WHAT I BELIEVE ABOUT THE SOUL & THE AFTER-LIFE

In the last few weeks, I received news of several friends & a family member who passed away. This caused me to reflect on the questions of the after-life and if there is a soul that lives on.

I believe in the soul as the real YOU, the person you are beyond your physical body. If we were merely defined by the physical, there is no continuity of personhood because our physical cells perpetually die and are regenerated and replaced. Yet, we have a sense that the person I was as a child is still the same person in my adult body, even though the physical makeup is completely different.

I believe the soul, the real person, continues after death as described in the Bible, "to be absent from the body, is to be fully present with the Lord." I believe Heaven may be another dimension. Physicists & M-theory have claimed to discover 11 dimensions to space-time, beyond the 3 dimensions we perceive with our 5 senses.

One metaphor that explains this for me is when you have an old car that wears out and breaks down. You leave that car that carried you around, and you can buy a new car to drive yourself around in. I had a family member pass away just over a week ago. The idea that his soul continues in Heaven, in a heavenly new glorified body, reunited with family members, is comforting to me. My beliefs are in part influenced by scriptures like Corinthians which says if there is no resurrection and after-life, we are "among men, most miserable." In other words, if my family members who died are just rotting in the ground, and there is no soul or afterlife in Heaven, it saddens me that they are no longer living.

Here is a second story with a metaphor of two babies in the womb that deals with the fear of death very well. A therapist I was seeing in the past shared this with me & I've copied it from a printed version verbatim:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”