“The only things that are certain are death and taxes.” Now that corporations are persons and so easily evade taxes, perhaps it’s time to declare that only death is certain. What is death? A medical dictionary says that death is the cessation of vital functions: heartbeat, breathing, brain activity. Sounds pretty terminal.

If we are talking about the body, maybe that’s enough, although some of the cells are still alive. How long do those living cells continue their rebellion? It doesn’t matter. We bury, cremate, or perhaps elevate them on a platform of branches when the whole is deader than the life of its parts.

So is that the end of the story for the individual. Born, lived, died, the end?

It depends on whom you ask. Agnostic or atheist: 32 percent will say they believe in life after death. Spiritual-but-not-religious Americans: 79 percent. Jews: 58 percent. Hindus: 59 percent.

Various religions have different stories about what happens to you even as your body begins the return to dust. They also have various prescriptions for what to do with your bodily remains. Hindus cremate. Jews usually not. Christians bury or cremate. Catholics prefer burial. Islam usually prohibits cremation. Religions differ on how long it takes for you to depart from your body and therefore how much care must be given to the body after your expiration date.

Is the story of your body the story of you? Or is there more. Is there a you that outlasts the body? When we examine the physical, the sequence appears consistent and universal. A physical thing is created, more or less maintained for some time, and then is destroyed. Birth, life, death. The scale doesn’t appear to matter.

Buildings may outlast cars, a stadium will outlast a deer, a window is likely to go before the house it is in, but all these things and every other thing including stars and planets come into being, last a while, and then slowly or quickly wink out.

Call it death or call it rearrangement of parts; sooner or later the universe, like a great furnace, consumes at least the forms of all of its physical constituents.

If universal dissolution of physical forms is a law of nature, as it appears to be, and there is to be a you that outlasts your body, then either that you is not a physical form, or it is being destroyed more slowly than your body.

I believe most people who believe in life after death believe that the you that endures is not physical. They think of it as soul or spirit or consciousness that continues because it is not physical and consequently does not meet the same fate as the body.

Existence of mental experiences makes many comfortable with a non-physical component of our existence. We often hear talk of the immortal soul, suggesting immunity to the inevitable destruction that befalls the physical.

Consolation 1: Do we ever experience death? I say no, but the truth is that I don’t know. It seems that if there is nothing after death, all we experience is the dying, but not death or even the transition. And if there is something after death, then we didn’t die and so we do not experience death.

Consolation 2: Our experience informs us that consciousness exists. In fact, it is only by some event in consciousness that we know of the existence of anything. So might it be that everything is made of that one substance, consciousness?

Metaphor alert. Is existence perhaps an ocean of consciousness. Is the manifest world, the activity of reality, simply the waves of activity of that ocean? The waves appear to be separate and to be born, continue, and then die, but are merely the activity of the ocean.

When we lose sight of the ocean, we see birth and death of the waves. When our vision expands, we see the continuing existence of the real identity of the waves, the ocean. Nothing dies. That which is, the ocean, simply continues to exist. In this worldview, everything is the ocean and nothing dies.

Some people take themselves to be the body and in their vision, when the body goes, they go.

Others take themselves to be a nonphysical entity associated with the body. When the body goes, their nonphysical self endures, perhaps forever.

Others take themselves to be the All, to be One. For them, death is out of the question.

Richard S. Bogartz is a professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts.