© Charles Chandler

 

I don't believe in reincarnation per se, but I do believe that our spirits live on, in the hearts and minds of those we have influenced. And I believe that such is the true afterlife.

 

We all hear the voices of many people in our minds. We think that those are our words, that we got from others. But if we listen closely, we can hear things said in certain ways, that are characteristic of the way the speaker said them, not in the way that we would say them. It's possible that in influencing us, the speaker's spirit entered us, and now lives within us.

 

Is this scientific?

 

In scientific terms, the speaker's words triggered auditory sensations that etched long term memories in our central nervous systems. And remembering someone else's words is just reactivating one of those neural patterns. There is no evidence of the transferral of a spirit.

 

But by the same token, science cannot even prove the existence of consciousness, since there is no objective proof of it. Thus to the neuroscientist, a person is just a neural machine, where external stimulae trigger cerebral processes that result in muscular responses. And in scientific terms, if there is no evidence of something, and if the behavior of the subject can be fully explained without the existence of said thing, then said thing simply does not exist. And thus it is with consciousness, from a scientific standpoint. The behavior of a human can (theoretically at least) be fully reduced to just neural mechanisms. There is no evidence that humans have any sort of internal states, and asserting the existence of said states does not change the scientific quantification of human behavior. So humans do not have internal states.

 

So here we have the scientific proof that consciousness does not exist.

 

Yet from the internal perspective, consciousness not only exists, but it is the only thing that ever existed, or ever could, at least from the internal point of view.

 

The reconciliation of these diametrically opposed assertions concerning consciousness is an interesting topic, but the point here is that consciousness simply doesn't show up on scientific instruments. So when people influence us, have their spirits entered our minds, thereafter to continue to live, even after their original bodies have died? This is a question that science cannot answer, because it cannot measure any consciousness, dead or alive (in the biological sense).

 

To answer the question, we have to use methods that at least acknowledge the existence of living consciousness. Once we do, we freely acknowledge that memories of people we have known are a lot more than just neural activity patterns. We remember how they made us feel, and they live on in those feelings. Properly put, their spirits never died.

 

So I believe that this constitutes the only true afterlife. Nobody ever said that we will live forever in the physical world. Rather, we can only continue on after death in the spiritual world. And how do our spirits live on, after our bodies have died? They live in the hearts and minds of those we have influenced. If the influence was good, then our spirits share the joy that we have brought others. If it was bad, our spirits suffer the sorrow that we brought on them. Hence heaven is open to those who exert a positive influence on others, while those who have a bad influence on others will suffer their hell, for as long as the influence persists, as it is passed from one host to the next.

 

Experiences