Evolution of love

WHO AM I?

When a person strictly identifies his only existence with his body and is certain the universe is a separate, random, external entity, then saying “Death isn’t real” is not only ludicrous, it’s untrue. His body’s cells will all indeed die. His false and limited sense of being an isolated organism—this will end, too. Claims of an afterlife will be met with an appropriately justifiable skepticism: “What has an afterlife, my rotting corpse? How?”
The next level upward has our individual feeling himself to be a living entity, a spirit perhaps, ensconced in a body; if he’s had spiritual experiences or else religious or philosophical beliefs of an immortal soul being part and parcel of his essence, then now it makes more sense for him to accept that something goes on even after the body is gone, and he’ll not waver in this view even as his atheistic friends deride him for wishful thinking.
The concept of death has always meant one thing only: an end that has no reprieve or ambiguity. It can only happen to something that has been born or created, something whose nature is bounded and finite. That fine wine glass you inherited from your grandmother can have a death when it falls and shatters into a dozen fragments; it’s gone for keeps. Individual bodies also have natal moments, their cells destined to age and self-destruct after about ninety generations, even if not acted upon by outside forces. Stars die too, albeit after enjoying lifespans usually numbered in the billions of years.
Now comes the biggie, the oldest question of all. Who am I? If I am only my body, then I must die. If I am my consciousness, the sense of experience and sensations, then I cannot die for the simple reason that consciousness may be expressed in manifold fashion sequentially, but it is ultimately unconfined. Or if one prefers to pin things down, the “alive” feeling, the sensation of “me” is, so far as science can tell, a sprightly neuro-electrical fountain operating with about 100 watts of energy, the same as a bright light bulb. We even emit the same heat as a bulb, too, which is why a car rapidly gets warmer, even during a cold night, especially when a driver is accompanied by a passenger or two.
Now the truly skeptical might argue that this internal energy merely “goes away” at death and vanishes. But one of the surest axioms of science is that energy can never die, ever. Energy is known with scientific certainty to be deathless; it can neither be created nor destroyed. It merely changes form. Because absolutely everything has an energy-identity, nothing is exempt from this immortality.