One of the greatest misunderstandings in religion is the belief that stories about what happens after death are necessarily describing what happens when the physical body dies. The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Greek myths of descent into the underworld, and even the biblical accounts of death and resurrection can all be understood as descriptions of internal processes that take place while we’re still alive. The descent into the underworld is the confrontation with everything we’ve buried within ourselves. The judgment of the dead is the moment we can no longer hide from the truth of what we are. The terrifying deities of the Tibetan tradition are manifestations of consciousness that must be recognized rather than feared. And the resurrection described in Christianity is the emergence of a new way of being after the identity we’ve spent our lives constructing begins to dissolve. The problem is that people have spent thousands of years turning descriptions of experiences into beliefs about places they’ll go after they die. They’ve mistaken maps of consciousness for maps of the afterlife. I’m not claiming to know entirely what happens after physical death. What I’m saying is that there’s a death you can experience long before your body dies, and until you’ve undergone it, you’re largely dependent on what other people tell you these stories mean. You can spend your entire life studying descriptions of resurrection without ever actually experiencing it. You can memorize every detail of the underworld without ever making the descent. At some point, you have to stop studying the map and actually make the journey. The kingdom of heaven isn’t necessarily somewhere you go when you die….it’s something you can discover while you’re still alive.