Although your post isn't specifically directed at my beliefs, my ego responds.
It's been 5 years since my friend's stepson died. He was 24. My friend asked me to remember her spouse, and this idea came to me. My spouse has been dead for 4 years. And this is what my brain thought I should know:
"I think of John as a raindrop on a pond. John's life still creates a wave that ripples through time. We are all brief raindrops on the surface of time. But even as the drops disappear, the waves left interact and form beautiful patterns on the surface of time.
We are all part of that pattern and it is beautiful."
This differs from "Gone But Not Forgotten" because that phrase puts the impetus on the person remembering to remember. Thinking of the past person as a wave gives them more agency. Those gone still act on the living.
However, what comes after life is not the same as our current consciousness. If that were the case, having 100 billion people lived before us, at least one of them would have manifested themselves in a meaningful way and not as a dream, or "something in the side of your peripheral vision", or a fleeting thought. At least one person would have communicated at least as clearly as I'm communicating with you.
There is a reason we call dead "dead". Whatever happens after death is as different as what we call life is (as living-and-breathing) is different from being a zygote or a blastocyst.
I apologize for fighting the hypothetical. But I don't accept the paradigm. We can't know the divine but we can touch it from time to time.
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