Assuming that we acknowledge it as a real possibility, and have not pre-decided that it cannot be true; we can know that our soul is is not bounded by mortal life (our conception and death).
We can know this directly and for-ourselves - simply by remembering our past experience.
If we have personal knowledge of being-alive (in some way) that extends back beyond our incarnation; then we know that "we" (whatever makes me me) are not only mortal Beings.
(I am saying nothing here about the specifics of our past existence, such as the forms in which we existed. Whether as spirits of some kind...Whether we were previously incarnated in some human or other form - or how many times. Such specifics may not be knowable... But surely are much harder to establish accurately, and are much less reliably knowable, than the simple fact of having existed.)
In sum: we can know our immortality going-back-in-time, by direct personal experience.
And there is nothing more sure than direct personal experience.
What about life after death?
What about immortality going-forwards?
Can our future potential state also be known for ourselves - known despite that we personally have not yet experienced it?
(And despite that any and all "reports" of post-mortal life are subject to all the uncertainty, error, manipulations, lies, and varieties of interpretation that are common to all forms of second-hand, third-party, "public knowledge".)
We can potentially know about possible future states from those we love who have died, and with whom we have established direct and personal contact.
We can know this, in just the same way we know of those we currently love in this mortal life; but with whom we are not at this moment, here and now, in sensory contact.
This contact is not available to everybody.
It must, of course, be acknowledged as possible, if it is to happen and be taken seriously. Also it depends on being capable of love, and on actually loving someone who is now "dead" - and also that the person who died is in a post-mortal state in which contact can be established.
It is not the same when contact with the dead is claimed by other-people (such as spiritualist mediums - who almost certainly do not love those whom they claim to contact); nor by means of visions, voices, nor any intermediate symbolism - all of which require interpretation.
What is most convincing is not to have conversations with "the dead"; but instead to have a living and loving relationship by direct (mind to mind) contact - just the kind of relationship (to repeat) we may currently be-having with someone we love and who loves us.
In other words, this is not a matter of "getting information" about post-mortal conditions from the so-called dead whom we have loved; it is knowledge that arises in the course of having a loving relationship.
I think this may be the best (and only) sure way we have, personally to experience the possibility of resurrected eternal life in Heaven - to be in a direct and personal relationship with someone who currently lives thus.
The point about such direct and relational personal experiences is that they by-pass all concerns about errors, deceptions, manipulations and dishonesty of third parties - or the consequences of misunderstanding, fear and wishful thinking in imagining and interpreting... Those problems that beset all discourse on such matters in public.
Of course, the consequence is that in knowing by personal experience, we can't convince other people that we are right!
Indeed we should not try to convince them of the reality of past or future existence - only, as I am trying now, to convince them to discover for themselves.
6 comments:
amazing post. so clear and simple. but ofc, the trouble is what you mention at the start: most people have been conditioned to discount the possibiltiy and deny their own experience. i found the contrast particularly striking after my father passed away.
@Laeth - Thanks.
The problem is that we moderns always think in terms of being able to convince "other people" of what we choose to believe.
Yet in practice "other people" are unimpressed by any amount of evidence and logic; and are only ever "convinced" of anything by external information from The System - i.e. information/ instructions from those with social status and power - but especially *the power to hurt us*.
This is why even people who regard themselves as devoutly obedient to their church, in practice comfortably ignore that church when (it isn't often!) their church disagrees with The System.
Such people are (primarily) negatively motivated, and mostly by fear; but when it comes to things The System is serious about; it turns out church people are much more afraid of The System than of their church. So they leave the church (in droves); or else feel free to ignore the church whenever they agree with The System, instead of the church.
I don’t think I could have been less open to the possibility of an immortal soul, yet when a child of mine died, both my husband (apostate atheist) and I (lifelong atheist) were firmly and involuntarily linked to his soul for a period of time. Words weren’t involved but I experienced it as though he was a helium balloon choosing to follow us around from a short distance that grew over a few days as we felt he was concurrently journeying to heaven (notably my husband’s and my sense of this link was identical for about 3-5 days). After that the link had to be maintained by choice (at which point my husband’s and my experience of it diverged). But initially just love was enough to overcome 30+ years of personal undoubted metaphysical assumptions.
One irony that won’t surprise you, Bruce, is we then went to church (a fundamentalist/evangelical one) seeking spiritual understanding, and one of the first things a leader there said to me was that my son was instantly removed from this world upon death. She said this to comfort me, but ofc that forced me to make another conscious choice to believe in that personal knowledge over whatever anyone else says the Bible (or whatever) says. I shudder to think how dead I would be if I had decided I was imagining all this in my grief either because of my atheist assumptions or because “the Bible says so.”
@Mia I was member of a conservative evangelical church for many years, and heard several theological sermons about what they believed happened after death - which initially took me by surprise and struck me as bizarre.
The Catholic understanding of death and what came after (I have also practiced as an Anglo-Catholic), is pretty well known culturally, including among non-Christians - and fits quite well with spontaneous natural beliefs; but the Protestant view is strongly counter intuitive and alien to experience.
I always come back to the question “how much of our experience of the world is a trick?” Personally I can’t believe that very much of it is, although certainly some is. Related to that, a lot of Protestant sola scriptura doctrine would imply that it was a disadvantage to live at the time of Christ and meet him in person, even to be an Apostle would have to be less valuable than living in 2026 with a Bible app on your phone and the Holy Spirt present. On some level I reject the premise of comparisons like that because I assume God puts us in the right time and place for us individually, and I realize even those that believe in some form of election claim there’s still no such thing as advantage or disadvantage under that scheme, but something about that line of thinking appeals to me in this context. It seems likely to me that a unique sort of personal love would have arisen among those who were with him in mortal life in person.
@Mia - "It seems likely to me that a unique sort of personal love would have arisen among those who were with him in mortal life in person."
Well, there was Judas Iscariot. Also many of the actual disciples other than [the author of the IV Gospel, at least by his own account] seem to have had a rather feeble and fragile belief in Jesus's divinity and truth, at least before the resurrection.
I suppose Jesus was someone who on the one hand had mostly enemies, yet deeply impressed a few people. In this respect he was hardly unique. It was not personality or worldly impact; but what Jesus was by nature, and what he did, that made him absolutely unique.
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