Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

the title of my last book, Then I Am Myself, the book.

This is what it's, Then I Am Myself, the world.

Suddenly, I know it sounds terrible, but you feel you're one with the universe and that, holy maloney, it shifted my, you know, so at the time I was 65 and

You believe in what truly exists, what really exists.

It's pretty established.

But it completely shifted the tectonic planes of my metaphysics.

So I'm now much more of an idealist who believes that ultimately what truly exists, Andrew, is not the physical.

There's atoms and matter and energy and information, space and time.

They exist in some sense, but they're ultimately the product of something phenomenal, something mental, because I felt I became part of reality.

This cosmic consciousness, whatever, for some timeless moment.

And so to directly answer your question, I now believe that when I die, Christoph will be gone.

Christoph will never come again, right?

Christoph, I mean, this person looks like this, talks with this funny accent, has these particular traits and behavior and memories.

That will be gone.

But...

my conscious experience will go back to where it came from.

This is where it came from.

This ultimately, this, and Schopenhauer, the German idealist for Schopenhauer, this beautiful piece where he talks about, it's like, you know, there's this ocean and there's this froth, and for a brief moment, you know, this little bubble that's part of this wave believes, oh, I'm an individual, I'm supreme.

And then, of course, it lives for 60 or 80 years, and then it gets absorbed by the ocean again, becomes part of the overall ocean.

So that's, I think, that's my current belief.