What is the reality of the soul?

The theory says that perhaps there is only ever one soul—one thing, one suchness whatsoever—and our impression of being an “individual soul” who is having a separate experience is like the impression a wave arising from the ocean has of itself. The ocean endlessly generates infinite numbers of waves, and each one believes—for the brief duration of its appearance—that itself, and all the other waves, are not connected. Each wave pretends that it is not the ocean making waves. The waves even altogether forget they are also directly the ocean, each believing they inhabit an endless plane of separate waves. But when the wave crest falls into its trough, it becomes the ocean again.

The analogy also applies to us: There is one ocean of consciousness, and it generates infinite numbers of points of attention. You are a point of attention in the ocean of consciousness. So am I. But really, behind our masks of separate individual identities and experiences, we are really one thing experiencing ourself under the temporary arrangement of separateness. Waves are the ocean’s way of playing at not being the ocean for a while. Beings are God’s way of playing at not being God. Ultimately there are really no souls as such (if by soul you mean a forever-separate, permanent self).

In other words, I am you, you are me, and we are everywhere. If this idea sounds absurd to you because you have only ever known the Western ideas of spirituality, then know that what I've just described is the Zenith experience in Zen, Hindu, and Buddhist philosophy—the remembering of the oneness behind the temporary drama we variously call “life,” “reality,” or the “universe.” This is my way of explaining what Enlightenment is, only Enlightenment isn't a concept you grasp merely intellectually—it comes on as an unshakable mystical experience. I will explain later a particular method by which this mystical experience can be evoked—the one that led me to see the world from the perspective I just now described.

Religions are institutions of group-think comfort and hierarchical, patriarchal control, and they are no better or more truthful today than they were 3,000 years ago. What this planet’s 4,300 religions have to say about souls and death is a kind of game to prevent you from waking up to yourself and finding out who you really are. They want your tithing, your allegiance, your unquestioning obedience, your silence when their priests molest your children, and they want special tax breaks while they implore legislators and voters to pass laws that injure people whose different sexualities they are uncomfortable with.

Religions feed on your fear of death, and they stoke outrage in you for others who are different than you. They want to scorn or punish you if you reject their myths, and they want to convince you to believe they alone have the true story that you must believe if you want a happy experience after death. They want you to believe life is a dress rehearsal, that the “real thing” is coming some future day, when their mythical gods return to Earth or maybe when you die and get to Heaven if you played by their rules.

They want you to believe life is just a practice, a dry-run for the real event yet to come, and that a cosmic boogeyman will burn you in a lake of fire forever and ever if you don't play along with their game. Religion has no authentic information about what happens when we die, and yet, this is the central theme every religion is crafted around: a story about what happens when you die that is not directly verified through experience. And these 4,300 myths of what happens after death are each held up as the central reason for you to shut up, pay up, and obey the institution. Being around all those fearful, controlling homogenous people led me to see religion as a form of a Pass/Fail IQ test. Either you figure your way out of it or it traps you in the clutches of group-think.

What the death event is can be experienced without actually dying to get there. In our bodies is a neurotransmitter called N,N-DMT, also known as The Spirit Molecule. It is a molecule found in virtually all life forms on our planet and it's in your brain right now. When DMT levels in the brain reach a certain threshold, an experience happens to you in which the world sloughs away. It's all gone. You have no body and you're traveling down a tunnel made of the most beautiful crawling light patterns that could only be made by the mind of something divine that hides itself within the folds of our ordinary reality. At the end of the light tunnel await beings who are also made of light.

This is the general framework of a near death experience as recounted by many survivors, and NDEs can be safely induced with DMT. The experiences people have by participating in ayahuasca tea ceremonies, or in vaporizing DMT, closely mirror those described by NDE surivivors. If you are truly interested in finding out what's on the other side of the veil, and finding out who you are behind your human identity, know that it is possible to do so experientially through the Spirit Molecule. The most common way to glimpse the Grand Mystery is to drink ayahuasca, an Amazonian tea that contains the Spirit Molecule. Its name means “vine of the dead,” and it's been drunk ceremonially for thousands of years in the Amazon as a way for the tribes to come into direct contact with the spirit world. It is a tool to explore this Quora question directly without any myths and campfire stories getting in the way. I would recommend watching the documentary DMT: The Spirit Molecule, based on a psychiatrist’s FDA-sanctioned study of DMT in the early 1990s.

The Spirit Molecule are the tools for exploring consciousness from time to time. The experiences the Spirit Molecule gave me touched me profoundly, and I wish more people knew about it and experienced its effects to reduce our cultural fear about dying, and to weaken our species’ debilitating, toxic obsession with religious dogma. There's no need for making up and clinging onto our dead ancestors’ stories and myths. We are each of us the original mystery of creation and we are also the creative force behind the collective dream-world we share. We are It. Cheers!