Immortality of the soul: to the history of the issue
Information and even entire teachings on the topic of the immortal human soul have come to us since ancient times. Scientists and researchers find them in the culture of almost all primitive human societies. To one degree or another, this theme is present in the context of all world religions. Not to mention the fact that it is professed by all esoteric and spiritualistic teachings, according to which
the human soul or spirit is the unique and original beginning of everything and everyone in this animated world.
Nothing, perhaps, in the history of civilization has caused so much controversy, disagreement and searches as the concept of the immortal soul of man.
Are we immortal, or are we completely perishing, and perhaps some part of us is subject to dispersion and destruction, while the other, the one that truly is us, remains unchanged and eternal? This is exactly the question we will try to explore...
— the founder of Neoplatonism, philosopher and idealist Plotinus wrote about the immortality of the soul back in ancient times.
It is interesting that even by belonging to his name through a kind of linguistic inversion of Plotinus - Plato, he seemed to have received from the Universe a certain right to continue Plato’s research, defining, in turn, the concept of the Divine as an inexplicable primary essence, standing above any comprehension...
Eternal peace or eternal life?
In Christianity, there is a belief that every soul is immortal and every “I” lives forever. Christians understand the immortality of the soul as the existence of consciousness with the memory of oneself as an individual. After being tested by Orthodox ordeals or atonement for sins in Catholic Purgatory, the soul goes to Paradise - Christians say - where it rests in eternal bliss.
It is true that for the human soul there is the option of eternal torment. However, as Dante writes in The Divine Comedy, in the last circle of hell only the very last sinners were frozen into ice - “traitors to those who trusted.” Others have a chance for “salvation” and finding “eternal peace.”
Painting by Alessandro Botticelli “Map of Hell” after Dante.
“Eternal peace” is immortality—isn’t this a contradiction? Peace is hardly a state that can be identified with existence. "Movement is life. And life is movement,” said Aristotle. And it’s true, because if this is life without movement, it means without development - it’s not life at all, but a frozen moment, peace, death, non-existence.
“God is difference, movement. The devil is equality, peace. Strength, known - life, Peace, known - death. Strength is difference, Peace is equality. Whoever strives for equality, or equality, approaches the Devil, peace, death. He who strives for difference or inequality draws closer to God.”
Righteous
Do not forget that every understanding is only a vision, but not the Truth. And plunging into mystical ideas through mythology, religion and symbolism, you can understand how multidimensional other worlds are and why it is so difficult to describe them to the human mind. Perhaps the “eternal peace” that Christianity speaks of is peace only for our reality, peace only in the subjective definition that each of us can give to this word.
From what has been described, it is logical to assume that the immortality of the soul is only an abstract expression. And it is impossible to give a clear description of what life after death means for consciousness. The biblical writings do not and cannot have clear specifics. After all, any religious description can be considered purely as a metaphor or as a symbolic reflection of spiritual reality without reference to the evidence base of matter. In order to be able to interpret a metaphor, one must understand symbolically the range of consciousness within the culture where it matured and grew. However, in the traditions of different peoples, the idea of posthumous existence has very similar features. The Wheel of Samsara, according to the theory of reincarnation, is a faithful resemblance to hell, with the only difference that this hell is located right here on earth.
Wheel of Samsara
The immortal soul of man in the Renaissance
It triumphed not only in the scientific works of great thinkers and explorers, but also in the materialized images created by unique artists and sculptors of this era of the great awakening of the human spirit.
If we mention thinkers, then it is worth saying a few words about the treatise “On the Immortality of the Soul” by P. Pompanazzi (1462-1525). He believed that a person has “not a simple, but a multiple; not a firmly established, but a dual nature” and therefore must be, by definition, in the middle: between mortal and immortal entities.
Unfortunately, this treatise was burned by the inquisitors in Venice, and only thanks to the help of his friends did its author escape the same fate...
What is the soul and is it immortal?..
Translated from Greek, the word and concept soul (psyche - psykhein: to blow, breathe) means the very essence of human life and is close in meaning to the word pneuma: spirit, spirit or breath, breath.
Without delving into the more subtle meanings of these concepts, we can say that a body that no longer breathes is simply dead.
And here the question arises: if the body is dead, then where does the soul go, which just recently resided in it?..
