Consciousness continues after death in its myriad forms. Consciousness is a priori to life. It cannot die. It does not change. It is the substrate of all that exists. Consciousness is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent.

I had a very powerful near-death experience and can very much confirm the reality of the soul. I experienced detaching from my physical body and watching from above the aftermath of the devastating car wreck I caused unfolding below me (no one was killed). I watched ambulances rush to the scene, my victims pulled from their cars and taken away. I watched my own handcuffed lifeless body having its clothing cut off, placed on a stretcher, and put in the ambulance. For the next couple of days, while my physical body was in a coma, I – my soul – remained separate from it, having a truly remarkable journey of its own. Upon my return to this body, and consequent to my role in the accident, I received a 35-year prison sentence, of which I have served 7 years. Needless to say, I have had ample time for reflection and introspection regarding the reality of what I experienced – the reality of the soul.

The questions proposed here consumed me for many years after I was locked up – “what evidence is there of a soul?” After reading dozens of books, research papers, and testimonials looking for “proof” of the soul, I can honestly say I found none. The root of my problem, however, was equating truth with proof as if they were synonymous terms. Subjective realities such as the soul state are verifiable but not provable. All subjective states are similar. I can verify I am happy, but I cannot prove it to you or show you evidence confirming my happiness. Evidence and proof are objective and belong to the scientific paradigm – a linear paradigm, of which the soul is not a part. Unfortunately, the reality of the soul will forever remain locked in the consciousness of those who have become her and then returned to tell their stories.

If the human ego keeps us in fear of our own mortality, then it ensures its own reincarnation. Fear binds the soul to the physical world, and the physical world is nothing more than a projection of the ego itself. Suffering is a mentalization created by the ego. It reflects a degree of desirability and has no existence outside of the mind.

Good versus bad is just one pair of innumerable mind-made dualities. In spiritual literature, resolving this duality, as proposed in your question, is referred to as the paradox of the opposites. Good and bad are like hot and cold; they are arbitrarily selected points of view that show how reality is perceived and experienced. It is not that reality “is” that way. It appears so because we perceive the world through our limited sensory organs. When we smell, hear, see, or feel something, that sensation replicates the belief that those qualities we sense are indeed real. The objects of sensation are then labeled by the mind, given separate identities and unique nominalization. The crux of duality lies in this labeling process, in language that contains an unstated positionality and an implied context.

It is most difficult to undo this programming volitionally because it is something embedded in our psyche since we were children. We are taught colors, shapes, and sizes. We are assigned our own label, and given a name. We are taught this is mom, this is dad. You are a girl; he is a boy. This is right, this is wrong. In children, the duality of good and bad is further reinforced because they are generally rewarded for being good and punished for being bad. Good and bad then become something existential, something which produces tangible results.

In Reality, there is neither good nor bad. They are mentalization that describe degrees of desirability. Actually, nothing in the universe, nor the universe itself, means anything. Its existence is its meaning. If one could move beyond the mind, transcending the ego, one finds there is nothing to praise or condemn. No right or wrong, good or bad. Beyond duality, there is no here or there, now and then. There is no space or time or anything causing anything else. The subjective I is found to be the non-localized reality of the Self, and the ever-present newness that you seek is all that remains.

As human beings, our minds are conditioned to believe in a world separate from ourselves. As children, we are given a label, our name, taught some language, and taught to divide the world into conceptual bits and pieces, labeling those pieces as “this” or “that.” Language is the primary factor in manufacturing the illusion of duality. The identification I have with my body as being “Adam” tells me I’m separate from the world around me, restricted in size and ability, conditioned by forces and physical laws that govern physical things. As we grow up and our bodies begin to change, space, time, and causality become a reality. We feel we are a material body that occupies some amount of space, subject to age over time. The thing about space, time, cause, effect, now, then, here, and there is that they are not actually real. Those are metaphysical concepts. No one has ever sensed or experienced any one of them. These purely mental abstractions arose from primitive instinctual drives, i.e., I am here, food is over there running at a certain speed, I have to cover a certain distance to get to that food, and so forth. Our survival was dependent upon making these sorts of measurements. Thus, the concepts of space, time, causality, etc., were ingrained into our psyche long before we formally labeled them as such. Thousands of years later, our ego/mind evolved out of those instincts and assigned a reality to those metaphysical concepts. Thereby cementing the belief in an independent world, which exists separate from that which experiences it.

To the second part of your question, “is it possible that everything we perceive is a product of our imagination,” I would say yes, it is possible. After a horrendous car accident, I left my body and saw many worlds that I had undoubtedly created. After three days in a coma, I returned to this body and my experience of those other worlds exists as a very lucid, structured set of memories, no different than any memory I have of this world. Today, my view has radically shifted from what it was prior to the wreck. When I returned to the body, I found it is only the human ego that denies authorship of its surroundings and plays victim to its own projections. The ego is very tricky, allowing us to believe its projected world arises “out there” apart from it. Our imagination, which I believe is the root of manifestation, produces an “objective reality” whose original source has been forgotten by its creator – the ego. And because the dualistic images we perceive are the very filter through which we interpret our experiences, our senses tell us the images and qualities we project are external. I now believe that what we sense objectively is a projected representation of the subjective mind, or you could say what we perceive as the manifest universe is the experience of meaning developed in the mind. In short, I believe what the sages all tell us: “The universe is in you; you are not in the universe.”