Here After The Hereafter

A member of one of my non-Gather groups replied to one of my posts there with the following, to which I wanted to respond:
> I have long believed that dying is like stepping into another room of our existence, that we didn't know and not available to us till a certain time.<

The following is a non-religious comment (or set of observations), not designed to be either scientific or religious. It's a logical thought path.

Nothing in nature even hints that anything disappears or ceases to exist when it "dies." On the contrary, the laws of conservation of energy (physical laws of nature) insist that every bit of matter becomes either another form of matter or some form of energy when it changes. Biological matter usually transforms into energy when it dies, then is transformed back into another form of matter in another life form (e.g. a dog dies, is eaten by bacteria and transformed therein into energy, then later into another form of matter--usually a life form--when the bacteria are eaten by other life forms).

So everything we know, everything we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear, becomes transformed if it dies or is used up somehow.

When a baby is born, a new assembly of matter becomes a life form--the exact moment when this happens is irrelevant to the discussion. That new life form learns and eventually can do things based on what it has learned, just as social animals like wolves, large cats, bees and ants do. While the primates among social animals have personalities that are distinctive, we still do not know if they are as aware of their place in the material world, as humans are.

Humans generate a level of something beyond what any other animal or plant can do, so far as we know now. Call it personality or soul or whatever you want.

Physical laws (which do not necessarily apply to such things as personalities) suggest that anything new must have come from somewhere else, must have originated elsewhere. Humans are not capable of creating anything from nothing, so we have no reason to believe that humans could create a personality that would not otherwise exist in another animal that had similar experiences as a child. That soul or personality must have had a previous existence or it would not fit with everything we know about the universe around us.

If something exists now and had an existence prior to its present form, the laws of nature suggest that it too must transmogrify when the corporeal body it inhabits transforms after death. Nothing, after all, ceases to exist, according to nature.

You can call whatever the soul or personality or spirit presence that is generated within each of us the product of whatever you want. It had to come from somewhere.

You can call whatever it becomes after the body it inhabits dies and transforms into some other form whatever you want, and say that it lives wherever it suits you.

It remains a fact that everything in the natural world--everything we know--says that the soul existed before we got it and must go somewhere else and perhaps be something different after it leaves us.

The debate is not whether eternal existence is a fact--as nature gives us abundant evidence that it is--but what names we give to its various parts and events and whether we can agree on what those names refer to.

What we do about those parts or events is what we call religion. Rituals are what distinguish one religion from another, though there are often minor variation in doctrine. Variations in doctrine may well be human inventions, even if they are claimed to have come from God. Claiming that something comes from God does not make it so, any more than we can claim justly that dreams are messages from God.

That leaves rituals, including costumes and accessories, as the main differences between religions. These too were devised by humans.

It could be argued that what prevents us from understanding the eternal existence of our souls, spirits or personalities is our insistence on focussing on rituals and doctrines that were invented by humans. That is, we focus on our phsycial present so much that our eternal existence is unclear.

The single greatest factor that limits our progress in this life is the insistence that what our bodies do in this life is more important than our eternal existence. Today is everything. Call it hubris or arrogance.

In 1986, a young Canadian man named Terry Fox, an athlete who lost one leg due to cancer, tried to run across his native country, a distance of thousands of kilometres. He only made it half way before he had to stop because the cancer returned. Was he stupid because he ran over 2000 kilometres with only one leg? Was he arrogant for thinking that he, as a "cripple," could do what most healthy Canadians would not even consider?

Terry Fox died in 1987, but some 44 countries today have annual Terry Fox Runs for Cancer.

Did Terry Fox die and disappear?

Not a scrap of evidence tells us that he did. No doubt his disease-riddled body transformed once it was interred. But there was more to Terry Fox than a man with one leg and an outlandish aspiration.

Terry Fox's ambitious (or foolish) quest was something beyond the normal. The motivation for it came from somewhere other than from his body cells. That same motivation is bigger than ever today, though in other life forms all over the world.

There is something more afoot here than simple fundraising for a worthy cause.

Call it what you will. Just don't ritualize it and give it costumes and labels. With those we create causes for disagreement.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make sense of the mysterious.
Learn more about TIA at http://billallin.com