So today we’re going to tackle a question that has confounded mankind for millennia;
what happens when we give up the ghost down here on terra-firma, when the heart expires,
the brain stops receiving oxygen and your friends start putting together a top ten list
of your favorite songs for your no doubt bleak funeral.
Many people still believe that our time on Earth is spent in some kind of vestibule to
heaven, a kind of waiting room where we stay while the Almighty like a divine accountant
gets out his calculator and starts subtracting all our sins from the good things we’ve
done.
You have to believe in the right Him of course, and so for centuries cultures having been
calling out others as infidels or heretics.
Heaven they say, isn’t open for all, some names aren’t on the guest list and they’re
not coming in.
According to some people, heaven isn’t big enough for all the religions, and even in
today’s politically correct world the eternal ethereal hotel in the clouds isn’t exactly
an inclusive joint.
But there is more to after-life theories than the precept of heaven, so let’s now investigate.
Let’s start with the ancients and we’ll get around to what modern people, modern religions
and modern science, say later.
Many ancient Greeks believed when they died the soul separated from the body.
They then entered the Underworld, where the main man in charge was called Hades.
As you’ve seen in our episode on Hell, words like Hades and Tartarus (a place farther down
than Hades) pop up in old texts of the Abrahamic religions.
In Orphism, an ancient Greek religion, there was life after death.
Graves have been uncovered with tablets in them that gave instructions for the dead for
when they entered the afterlife.
The Underworld was not easy to navigate, so the Greeks might have left some notes for
the passed over person.
But not all Greeks thought alike.
The philosopher Plato was perhaps less superstitious, and he believed we had a soul before we were
born and we had one after we died.
He once wrote that the trauma of birth makes us forget what we had learned in our past
life.
He called this “anamnesis.”
He seemed to believe in an eternal spirit, but not exactly one that has to navigate beasts
in the Underworld.
This dualism he talked about of soul and body would take root in many beliefs to come.
Some scholars say for Plato our soul is our true form, our true self.
What you need to know is that ancient myths from the Greeks and other places around Europe
such as the ancient Germanic cultures held the belief that there was some kind of underworld
and it wasn’t a very nice place.
Another assumption came later, and that was if there is a terrible place to be, there
must be a nicer place, and that as we know wasn’t down below but up in the sky; The
Hotel Heaven as mentioned earlier.
But then we had philosophical points of view that dealt with a life-death dualism, that
inside us was spirit.
This was based on reason more than crude superstition.
Many of you today might still believe this, the belief that contained inside us is something
else and perhaps that is connected to a collective spirit.
Maybe it does not take human form, meaning it’s not the diaphanous fella that turns
up at the Pearly Gates to barter with St. Peter, nor the lucky soul that feasts on great
food with his stock of pure women, but merely consciousness.
That’s why some people talk about this mainframe of thought, the collective unconscious, a
kind of matrix we are plugged into but don’t always receive a signal from.
The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed this to some extent, that what
he called “absolute spirit” could transcend death.
He wrote that once we had become absolute spirit through a journey of self-discovery
we could understand infinity.
Hegel is really confusing, but let’s just say that like in some religions he believed
we could transcend this life.
If you saw the recent Joe Rogan show with the always personable British particle physicist
Brian Cox, Rogan brought the matter up that there might be a soul, perhaps connected to
a great plexus of other souls.
Cox countered, saying scientists would know if a soul existed, even as a thought, because
they had incredibly sophisticated methods of measuring or just seeing energy.
Everything in this universe has some kind of energy, and if we had a soul, argued Cox,
we’d know.
But if you are religious, you could just argue that God works in mysterious ways and scientists
are just brazen for thinking they could detect this soul.
That’s an argument you can’t win, because in religion you just have to take a leap of
faith.
Empirical truths might hold some weight with religious people, of course, but perhaps not
when God and the afterlife are concerned.
We must also remember that men in the clouds with lustrous white beards is more of a whimsical
version of life after death, and it’s arguably superstitious when you consider the works
of serious theologians.
Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century for instance argued that because humans can think
of abstract ideas without actually needing to see things, basically that we have imaginations,
the mind didn’t need the body.
Like many before him, Aquinas believed the soul to be separate.
He once said, “Soul is not the whole human being, but only part of one: my soul is not
me.”
Aquinas was one of many Christian philosophers that attempted to reconcile more down to Earth
philosophy with religious beliefs.
When the body died, something lived on, but that had nothing to do with men with pitchforks
or angels playing harps.
Now let’s look at Buddhism.
You’ve all heard of the concept of reincarnation, but often it’s misunderstood as being a
reward or punishment for something you did in this present life that affects what kind
of creature you will return as.
Sometimes called metempsychosis, what this really means is not that you’ll come back
as a cockroach for cheating on your girlfriend, but that there are realms you can come back
in as the same soul.
