I used to think “passed away” was just a euphemism.

A way to avoid the hard truth.

I thought, “Why do they say passed away, transitioned, or went home?” Just be plain. “He died." Don’t sugarcoat it.”

My first grief counselor told me, “When you can say ‘died instead of something like passed away,’ you’re on the road to healing.”

But the more I learned, the more I realized we “plain speak people” had it backwards.

“Died” is the lie.

It means cessation. The end of life.

But you cannot cease to be.

You ARE life.

You Are Not Your Body

Here’s what I mean.

If you were your body, would you be the same person as the baby that was born with your name?

Think about it.

Your cells turn over constantly. Skin cells every few weeks. Red blood cells every few months. Most of your body replaces itself every seven to ten years.

Virtually none of the cells in your body now are the same cells from when you were born. Certainly, none of the molecules. You eat, you assimilate, you eliminate. There’s constant turnover. Your body is made up of completely different stuff than newborn you, five-year-old you, or even you from a decade ago.

The Ship of Theseus—the ancient philosophical paradox—asks: if you replace every plank of a ship, one by one, is it still the same ship? Your body is that ship. It’s been completely rebuilt dozens of times over your lifetime.

Yet you’re still you.

Why?

Because what’s continuous isn’t your body. It’s your consciousness.

Your Brain Is a Receiver, Not a Creator of Consciousness

We’ve been taught that the brain creates consciousness the way a generator creates electricity.

But the evidence points to something different.

Your brain is more like a filter. A receiver. Like a radio picking up a signal that exists whether the radio is turned on or not.

When the radio breaks, the music doesn’t cease to exist. The broadcast waves are still out there. You just can’t hear it anymore through that particular device.

This isn’t just philosophy. Near-death experiencers tell us this consistently.

They report expanded consciousness when the brain is compromised. Enhanced awareness when the filter is damaged. They describe experiences that are often more vivid, more real than normal waking consciousness. The brain seems to reduce experience, not create it.

Dr. Pim van Lommel’s research showed NDEs occurring during measurable periods of no brain activity. How do you have a lucid experience with a non-functioning creator of consciousness?

Because consciousness doesn’t originate in the brain.

Even the Government Knows Consciousness Isn’t Local

If you think the idea that consciousness exists beyond the body is just wishful thinking, think about this: the U.S. government spent over 20 years and $20 million studying it.

From 1972 to 1995, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency ran a classified program called Stargate. The mission? To see if consciousness could gather intelligence from locations thousands of miles away.

Physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at Stanford Research Institute developed protocols for “remote viewing”—the ability to perceive and describe distant locations without being physically present.

And it worked.

Remote viewer Pat Price, a former police officer, was given only geographic coordinates for a target site in the Soviet Union. What he described was startling: a large building near water, people assembling a massive 60-foot diameter metal sphere from curved sections, workers struggling with welding because the pieces kept warping.

He sketched what he “saw” in remarkable detail.

Three years later, Aviation Week magazine published a story about the Soviet atomic bomb laboratory at Semipalatinsk. The sphere Price had described—which he’d drawn as about 58 feet in diameter—was real. It was designed to capture and store energy from nuclear-driven explosives.

Russell Targ, a physicist, later said: “The accuracy of Price’s drawing is the sort of thing that I as a physicist would never have believed, if I had not seen it for myself.”

The program achieved a reported accuracy rate of 65% or higher in later experiments. Remote viewers located a downed Soviet aircraft in Africa. They described hidden Soviet military installations. They identified the location of a kidnapped American general in Italy.

For over two decades, the government used this capability because it demonstrated something they couldn’t ignore: consciousness can operate independent of the physical body. It can access information across vast distances without any known physical mechanism.

Think about what this means.

If your consciousness can “see” what’s happening thousands of miles away while your body sits in a room in California, then consciousness clearly isn’t created by your brain or confined to your skull.

The government knows this. They studied it. They used it. They just don’t talk about it much.

This isn’t fringe science. This is documented, ...