EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK: Secrets Behind the Veil - what you don't know can hurt you, by P. D. Moore.
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Chapter 26
Is there Life Beyond the grave?
“The
only power the dead can exercise over the living is in their last Will and
Testament.”
- P. D. Moore
For
years now reincarnation has
been gaining acceptance among intellectuals and the general public alike. Films like Harry
Potter,
Lord of the Rings and Angel only reinforce this belief. According to Professor
Dumbledore, of Hogwart, “Death is the next great adventure”. And so
millions of us in the West now have the same spiritual beliefs as over 3 billion
Hindus, Buddhists,
Taoists and, other esoteric
faiths.
All of which teach that man has an immortal soul
.
The
reality is however that the closest that we can ever get to immortality
is
through organ donations, and the powers of the gifts we bequeath in our Wills.
So why do so many of us have confused such ideas in regard to life
after
death?
The
question of what happens to us at death
is
of course a profound one. If as many believe there is a soul
within
man, what is it made of, and where does it live? What happens to the soul at
death? Does it go to paradise, nirvana, undergo rebirth, suffer purgation or just
annihilation? Or is the soul something within us that just flies away when we
breathe our last breath?
And what about a resurrection? Christians hold to
this belief, yet many of them still believe in an immortal soul
that flies
off to heaven or descending into hell. According
to the Bhagavad-gita, those who do not have any interest in their soul’s
destiny, or who make no inquiry about their ‘non-physical’
nature are compelled by the laws of karma
to repeat
the cycle of birth death
and
rebirth until they learn to value the soul.
Let us then explore this concept of the soul. To do this we must consider what is the soul (if
there is indeed such a thing as the soul). We will also have to ask how did the
concept of a soul originate in the first place and whether its meaning has
changed over time.
The
history of the soul
I will not repeat here in any detail the Hindu/Buddhist
views about the soul or spirit. We have covered these in sufficient depth
already. We must now explore some other beliefs about the soul or spirit that is
said to reside within man. For the Greek philosopher Plato the soul
was the
‘immortal seat of reason’. For Aristotle it could be found in animals as
well as in plants, and was the ‘essence’ of every being, but it died when
the body died. For other philosophers it was the spark of God in man or the
fountain of creativity; for others it was a chimera, or boggy, or duppy.
What is clear from the literature is that unlike Plato,
Aristotle does not attribute consciousness
to the
soul
. In other words for Aristotle the only difference
between the ‘souls’ of animals and that of man is the ability to reason.
This Aristotelian view is the nearest to the Abrahamic beliefs of the soul. This
belief was first expressed in the book of Genesis 2:17, and 3:3: “Ye shall
surely die”
My research
revealed three or four main views of the soul.
By main I mean most common. There is the Vedic view – based on reincarnation -
that the soul is a part from a larger, or Universal Soul. It
is thought that the soul has to migrate through a series of lower life
forms
or bodies before it can rejoin the Super Soul. A figure like the Buddha, for
example is believed to be the product of many such countless reincarnations, and
hence possessed of great wisdom. We already explored this view in earlier
chapters.
Then
there is the Abrahamic approach, from which the early Christians
got
their belief. Vedic and other spiritualistic teaching on the soul have
since contaminated this view of the soul. Consequently, the Christian churches,
with a few exceptions, all teach a mixture of Abrahamic and Vedic, or ‘pagan’ views on the soul. My reasons for saying
this will soon become apparent. But for now the Funk
& Wagnall Dictionary is
authority on the point: Among the ancient Hebrews ‘soul’ was the
equivalent of the principle of life
as
embodied in living creatures, and this meaning is continued throughout the Bible
.
The Greek philosopher, Homer, on the other hand thought
that the individual, or soul
was little
more than the play things of the gods, who sought to enact their will and drama through
human agents – hence the idea of the god-kings or emperors.
The
early Jewish, or Abrahamic view was quite different from the Greek tradition on
this point. Even in Hellenistic times, Jews believed
that the friends of God would live forever, but by a very different means: God
would bring his friends back to life in
new bodies - The New Age Encyclopedia,
page 385.
