Ram Dass once said:
By cutting through the veil of illusion, one realizes they are not the body or the mind. In fact, we are seduced into the appearances of reality.The game is to get free from attachments to the senses by using the witness.
I keep coming back to that line—using the witness. I close my eyes and try to imagine what it feels like to slip beneath the costume of who I think I am.
Not the 78-year-old woman.
Not the one carrying old pain.
Not the roles I’ve played, the fears I’ve tended, the identities I’ve held like talismans.
What would remain if every story dissolved?
For a moment—even just the length of a breath—I feel it. A quiet spaciousness. A soft, luminous presence not tied to memory or body or name.
And it makes me wonder: Where do we truly go when we die?
There are so many ideas.
Some say we enter a realm where we watch our life played back—every choice, every gesture, every mistake—not as punishment, but as learning.
Some envision heaven and angels and pearly gates with ledgers. Others speak of reincarnation, soul contracts, astral planes, ancestral reunions.
I don’t know.
But here’s what I feel:
I don’t believe in a cosmic report card.
I don’t believe in a celestial judge tallying good and evil.
If anything, I believe we slip back into the essence we came from—a kind of stardust of consciousness, a shimmer of pure awareness.
Love, if you want a simpler word for it.
Because if our deepest nature—beneath the wounds, beneath the stories—is love, then love is what remains.
Maybe the body falls away and the mind quiets and the personality dissolves like mist, and what’s left is simply the witness that watches it all unfold.
The part of us that was never harmed.
Never broken.
Never separate.
Never in danger of being lost.
The part Ram Dass was pointing us toward.
Sometimes I imagine the moment after the last breath — not a tunnel or a judgment or a reunion, but an exhale into spaciousness.
A remembering:
Oh. I was never that small story at all.
Maybe the “life review” mystics describe isn’t punishment but recognition.
Maybe we see our choices from a place of clarity, not shame.
Maybe we meet our own life the way a mother meets her child—with tenderness, with forgiveness, with understanding.
Maybe the question is not, “Will I be judged?” but “Will I finally see myself without the veil?”
And maybe that seeing is freedom.
The game, as Ram Dass said, is to loosen our grip on the senses enough to notice that the witness has been here the whole time, quietly, patiently, lovingly waiting for us to remember.
I don’t know what comes after this life. But I know this:
When everything I think I am falls away, I hope what remains is only this—Love, spacious and unbound, returning to itself.
Perhaps this is the quiet gift of the Third Eye Chakra—the ability to witness without clinging, to see beyond the story, to remember what has always been true.