That death is a cycle, and you can with good enough karma achieve Nirvana, the end of the
cycle; no more rebirth and therefore no more worldly pain.
Someone might argue again that the soul does indeed exist as separate from the body and
when one body dies this enters another cycle in another body but the soul remains the same,
just trying to achieve a state of nirvana.
Another belief perhaps similar is “eternal return”, which can be found in ancient Egyptian
texts and also ancient Indian texts.
Everything in the universe is cyclic, which includes your existence.
That might also mean we are destined to live the same exact existence again, for eternity!
If that’s true you should embrace your life, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote.
If some entity came to you in a dream and told you would live this life over and over
for all of eternity, with all the pain and anguish as well as happiness, would you feel
bad about it? asked Nietzsche.
It’s not religion, but a thought experiment.
If this eternal recurrence were true, you should love life and all that happens.
This could make you a better person, a happier person.
Religion can also act as a positive thought experiment.
If you believe it is a sin to cause others pain, and we all know pain, and that this
can lead to not going to heaven, then perhaps you will act better.
We might also add that for some people causing pain to others gets them into heaven, i.e.
the Christian crusades, religious extremism, countless fundamentalists today that have
little respect for certain people’s right to freedom.
People disagree on what gives us good karma, what gets us silver stars from God, and this
poses a significant human problem and has done so for thousands of years.
What we are trying to say is that belief in an afterlife can perhaps be positive for you
and the society in which you live and the world as a whole, but it might also lead to
disharmony.
Ok, enough religion.
Brian Cox might tell you that you don’t have a soul, but he admits science doesn’t
fully understand how consciousness works.
As a physicist, for him it’s all about energy, and nothing to him shows that we have this
extra piece of matter in our bodies that is a soul.
But Cox also admits that Atoms (what we are made of) can be confounding things.
Do we really understand how the constituents of the atom interact?
Perhaps the soul exists somewhere in subatomic particles.
Cox admits that science can be a work in progress, he only says from what he knows right now
he doesn’t believe in a soul.
Religious folks might also ask, what came before the Big Bang and this universe making
particle?
No one knows.
Science admits this, while religions are often more stubborn, dogmatic.
Ironically, leapers of faith are often surer than scientists.
Perhaps people should keep leaping in directions their entire lives?
That’s what science would say, but scientists can be stubborn too at times.
Back to consciousness.
We have certain physical properties that others have, this is the fleshy machinery of the
brain and the chemicals that oil the many parts.
But, and this is very important, we have ‘us’, meaning we have personality, we have character,
some might even say an aura.
Some thinkers, serious thinkers, say the fact that there is this identity means we might
have a soul.
If the physical part dies, what happens to that special part that made us, us.
Then we are back to where is the energy and we might ask if this soul can only exist with
the physical parts.
Maybe we have a soul, but it dies.
We are special, but not immortal.
If you’ve ever heard of the philosopher George Berkeley (namesake of the California
University) you might know he was interested in what happens right after death.
Did anything travel, did we move on?
It’s said he once asked one of his students to hang him and take him down just after he
started dying.
Apparently this experiment didn’t do much except cause him lots of pain.
But did you know that research in the USA said 18 percent of people brought back from
death after a heart attack had a near death experience.
This for some is proof of life after death, while some scientists say we just go into
a dream mode.
Others say the Pineal Gland releases the substance DMT at death and if you’ve ever taken that
stuff you will know fantastic, sometimes unexplainable things can happen.
Science says our brains definitely work for a while after the heart stops, so something
is going on.
We don’t think near death trips are a good example of life after death.
Others believe in the 21 grams theory, that after we die we lose 21 grams and maybe that
was a soul exiting.
Scientists disagree, however.
OK, so we have self, which is consciousness that we don’t properly understand.
We have a universe that we don’t really know is infinite or not or if there was anything
before it.
We are made up of bits of the physical universe, atoms from the stars, and to some extent at
a quantum level we don’t always know what’s going on.
We might go out on a limb here and say that if there is a soul maybe it can only be found
by understanding the engineering of this universe down to the smallest level.
Maybe there is more to see.
What haven’t we seen?
If we have a soul maybe it’s in the small print, and perhaps we just haven’t been
able to read that yet.
This of course might not mean there is a God, a hell, an underworld, but it might explain
how we are all different and yet part of the same thing connected perhaps in a way we don’t
yet know.
That indeed we are all pure spirit of some kind.
Perhaps even science will reconcile with religion in the future but in ways we still can’t
fathom.
Others might just call us temporary space trash made of carbon and proteins not connected
nor eternally soulful.
We will at least live on in a way in an atomical sense.
So in some ways, there is always some life after death, just not with an “I” involved.
We can safely say we don’t know, but we have enjoyed talking about it.
You know what we are going to ask you, and that is what do you think about this?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show What Happens When You Die!?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.