If you are a spiritual being inhabiting a physical body, then the brain (and your senses) serve as an interface between your spiritual self and the physical world. Your experiences as a physical being are thus intimately tied to your sensory experiences (and your memory). When you die, you will separate from the physical body and return to spiritual consciousness. Presumably, your experiences in the spiritual realm (absent your brain and sensory organs) will be fundamentally different.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind).

We come from non-physical which is eternal and we are all extensions of that let's say big conciousness (or source energy) at a non-physical level. This body is only a physical manifestation of our non-physical conciousness which is eternal and we decided before coming into these physical bodies that the way we are going to communicate with this eternal conciousness is through our brains which interprets everything physical on this planet.

Our eternal conciousness expands with every experience we have on earth and every experience we have ever had and it will carry on expanding with all the other experiences we will have on our journeys to other universes.

That's why you can feel that you have been in other places before but not in this lifetime. You have somehow connected with that eternal consciousness for an instant which has had that experience before.

You are consciousness having a physical experience. You were consciousness before you were physical and, ergo, will continue to be consciousness after you cease to have a physical experience. Your consciousness - your spirit/your soul - continues.

Remember that the physical manifestation is only one level of consciousness for the soul or the essence of our beingness. Within the soul is also the subconscious and the superconscious states of being. When we are present in the physical we are not consciousness of our other states. However when we die the consciousness becomes more present. It is allways there and will allways be there. If we can tap into the superconscious states while in the physical then we can enrich our lives here on earth.

In the physical manifestation the energy vibration is much lower than the spiritual and that is why there is little contact with the dead. After death the energy vibration is tremendously greater and thouhts manifest very quickly but not in a physical form.

My interest in spiritual matters really began after this experience. At age 15 I was in an accident where I fell down the height of 1 floor head-first on to a concrete floor & while my friends believed they were witnessing my death I had an out-of body experience as a point of reference outside my body.

I will enter a long post in the future detailing my exact experience during this incident. but until this moment I had no opinion or idea about my spirit or god or any other spiritually insiteful statements of wisdom. I had a real first-hand experience that had no refference point to anything else I had experienced up to that point.

To my surprise when I eventually started talking about this out-of body experience & my subsequent confidence in the knowing that life continues beyond death, many tried to convince me that I had a halucination and not a real experience.

Now remember I was speaking from real experience and not book knowledge. In fact, by the time I started talking about this experience, I had already read the book Journeys out of the body, & had success at consciously moving my spirit out of my body with conscious intent (the experience scared the hell out of me & I didn't have the courage to try it again).

My point to this whole this is If you are afraid of death let me say to you from first hand experience as a friend that you really don't die, you existance does not stop, it changes. I say this to all of you with absolute sincerity. Don't waste years lamenting the loss of a loved one who died because they are not lost for ever. you will meet them on the other side when you eventually graduate from this dimension.

It is good to learn form every scripture, religion, wise teachers, philosophies and what ever else that resonates true to your inner beings need to grow. but ultimately nothing beats putting some of this philosophy to actual use by testing it with your own life. You will be surprised by how much you can actually verify as real instead of just reading about it and forming opinions based on discussions with others.

Oh by the way things don't happen overnight. it takes many years & slow progression of realization that the real action is within our selves & not on the outside. but we are here to play with this awakening over the rest of our lifetime. So lets all play.

the brain is a small biological computer! the mind is not physical! and the awareness is not physical either! but all are part of you! when your car is good for scrap you exchange car! is the car you? or is it only one extension of you? well it is the same for the body! you want another example when you play video games you can believe you are the avatar in the game! when that avatar die or is destroy do you die also? if you think you are the body you will be awhile in limbo seeing darkness because your mind will make your belief come truth so on the veil of the mind you will have darkness as a picture until you realize that there is something else and lift that veil! i hope it solve your problem!

Well, to answer your question the physical body that your spirit resides in, like you live in an house but you are not part of that house, and in that physical body is the control board which is the brain which tells are send signals down nerve cells or neurons to all other parts of the body so therefore the cousciousness would take up residence in the control towel( like Vesuvius so very well said) the conciousness interlace with the brain because without the conciouness the brain could not operate it fuels the brain with the components it needs to operate)( simply put consciousness is the spark which makes all of the brain cells come alive) the brain because it controls the physical body and how it operates it subconciously because you don't have to think now breath, now walk, now talk kidney now work and so on it is done on an subconcious level like being on automatic pilot and on an concious level we think what are we going to say and what food am I going to eat and so on.

The brain is a large mass of nerve tissue enclosed in the cranium, responsible for the interpretation of sensory impulses, control of the body, and coordination; the center of thought and emotion in the body.

Now when your physical body dies the spirit does not die it leaves the body either right before death or after death and yes your conciousness goes with the spirit because it is part of the spiritual make up of the spirit. God created us both as an human being but the way he made the human being live is with the spirit God breathe into his nostrils and man became an living soul. You were still dirt and molded clay with no life before he did that.

All of your memory is in your consciousness and when your spirit is in your body you are able to retrieve some of it and sometimes you are able to retrieve more than this life time of information it depends.

Now I will also add your cells of your body retains some of your history too but that is another story to tell.

There is an old saying: The material body will go to corruption, but the soul will always live on; and in the same token that we have experienced life, we will experience death!

Therefore, until that time, life after death remains a mystery unknown to man. So be patience with your self, for you too will live to experience the destiny and victory of both your life and death alike, and the great mystery to unfold after the departure of the soul from the physical body now at rest at last. In essence, your soul is you, both spiritually, and physically!