Two
well-intentioned men, Michael Roll and Ronald Pearson gave a series of talks
around Britain to prove that there is survival of the ‘soul’ after death. On Friday 12th May, the audience
at The Star of the East hall was privileged to hear a preview of the following
day's lecture at Canterbury University. At Canterbury University? Who would have
thought such a thing imaginable? But such are the times in which we live.
Clearly
the belief in an immortal soul is
no longer unique to Hinduism and other so-called ‘pagan’ religions.
Christians too
have come to accept this most fundamental of beliefs of the occultism and New
Age Spiritualism
– the belief in the immortality
of
the soul. Dr Norman Vincent Peale, a
leading Christian minister in the USA, in the 1953 October issue of The
Reader’s Digest, under the Article titled “There is no Death”
confirmed this when he said:
I firmly believe in the
continuation of life
after what we call death
…. I believe there are two sides to the phenomenon
known as death: this side where we now live and the other side
where we shall continue to live.
Now
why do so Christian minister believe so firmly what his own Holy book so firmly
rejects? Such prominent views are one reason for the perpetuation and widespread
acceptance of the belief, that when a man or woman dies the body is vacated by
an “immortal spirit”
or “soul”,
which never really dies, but departs to its place of reward or punishment. This
belief however stems from a profound misunderstanding of what constitutes ‘the
soul’.
So what is the soul
?
The
soul is
not some conscious entity within man; rather it is the seat of the emotion, the
intellect - your will. It is not some separate entity within the body. The Greek
word for soul psuche, gives us the English word psychology, which means the study
of the self.
The soul is your Self. It is that which makes you different from others (that is
to same your mind and
emotions). If this were not the case, it would mean that were we ever to clone a
human being there would be two people with the same soul. So what would become
of that soul on the death
of
both those individuals? And if one of them turned out to be ‘good’ and the
other a psychopathic killer, what would be the destiny
and
future of that soul which resided in them both when they were alive? It’s a
nonsense.
With
your soul
you
are self-conscious;
and without the soul there is no consciousness.
This alone should convince us that the soul is the individual mind and
emotions. What you think of yourself is therefore a reflection of your soul’s
condition. Conversely, with your body you are sense conscious – you relate to
the world around you with your touch, sight and smell.
On the other hand with your ‘spirit’
you are God-Conscious. By ‘spirit’ I do not mean what is generally
understood.
Most
Christians confuse
the ‘spirit’
with the soul
and
use the terms interchangeably. This is an error. This is not what the early
Apostles believe and taught. You will see from my treatment of the subject in
this chapter and the next, that I make a case to the
contrary.
The
belief of the immortality
of
the soul
(often
incorrectly termed spirit)
is derived from the ‘pagan’ world, first adopted by the Roman Church during
the time the Church of Rome sought to align herself with the powers of the
Empire and the mystical religion of
its people. I say the Church of Rome, as it is important to emphasise that this
teaching was not universally accepted in Christendom. Neither Martin Luther, nor
Tertullian for example held this view. Even today not all Christians
espouse
the mystical belief in life after
death.
So
what did the early non-Roman Christians, and Apostles
believe about the ‘spirit’
(sometimes incorrectly referred to as the soul)?
We have already seen what the Bible,
in both New and Old Testament says on this. The early Christians maintained that
position up to the 1500s. Early Christian writers understood that there are
three dimensions, or life-functions
within man. Tertullian for example, who lived just a couple of hundred years
after Christ (circa
150-220 A.D.), wrote that the body was the area of “world-consciousness,”
the soul was the area of “personal-consciousness,” and the spirit was the
area of “God-consciousness.”
The
great British Reformer William Tyndale wrote concerning the dead
:
“I
confess openly, that I am not persuaded that they [i.e. the dead]
be already in .. glory …. Nor is it any article of my faith;
for if it were so, I see not but then the preaching of the resurrection of the
flesh were a thing in vain.” - Preface to New Testament (ed. 1534). Reprinted
in British Reformers – Tindale, Frith,
Barnes, page 349.
