Anything worth thinking about will be pondered upon eventually...
“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free” Baruch Spinoza
-->The washcloth example: Water in the washcloth is absorbed and can be retained. Both washcloth and water are separate, but held together as one. Mind and soul can exist within the body, but can be released when ready. So when we die, it’s like the death angel wringing us out to dry. The spiritual energy built up within the body must go somewhere (matter cannot be created or destroyed) so it escapes the body into the environment and exists as a bodiless mind. Just a thought.
-->Nothing. I have an inner calm that's effortless to maintain. When I get angry I feel nothing; when I cry I feel nothing; even when I’m happy I feel nothing; when I make love I feel nothing; nothing but calm. At the end of the Diary of Anne Frank, there’s a second hand account of her dying in the concentration camp and the last thing she said was “I feel nothing.” Perhaps nothing is the most natural thing we can feel. Returning our bodies to nature is like returning it to nothing. She died at peace with nature; her soul escaping.
-->I don’t know if I like the skeptic’s idea that all ghosts and angels are mere hallucinations. Unless people have mass hallucinations, which is possible, unlikely in some circumstances. There have been too many anomalies witnessed by otherwise normal people to believe that there isn’t something that lies beyond us – that is the physical and observable reality. I have seen a ghost once, but it was while I was awakening during what is called a hypnogogic state, I think. Either that or hypnogenic.
My dad also saw a ghost once while in the house my mother grew up in. He was alone when he saw the spirit of my dead grandmother. Was it her spirit? Or was it due to the fact that he also was waking from a dream? Our mind hallucinates while we are in REM sleep and that could carry over into real life like it does in schizophrenics.
However, what about incidences when the person is wide awake and has a witness who sees the same thing. My friend said she saw a ghost with what she thought was long black hair and “ghostly” white skin at an old abandoned building. She ran back to get someone else, who witnessed the same thing, but when they brought every one in the group around to see it, the ghost disappeared.
How do you explain it? Why did they see the same apparition? If the witness is not a liar and the friend has never shown episodes of psychosis there is only one explanation. The Bible says you only need two witnesses and everything the Bible says is law (semi-sarcasm). It must be what millions already know and believe – ghost are real. But what are they? Are they a sign that we live beyond the grave or are they a leftover impression of our former selves?
-->Then again, what about this spiritual side? Where does it go, or does it even exist? I think so. We have our minds, our bodies and a third factor that goes unseen – the soul. The mind is our consciousness and how we perceive life. Some have greater more perceptive minds then others, and some are constantly moving around in a subconscious state of perceptual blindness.
Our bodies are how we exist in the material sense of the world. We need our bodies to control our actions and have free will (or a lack thereof). The soul is an invisible (or at least to our naked eye) extension of ourselves. Perhaps it is possible to step outside the body as I’ve heard stories of blind people seeing color for the first time when they had a near death experience. Although it would appear to be impossible to escape our mind. Therefore when we die, we take our mind with us wherever we go.
The body goes back into the universe’s materials broken down into basic matter and sent to thrive in other beings like dirt, insects, plants and eventually back into animals. The mind will hopefully continue on with the soul. There’s too much evidence out there that a skeptic or atheist cannot account for that would suggest there is a life beyond our physical deaths. The human range of vision is too short to claim that things we cannot see cannot exist.
If anything, we should all stay hopeful that we do live beyond this point; a life after death may be a beautiful and wondrous existence full of knowledge and star travels – okay, so I’m putting my desires before reason. Think hard now, where were you before you were born? If you can answer that with confidence, give me a call we have a lot to talk about.
