Spirit Is Eternal

What happens to us when we die? Is death a loss of the physical body, a prelude to dark nothingness, or do we go onto something that we cannot yet fully explain? These tantalizing testimonies — of people who emerge from near-death experiences, who then literally come back to life, and the spiritual traditions that insist upon the reality of phenomena like reincarnation — all point to the ambiguous but important questions for both science and the human condition. What does it mean to ‘die’? And its corollary: what does it mean to live?

Created with digital painting tools, this work integrates imagery that combines the symbolism of the bluejay, which represents the discovery of one’s true self. In the yogic tradition, it is believed that one’s true self is not the personality, but rather pure awareness, or sat-chit-ananda, the Sanskit term for “truth, consciousness, bliss.” The ancient sacred geometry of the shri yantra — rendered in three dimensions and representing the creative power of the Universe — sits at the centre of the liberated bird-being, and metaphorically at the centre of the ever-continual process of manifesting and un-manifesting, creation and dissolution. The hum of universal frequencies, signified by the range of spectral colours in the background, suggests an embryonic, vibrational state prior to the consciousness manifesting itself into the physical plane — only to become un-manifest and re-integrated back into the source at the time of ‘death’. Whatever happens, the Spirit is eternal, and never truly dies.