More Questions than Answers (Pt II): Lent 2024, Day 41

Here are some my uncertainties about the nature of survival of human consciousness after biological death:

• Studies of patients brought back from near-death suggest that near-death experiences are not universal. Only in 17% of cases studied were NDEs reported by patients. There appears to be no link between those reporting them. "NDEs have been reported by children, adults, scientists, physicians, priests, ministers, among the religious and atheists, and from countries throughout the world." So the first question is why only one in six, and what do these cases have in common?
  
  
• Do the remaining 83% of consciousnesses simply snuff out along with their bodies? Or does this statistic only relate to near-death experiences? 
  
  
• Assuming that there is survival of consciousness after death – does this take the form of the individual (small-c consciousness) carrying forward in time as an individual's continuity of experience – though stripped at biological death of the ego? 
  
  
• If individual consciousness does survive individually, does it pass into another biological entity, a new biological 'container', in what is commonly referred to as reincarnation, with the new incarnation being aware to some degree of details of a past life or lives?
  
  
• If reincarnation does indeed happen (and my own personal experience suggests that yes it does, but intimations of it are weak and require a sensitivity to the phenomenon), how soon after one body's death is a new body there to accept it?
  
  
• What physical vectors (in any!) may be involved? Quantum mechanics? Gut-biome? Neural oscillations resulting in electro-magnetic phenomena?
  
  
• An alternative scenario to physical reincarnation in a new biological container is that individual small-c consciousness merges with the collective, cosmic, Big-C consciousness. Does this happen immediately after biological death, or is there a waiting period (purgatory in Catholic theology)?
  
  
• On the merging of the small-c and Big-C consciousnesses – do we lose our individual identities to be subsumed in a Cosmic Whole (All in God, God in All)? If so, how does this differ from eternal oblivion, if what we experience is share by literally everything? Is individual identity not watered down to the point of non-existence?
  
  
• I have been generally postulating a Universe that unfolds along a fixed arrow of time, from the Big Bang to its eventual demise. As it does so, we, the conscious observers, grow in wisdom, love and understanding away from the bestial towards the angelic. But how about a block universe in which the present is all there is? One evolves spiritually by reincarnating into a better and better world, though one that's always located between the 20th and 21st centuries?
  
  

"There are more questions than answers,
Pictures in my mind that will not show,
And the more I find out,
The less I know."

The theme tune to this week's blog posts (featuring what was probably the only pedal-steel guitar on the island of Jamaica).

Lent 2023, Day 41
The End of Times

Lent 2022: Day 41
A Better Future

Lent 2021: Day 41
The Holiest of Holies

Lent 2020: Day 40
God and Nation don't go together