Do we journey forward after our last breath? Does physical death signify the end of our being, the ultimate death? It all depends on how we define “Being.” Interestingly, a press release by the Pasteur Instituted, dated June 12 {{1}}, 2012,1 establishes that muscle stem cells survive 17 days post-mortem in humans and 16 days post-mortem in mice. This discovery raises a whole lot of questions.
Considering the above-mentioned fact and not knowing exactly what constitutes this being that we are (particularly what makes each of us so unique, entirely different from one another, with emotions, feelings and ideas exclusive to one’s self), how can we know whether our being, which I will refer to as our spiritual being to differentiate from our physical being, might still be present after physical death? And if it is, for how long does it remain so?
Hence, despite the fact that medical advances have allowed us to gain a fairly good mechanistic understanding of the human body, no one has so far been able to identify the physical component, if it even exists, housing the “self” in question. In any case, if it does exist and if it can be found within the brain for instance, does this mean that the cells that compose it can survive past the physical being’s death for as long as muscle stem cells do? If so, albeit at a different level of consciousness, our spiritual being could still remain present after our death, at least up until the death of the cells that compose it.
What if, the reason we haven’t discovered to this day an organ or physical housing responsible for the “self”, was due to the fact that the “self” in question is likely energy-based rather than physical? The latter hypothesis appears to me more and more plausible. Thus, the energetic interaction between all the elements that make up the body and more specifically the brain may, in itself, be responsible for the existence of the “self” as we know it. This would explain how external events (head injury, tumours, encephalitis, etc.) could alter our person without necessarily altering the physical appearance of the brain whilst only modifying the energy dynamics per se.
But even more so, what if the energetic interaction from which the “self” is derived was located completely outside of the physical body, which would explain why ultimately no physical component of the self was ever nor will ever be identified, and thus that we are part of an energy-based whole much larger, far greater than our understanding can fathom? Could it in turn mean that our energy can be eternal in being one with the universe from which it originated? I don’t see why not.
Finally, in regards to the vehicle that moves our ‘self’ throughout our conscious life, let us remember that nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. Our bodies are merely matter, comprised of atoms that can be recycled in various ways. On the other hand, our intangible spiritual being, if energy based, may very well continue to navigate throughout the ages. What a joy to consider the possibility that we could live eternally, under one form or another!
