As often happens when I find myself outside, say at the beach, and there is time for thinking, I start contemplating various matters. This last Sunday my wife and I went to “church” at Warwick Long Bay. Consistently in my life I have gotten more out of being alone with God in the midst of what He has created as compared to being in the midst of a bunch of people reaching up to God with what they have created. I know, I know, that was perhaps a harsh contrast, but bear with me. God does not ultimately disappoint. He may stretch me and challenge my faith, but He does not disappoint. I may feel disappointed with God, but He does not disappoint. And I don’t care how delicate the chapel or how grand the cathedral, what God makes just ouperforms what people make. It speaks to me more completely.Anyway, while I was standing on the sand, looking out to sea with the wind blowing, I began to wonder about something. From psychology and the philosophy of mind I realise that mind, what we call psyche, or soul, or even self, is something that forms on the fly as my brain, that is my body, is engaged in the world. The working of bio-physical systems gives rise to the working of parallel metaphysical systems. There is a technical term for this supervenience, which you can look up for yourself in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or even on Wikipedia.What I know is that the conscious awareness of myself, my mind at work, is dependent on my brain being at work. For example, if I am in a cold room, and it is so cold that I start to shiver, then I start moving around to keep myself warm, and my ability to relax and speak with other people is limited and overshadowed by what my body, and thus my brain, is processing. They are trying to maintain my metabolism. The experience I am having of being alive and being myself is that I am cold, and I feel awkward and distracted talking to others because my primary interest is to get warm. My experience of self is a whole body, whole person kind of thing. Mind depends on brain. At least, this is one theory of the self and certainly one theory of mind.So what happens when my brain dies, as it surely will, because every part of my body will die? Will my conscious sense of self just go poof with it? If my conscious sense of self depends, and actually comes into existence, out of the working of the physical brain, then what kind of consciousness do I have when my brain dies?Standing beside the water as it rolled onto the sand, I was reminded that Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today, you shall be with me in paradise”. The “you” was an address to a conscious person who was having a subjective experience of himself, much to his chagrin, for he was suffering on a cross and would soon die. This was what Martin Buber might have recognised as an I-Thou moment. These two people, Jesus and the thief, met one another in an intense moment of contact, one person to another one different, conscious person to another. Each was having a subjective experience of self, and their minds were engaged with what their brains were doing. When you read the narratives, you see two people dealing with the fact that they were in the process of dying. Jesus says, “Father, why have you forsaken me?” The thief says, “I deserve to die, but You don’t; remember me when you enter Your kingdom”. And Jesus, from somewhere in the midst of what He was going through, said to him, “You will be with me”. It doesn’t make sense to believe He meant that they would both be in a dark oblivion unaware of one another.So, I asked God, standing there next to the waves coming ashore, “Will I dissolve and reform into something completely different? Will I know myself as myself? Will there be continuity between this life and the next?”We are promised that we will be raised a spiritual body, just as Jesus was raised a spiritual body. That seems like an oxymoron to me (spirit, an immaterial thing; body, a material thing). I know that we are now spirited bodies, in the sense that my body somehow is fused with a spiritual capacity, a spiritual consciousness. Since my spirit is part of that supervenient relationship of body-mind, because we are whole beings, I cannot tell how much of my spirit, which goes to be with the Lord at death, will be conscious, or what that consciousness will be like, but I know I am promised some kind of conscious presence with God after I die.Then I wondered about something else. You know scientists are discovering all the time earthlike planets in the cosmos. Recently in the news there was an earthlike planet four-and-a-half times the size of the Earth, in the habitable zone, only 22 light years away. ONLY 22 light years? A person could never get there. But a thought could be there instantly; a spirit could be there instantly, and so could a spiritual body.What would it be like to inhabit a new world somewhere else in the cosmos, light years away from here? It boggles the mind, a mind whose thoughts are affected by such things as standing with two feet on the sand, hearing the waves crash against the sand, feeling the sand blow against me in the wind, feeling the warmth of the sun.In such reverie I get a sense of the magnitude and majesty of God. He is so far above and beyond my abilities to reason. That is why I just “love” watching people judge God and say that God should do this or that, because He seems to be unfair and mean, or that God doesn’t make sense to them. Duh. Imagine that.