What if death is not the end? It might not be the end that you want, but what if death is not the end of your story? Because according to Spinoza’s monism, there might be more to your postmortem existence than you might think. Spinoza argued that the entire universe is just one substance. Your body and all of your thoughts are part of this substance. Everything is part of an eternal, infinite substance. But everything that we interact with — all of the objects and all of the people that we meet — are modes. Modes are temporary configurations of the underlying reality. So, you are just a particular configuration at this moment in time. Eventually, you will move on to a different mode, because we are just waves in an ocean, briefly visible above the whole. And one day, our waves will fade back again into the sea. Likewise, you are just a fleeting moment of the infinite. You are a temporary manifestation of the one substance. Eventually, your mind and your body will disintegrate and you will rejoin the great ocean. But your substance will not vanish; it will just transform. Spinoza invites us to see the world from the perspective of eternity, and from this view, the distinctions we make between others and ourselves, between life and death, are just illusions born of our limited perspective. And so you are not just a human. You are the universe momentarily expressed as you. And one day, you will rejoin the infinite substance — not as a loss, but as part of the eternal flow of modes. — @philosophyminis TikTok