When God gazes into the depths of the creature,
God sees Himself and no one else.
-Meister Eckhart
In considering our quest for God, for whom are we truly looking for? In Judea-Christian-Muslim traditions, God is Yahweh, literally meaning I AM. I AM is one with the Hindu Brahmin, meaning the Self. The Self is who we are in our Nature. God is Nature, the Nature of all that is. What is true in the cosmos is true in our inner being. Thus our search for God means we need to be the one we are looking for. And, in that realization, we find ourselves in all as all.
The Self has three primary functions in life. In the Hindu trinity, these are identified as Brahmin, which is associated with birth into this world (in women, this is conception and birth); Vishnu, which relates to the sustaining of our form (being nursed as an infant and eating food as an adult) and Shiva, which signifies the process of death (intercourse, man emerges from a woman at birth and returns to her in marriage, sex and death. This is why we often go into a fetal position in deep sleep and at death).
Death is not the end of life but a process of life. Thus, the saying goes, "She'll be pushing up daisies when she's gone!" Death is a process of life and instrumental to our evolution.
Here I don't want to deny after-life experiences. What I'm not sure of is: "Do we keep our same persona?" I tend towards not because I feel staying in the same form or persona entails our not letting go to the ego that we misidentify with the Self, which is God / Nature.
I am more in line with the Navaho chant:
The mountains, the birds, the bees, I become it
The sun and sky, I become it.
The stars and space, I become it.
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