The
reformer Martin Luther classed this doctrine as one of the “monstrous fables
that form part of the dunghill of Roman decretals [or papal decrees].” – see
E. Patavel, The Problem of Immortality,
page 255. In one place Luther says,
“There is
… no duty, no science
,
no knowledge
,
no wisdom there. Solomon judgeth that the dead
are
asleep, and feel noting at all. For the dead lie there, accounting neither days
nor years …. ” - Exposition of Solomon’s Booke [sic] Called Ecclesiastes, page 152).
And yet 400
years on and the Christian churches that
were born from the Reformation still believe in this “monstrous fable”.
John
Milton, the renowned author of Paradise
Lost, wrote correctly, in his “Treatise
on Christian Doctrine,” Vol. I, pages 250, 251:
“Man
is a living being, intrinsically and properly one individual, not compound
and separable, not, according to the common opinion, made up and framed of
two distinct and different natures, as of body and soul,
but the whole man is soul, and the
soul, man; that is to say, a body or substance, individual, animated, sensitive,
and rational.”
It
is strange indeed why so many of the traditional, orthodox Christian
denominations hold so tightly to this darling error.
What
you are about to read next will explode all the beliefs you have ever held about
life
after
death.
It certainly did that to mine. It’s not easy to discard views we have taken
for granted or held sacred for years in just one moment. Yet it is pivotal to an
understanding of the powerful secrets that
lie behind the New Age
and
all the various phenomina described earlier in this book. I will attempt to
structure the information in bite-size bits so that it is easier to follow. I
should say here that for me it was an intriguing and amazing discovery.
What
do the dead
really know?
The
widely held belief among Christian religions is that there is consciousness in
death and
immortality
of
the soul .....
.....
The
belief that the dead
have
awareness is premised on the teaching of the immortality
of
the soul
.
Yet it is interesting to note that although the Bible contains
66 books, 1,189 chapters,
and 38,232 verses containing 874,746 words (and no, I didn't count them),
it uses the word ‘immortal’ just once (that’s found in 1 Tim. 1:17). One would have thought that if immortality was such an important
characteristic of man’s soul it would have been mentioned a lot more often
than that. After all the term ‘soul’ is mentioned some many times in the
Bible. Further, the term is used in reference to God, not man. 1 Tim. 6:15,
16 confirm that this term has no relevance to man, that only God has
immortality. So why do so many Christians
still
believe that there is an immortal soul (or spirit
)
within man? Why do they contradict their own Bible – their own thus saith the
Lord? And no I am not trying to be facetious.
What
then is the ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ in man?
Despite the popularity in the belief in the immortality of the soul or ‘spirit’ in the Christian world there is no real support for it in their Scriptures. So what is the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ in man? ....
.... Webster's Dictionary shows
the source of this contamination:
“The
[modern] Christian conception of the soul
derives
from the Greek, especially as modified by the mystery cults, as
well as from the Bible
...
”
It was Augustine who taught
who first gave credence to the belief that the soul
was
some immaterial and spiritual entity
- a pagan view that has been held on to by most Christian theologians
down to the present time.
But
Hasting's Bible Dictionary
concurs with Webster’s:
Soul is throughout a great
part of the Bible simply
the equivalent of ‘life’
embodied in living creature. In the earlier usage of the Old Testament it has no
reference to the later philosophical meaning - the animating principle - still
less to the idea of an ‘immaterial nature’ which will survive the body.
......
What
is the cause of all this confusion?
It probably stems from a misunderstanding of the Greek and
Hebrew. The word translated “spirit
” in the New Testament is the Greek word “pneuma” (pnyoo'-mah)
which means “a current of air, i.e. breath (blast) or breeze”. The word
translated “soul
” is different. It is the Greek word “psuche” psoo-khay'
which means the capacity for reasoning, responding with emotion,
and making complex decisions (“personal-consciousness”).
The Greek translators of the Septuagint rendered the Hebrew word, “nephesh” into the Greek word “psuche” (i.e.
a sensory
being). The Greek word psuche was
employed six hundred times to translate the Hebrew word nephesh, which referred to the behavioural capacity of “soul.”
