Our Life After

Human understanding of the process of freezing and preserving food has developed to bizarre proportions. Ever since its advantages were discovered by the Native Americans in Labrador, it has become an essential and ideal way of preserving food until it is needed.

Yet in recent years freezing has been employed as a means to a far different end. In an attempt to defy the laws of nature, people can now be frozen after death, the idea being that when a cure is found for the cause of death, the victim can duly be brought back to life. This is known as cryogenic freezing, where liquid nitrogen is used to keep the body as near as possible to absolute zero.

The question of preserving people for future reanimation raises some interesting points, some of which make you wonder whether the whole exercise isn’t merely a waste of time and money. Consider the possibility of the afterlife, for example. There is much evidence to suggest that we can and do exist independently of our physical bodies, and the act of dying is simply casting away the outer skin, enabling the soul to move on to a higher plane – a heightened state of existence.

Spiritualists believe the spirit body is attached to the earthly body by means of a cord. We may float out of our bodies at night while we are sleeping or during an out of body experience, but the cord keeps us connected with our physical form and is only broken when we no longer need our solid form and thus die.

It seems impossible to suppose the human soul might also be frozen by the act of cryogenics, since the soul departs from the body at the moment of death, becoming an entirely separate entity. So even if the cause of death could eventually be prevented, the body could not be brought back to life without the reintegration of the soul which, by this time one could reasonably assume, would exist elsewhere in the scheme of things and would have no need or desire to return to its earthly shell.

Or would it? The subject of returning from the grave naturally brings into play the possibility of reincarnation. Would successful attempts at cryogenic freezing and reanimation prove that reincarnation was indeed possible?

Many people believe they have lived previous lives and their current life is simply one of many, their souls being incarnated into another body at birth. If this is true, do we only return in new incarnations and bodies simply because the previous ones have decayed and are unable to continue as souls do?

If the process of cryogenic freezing was proved to work with humans at some point in the future, would departed souls return to their earthly bodies and continue to live their earthly lives as they had before death – in essence, as our living ancestors? Or would we merely be left with thousands of perfectly preserved corpses, cured of whatever killed them but still lacking the one vital component of life over which no doctor or scientist has any control – the soul itself?

The possibility of resurrecting nothing but zombies may also have entered your mind – and indeed, there have been apparent cases of people who have died, only to come back to life as zombies at some later date. Haiti is often mentioned in cases such as this, where voodoo and black magic are said to be responsible for the phenomenon.

However, it has been shown that suspended animation of this kind was due to carefully administered doses of poison from the skin of a certain type of toad and several species of puffer fish. Thus people who died in this way and were then resurrected were not really dead in the first place and we could assume their souls had therefore not departed from their bodies. Their vacant, lifeless appearance could easily be put down to shock at what they had experienced, rather than the reanimation of a body minus its essential core – the soul.

So it seems that cryogenic freezing can and will do little to affect the ghost population. Holding a body in suspension in this way is very similar to placing someone who is brain dead on a life support machine. The monitors will have you believe the person is still alive – the heart keeps on beating, the lungs inflate and deflate, the whole body keeps functioning but once the machines are switched off, the body dies.

Scientists can indeed keep bodies functioning – at least for a certain length of time – but they cannot find a way of persuading a soul to stay beyond its allotted time on earth. And I think it will stay that way.

Every living being wants to live an eternal and a prosperous life, especially the human beings. Often the very passion to live is what makes the concept of death quite frightful for us. The value that people often give to life can be seen in terms of their practices that surround death. In some cultures it’s seen that the body is returned to sea or earth, believing it is where it came from, while others lift it to heavens. Often the burial grounds are considered to be a sacred place.

But still the questions like, what is death? Is it really the end? If it’s not, then what really happens next? have occupied the attention of people ever since. It is this inescapability of death that has puzzled them on the notion and meaning of life. The readings today show the variations in the understanding of ancient Israel on the possibility of life after this life.

Earlier the Israelites didn’t have much clear idea about life and death. They believed that when the person died, it went to the shadowy underworld known as Sheol, a place where there was no sign of punishment or reward. Whereas the Greeks that came later had no concept of an eternal soul and believed that their God was a God of living and not of dead. While other nations might idolize the gods of the underworlds, but Israel did not. Still they are of the belief that death doesn’t result in total eradication.
There is quiet a difference between the way Jesus understands the notion of God as the God of living and not the dead and the way it was believed by the ancient Israelites. In the beginning it was referred to only those who were alive. However with the emergence of the concept of resurrection, rising of the dead is considered to be a new way of living. In other words it can be said that all are alive, those who are living and those who will be raised from the dead.

However, the question still remains the same, What happens next? Neither of the reading conveys any answer to the question, but it does indicate that something will definitely happen next. Since it’s not a fact that can be demonstrated, it is a statement of faith. The origination of this statement of faith is definitely not from the Greeks notion of immortal soul, but definitely from the trust in God. This trust is something that is implicit in the theology of Israel; however, it isn’t something that is explicitly mentioned in the readings of today.