Since so many of the answers are based on experience, I’ll contribute mine.
I have encountered what I will call “spirits,” though exactly what a spirit is, I am unsure. In several instances these things were similar to living humans, except without a body. Consequently, communication has been more along the line of ‘thought transference,’ and seems to be facilitated by the Alpha brain frequency (i.e., if you can consciously generate the alpha brain wave and remain conscious, like in meditation, your chances at communication are improved). In those cases a ‘personality’ or ‘non-physical consciousness’ seems to be present in a parallel to this physical world. The ‘spirits’ there seem to be lost and/or bored, and often seem tied to a physical place. This is where our concept of ghosts and hauntings comes from; after a few decades of boredom you find out you can scare people, give them nightmares, etc., FUN!
Based on this, I’ll say that when we die, some part of us, with some sort of consciousness, continues on.
But then why isn’t everywhere saturated with ghosts? Read on…
Not everyone who dies stays behind in Earth parallel wandering and confused. I have worked with people who have ‘spirits’ as helpers for them, to get them information otherwise unobtainable. These are also formerly living pesons with self-consciousness, but they have agreed to work with those mediums for some reason (yet undetermined). In my experience their information is not always accurate. They can be perceived as free-standing fields of energy.
Some of the lost spirits I have encountered have been persuaded to leave where they are. This is helpful in eliminating hauntings, but I’m not sure I’m doing the ‘right thing.’ I tell them to look around for a source of white light (not the sun) and to go to it. When they do, they do not return. I have personal leanings toward the idea of the “absolute singularity” as proffered by Zoe, but - well, we’ll get to that later. I imagine that when we die some are confused and wait for their experience to direct them, others are directed by beliefs they held before death, and move onward, thus not becoming ‘ghosts.’
I have been visited by people who were formerly alive. They have retained the non-physical aspects of life (consciousness, personality) and they know they are no longer physically alive. Usually they find me, and frankly, some that I have expected would come back, haven’t. Those who have visited me have told me things about the ‘afterlife’ or have told me things about the nature of reality, but I seem to be a kid who is flunking “Spirituality 101,” 'cause I am unable to adequately put these concepts on paper, or even explain them to others. It’s like we don’t have the right words in English to describe it.
I can kinda point at it, though. To wit:
There is an existance of a non-physical (spiritual, or energetic) nature. We, or at least some part of each of us, is extant in this ‘dimension’ (existance, place, whatever). One spirit that talked with me made allusions to a unity among and within spirits, but simultaneously directed that there was a separateness within that unity. Sounds paradoxical, but it made sense when he said it.
When we die, our body ceases functioning, but our essence continues on. We can be undirected, get lost, and become a haunt, or we can create our own fantasy, like heaven or hell or purgatory, that is real enough for us to believe in and stay there. There’s probably thousands of other things we entities can do as well, like reincarnation, but there is another place/dimension/creation where some sort of enlightenment is restored. I say restored, because we originally come from there. What goes on there, I don’t know, and why people come back from there to communicate with us mortals is beyond me. I was also not told (and was too awed to ask) whether ‘spirits’ are eternal. I was told, though, that God is not seperate from us.
S¬
…V
