“Yes, it is confusing initially, however, it is very difficult to explain this in another way. Let me try and expand a little:
“When I said human equals pure consciousness I was referring to the intellectual functions. That is, all those things I listed are the complementary functions of consciousness. So in short, when we say consciousness we refer to all of these things. In practice, however, the mind or the intellect is different, memory is different and the soul is different. Yet they are all components of consciousness.”
“So human is the sum total of all of this?”
“Yes… For example, the soul is the sense of ‘I am’ but don’t take this as ego or pride. Think of a person now… First he knows himself – this act of ‘knowing thyself’ happens through the ‘soul’ – the sense of ‘I’. Then, he begins to store the information he perceives in case it will be useful in the future. This act of storing is due to his faculty of memory. Then, he contemplates on the matters he perceives and tries to draw new conclusions from them; thus using his faculty of thought. When he thinks of non-existent things, he imagines. When he assigns forms and identities to these imagined things, he gives them shape. All of these are the properties that constitute an existence composed of intellectual functions knows as ‘human’. I hope it makes more sense now.”
“It seems, in this light, the being composed of intellectual functions known as human isn’t a material existence after all… It follows then we possess these qualities before birth, that is, before even having a material body, but we don’t even remember our childhood properly, let alone before birth. How would you explain this?”
“We said all of these qualities constitute human. But the activation of these qualities occurs concurrent with the person’s body and physical development. Before birth these qualities are at level zero, which bears no meaning for us today.”
“How about after death? What happens to humans after death?” Gonul asked with a curious yet doubtful tone, “we talk about an afterlife, about hell and heaven, and we believe in these concepts. Are these things real? What is their reality?”
“The disclosure of these realities is completely dependent on the comprehension level of the people. That is to say, there are some people who have reached the core or the inner reality of these concepts, but have inadvertently chosen to refer to them in a language that appeals to the common, hence disclosing them via symbols.
“That which is referred to as ‘death’, for example, is simply a person’s disconnection from their biological body. People who witness someone’s death infer that the person has become ‘non-existent’ hence adopting the belief that death means non-existence. In fact, many who don’t know the core of this matter believe they will physically come back to the world someday…
“With the termination of the biological body a person ceases to exist according to other biological bodied beings! But the truth is that his ‘non-existence’ in respect of other biological bodies doesn’t make him non-existent in reality. In fact, when something in the universe is considered non-existent it is in comparison to something else that is seemingly existent, hence it is a relative concept. The reality is neither the judgment ‘existent’ nor ‘non-existent’ is valid.
“It is the conditionings and the five senses, that is limited sense perception that spawns the judgments ‘existent’ and ‘non-existent’. Something that exists according to one thing may not exist according to something else.
“Of course, in order to comprehend this truth one must evaluate all of this without the limitations of the senses and the conditions he has accrued.