What is that silence we call death? I know it's the cessation of life, but that's not what I'm asking.?

Have you ever walked through an empty hall where only the sounds your hear are your own footsteps. The hall seems so completely empty. Why? Because no one is there. Death is like that. A person's eyes change when a person dies. They have a glaze over them like a building that has long been unoccupied. Again, no one is there.

Death is when your physical body ceases to live. After this, I view the afterlife to be kind of like once you've been shot in paintball, and you have to go back to the cabin or whereever, and you wait around with some other people til everyone else comes back. Except you're hopefully really happy.

THE PHENOMENON OF DEATH

We generally recognize only one kind of death, the physical cessation of life energies; but concerning personality survival there are really three kinds:

1. Spiritual (soul) death. If and when mortal man has finally rejected survival, when he has been pronounced spiritually insolvent, morontially bankrupt, in the conjoint opinion of the Spirit and the surviving seraphim, when such co-ordinate advice has been recorded and after the Censors and their reflective associates have verified these findings, thereupon do the rulers order the immediate release of the indwelling Monitor. But this release of the Spirits in no way affects the duties of the personal or group seraphim concerned with that Spirit-abandoned individual. This kind of death is final in its significance irrespective of the temporary continuation of the living energies of the physical and mind mechanisms. From the cosmic standpoint the mortal is already dead; the continuing life merely indicates the persistence of the material momentum of cosmic energies.

2. Intellectual (mind) death. When the vital circuits of higher adjutant ministry are disrupted through the aberrations of intellect or because of the partial destruction of the mechanism of the brain, and if these conditions pass a certain critical point of irreparability, the indwelling Adjuster is immediately released to depart for Divinington. On the universe records a mortal personality is considered to have met with death whenever the essential mind circuits of human will-action have been destroyed. And again, this is death, irrespective of the continuing function of the living mechanism of the physical body. The body minus the volitional mind is no longer human, but according to the prior choosing of the human will, the soul of such an individual may survive.

3. Physical (body and mind) death. When death overtakes a human being, the Spirit remains in the citadel of the mind until it ceases to function as an intelligent mechanism, about the time that the measurable brain energies cease their rhythmic vital pulsations. Following this dissolution the Spirit takes leave of the vanishing mind, just as unceremoniously as entry was made years before.

After death the material body returns to the elemental world from which it was derived, but two nonmaterial factors of surviving personality persist: The pre-existent Spirit, with the memory transcription of the mortal career, and there also remains, in the custody of the destiny guardian, the immortal soul of the deceased human. These phases and forms of soul, these once kinetic but now static formulas of identity, are essential to repersonalization on the next Spirit worlds; and it is the reunion of the Spirit and the soul that reassembles the surviving personality, that reconsciousizes you at the time of the morontia awakening.

For those who do not have personal seraphic guardians, the group custodians faithfully and efficiently perform the same service of identity safekeeping and personality resurrection. The seraphim are indispensable to the reassembly of personality.

Upon death the Thought Spirit temporarily loses personality, but not identity; the human subject temporarily loses identity, but not personality; on the mansion worlds both reunite in eternal manifestation. Never does a departed Spirit return to earth as the being of former indwelling; never is personality manifested without the human will; and never does a dis-Spirited human being after death manifest active identity or in any manner establish communication with the living beings of earth. Such dis-Adjustered souls are wholly and absolutely unconscious during the long or short sleep of death. There can be no exhibition of any sort of personality or ability to engage in communications with other personalities until after completion of survival. Those who go to the Spirit worlds are not permitted to send messages back to their loved ones. It is the policy throughout the universes to forbid such communication during the period of a current dispensation.