If dying does not necessarily imply an absolute loss of identity but its transformation, the next question to ask is how can we understand the process by which this transformation takes place?
Eternity Calling: Modernity and the Revival of Death and Afterlife