The very first usage of the Hebrew word nephesh
appears in Gen. 1:20,21. The verses read, “And God said, Let the waters swarm
with swarmers having living soul (nephesh)
... And God created the great sea-monsters and all having a living soul (nephesh)
...”
Later in the same chapter, God says, “Let the earth bring forth living soul (nephesh) after its kind, cattle and creepers, and the beasts of the
earth after its kind” (Gen. 1:24).
Reference
is made again to “every beast of the earth, to every bird of the heavens, and
to every creeper on the earth in which is a living soul
(nephesh)”
(Gen. 1:30). Again, in the second chapter of Genesis we read that "God
formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to
man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living soul (nephesh),
that was its name” (Gen. 2:19). The same usage for soul (nephesh)
is found in Genesis 9: 10,15,16.
From these
verses alone it is clear that the Hebrew word nephesh,
translated into the Greek as psuche and
from Greek to English as “soul,”
is applied to animals as well as to mankind. It refers to the living organism
and its particular behavioural qualities. All living creatures have behavioural
qualities unique to their specie, by instinct. For example lions
are
ravenous hunters, while sheep are docile herbivores. Both have a different soul
(psuche, or nephesh)
– a different nature.
On the
other hand the spirit,
“pneuma” (current of air, i.e.
breath or gases) is found in all life
. This is not immortal. On the contrary it is transient.
Just stop breathing for 10 minutes and see if it returns? You will be dead
. So where does that breath go? It goes back to the body of
air that exists all around us. Not to heaven, hell or purgatory. Nor does it
remain to haunt or instruct those still living. Immortality belongs only to God.
At death
the soul
or personality
(psuche, or nephesh)
is preserved by God for the executive judgment
of the wicked or for the resurrection of the just.
This soul is what gives each man his identity or personality. Man’s
spirit (pneuma)
returns to the air or atmosphere. It has no consciousness of its own.
Is
the soul of man and animals the same?
No.
The ‘spirit’
or, breath (i.e. the air we breathe) is the same, but soul of
man is not the same as the soul of the beasts.
What, then, makes man’s soul different from the animals? Man has
greater capacity for reasoning, responding with emotion, and making complex
decisions than does any animal. Human beings not only have the capacity for
physical life
-function
in a “body,” and the capacity for behavioural life-function in a “soul”,
but also to these are added the capacity to respond to spiritual life - that is
to the supernatural or
worship
.
The “soul” (nephesh in the Hebrew) is used to denote the immaterial life principle within mankind and animals, and is translated “physical life”. .....
..... Mankind has the capacity for life -function at three levels: body and soul and spirit. We are able to function at a physical, psychological and spiritual level. These are not three separate “parts” of man, which are partitioned or compartmentalised. They are nothing more than the three levels of capacity for life-function, rather than entities , which comprise mankind’s nature. Any other description is misleading, and should be avoided. ....
Counter
Arguments - In search of the ‘soul
’
Now
I know that many Spiritualists and an even larger number of Christians
who
know their Bible
will
probably counter by referring to 1 Peter 3:19, which says, speaking of Christ,
“By which also he [Christ] went and preached unto the spirits in prison.”
This they say show the dead are
conscious.
But
such an assumption is contrary to what we have already read in .....
Well
I have already explained the position from Greek and Hebrew words like pneuma, psuche,
and nephesh. If you
still have doubts, or questions I deal with all the possible objections in my
book Another Loook at Death – in search
of the soul. I
also look at several other texts of Scripture used by many, within and without
the Christian faith, to support the belief in the immortality
of
the soul. For example, Hebrews 12: 23; Luke 10:20; Matthew 10: 28 which says,
‘Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul’. 1
Samuel 28 (King Saul’s visit to the Witch of Endor) is also explored.
© copyright P.D. Moore and Lux-Verbi Books 2002. All rights reserved.
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What others are saying about the contents of this book
Sample chapters
Chapter 26
Index
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