What does knowledge about the eternity of the Soul give you:
Firstly, this greatly reduces a person’s deep-seated fear, from which all his other fears emerge: the fear of death;
Secondly, reducing fears promotes creativity;
Thirdly, the meaning of life changes: from a materialist, aimed at consumption and pleasure, wanting to have time to get all the pleasures, a person is inclined towards personal and spiritual development, the realization of his potential, the desire to serve, realizing that we are all eternal souls, particles of the Creator;
Origin of the Soul
Questions about the nature of the appearance of the human soul, about whether it was created by God or this is not entirely true, and also about what happens to it after the life of the human body - all these questions are, in fact, still open. However, there are, of course, possible answers to them. And there are many of them.
According to St. Cyril of Alexandria, the origin of the soul is “a mystery known to God alone.” And here Kirill is right. Although, one must assume that he meant this in a broad sense. For the church and religion do not give humanity any strictly defined version on the topic of the origin of our souls, while decisively rejecting the position of the follower of the Platonic philosophy of Origen, according to which the soul comes to us on Earth from some heavenly world. The Church condemned this assumption at its Fifth Ecumenical Council.
Good news
The coming of Christ. Image: https://tayniymir.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/vtoroe-prishestvie-hrista.jpg
The Gospel, translated as good news, speaks about the main thing:
The promised deliverance from death, the time has come, although it remains to wait for the return of Jesus Christ, Who promised to come and take with Him all who were waiting for Him (John 14: 1-3).
And it doesn’t matter whether such a person died a long time ago or is still alive, everyone will hear the sound of His trumpet voice, because the dead will rise. And those already brought to life in incorruptible bodies will be taken into heaven (1 Thess. 4:16-18).
And not after 40 days, about which there is not a word in the Bible. By the way, this is also the resurrection from the dead that King David (a man after the Lord’s own heart) is waiting for, who, according to the apostle, lies in the grave and not in heaven (Acts 2:29, 34).
Biblical Understanding of the Soul
As a result, some clergy - and among them such names as Clement of Alexandria, Ephraim the Syrian, Theodoret and John Chrysostom - believe that each soul is created by God separately from the rest; others, such as Tertullian, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, St. Macarius and Anastasius the Presbyter, are on the contrary: they believe that both the soul and the body arise from the body of the parents at the same time, what is called flesh from flesh. And in every flesh, thus, the spiritual substance (soul) is already potentially present.
Thus, the immortality of the soul, from the point of view of how the Bible interprets it, looks something like this: at the moment of a person’s bodily death, his bodily component, his lower carnal principle, returns to spiritless matter and passes into the womb of its owner, mother earth . There it turns to dust and, in the end, completely disappears.
The other component, the spiritual principle or, in fact, the soul, is on the contrary: it does not become some kind of soulless substance; does not disappear anywhere and does not dissipate like smoke. She passes, being renewed, into a new human life: this is the essence of her immortality.
However, such a completely logical, at first glance, interpretation, again, does not answer the question about the fundamental basis of the concept: the source of spiritual energy. And humanity has learned that this is what we are talking about in this case, although this happened, by historical standards, relatively recently.
The doctrine of hell or briefly about hell
So: what does the Bible say about this?
In fact, there is no exact origin of the word hades - and it is from it that the Russian “hell” comes. Presumably, it is based on two components: the negation of “a” in the sense of “not” and the word iden “to see”.
Thus, guided by the Greek-English vocabulary of Thayer's New Testament, this word in its final version denotes something invisible, unknown, incomprehensible and, accordingly, terrible and is associated with the concept of the underworld, the kingdom of the dead, Hades or some ominous abyss.
You can also find in the Bible the word “g enna” (Greek), which also depicts hell. Hence the expression fiery Gehenna. Around the second century BC, this word began to appear in Jewish literature as a symbolic designation of a place of endless punishment for the wicked.
Doctrine of eternal torment
In continuation of what has been said, it should be noted that hell in the Bible is a place of conscious suffering, pain and torment.
Thus, John wrote that people who follow the antipode of God, as well as this antipode itself, will be “thrown both alive into the lake of fire, burning with brimstone” (Rev. 19:20)
That is, all these torments will occur to the victims in their conscious state, and therefore there is a mention of Christ about this place as a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 22:13).
Hell...is closed to the presence of God, cut off from all that is good and whole. He is forever cut off from all love, all peace and all joy. Jesus explains that when people realize this, when they realize what they have missed, it will have a devastating effect on them. - Benton.
And these torments will continue forever.
Doctrine of Purgatory
Catholic teaching - the Dogma of Purgatory - was formed back in the 13th-15th centuries in the works of Thomas Aquinas. It must be said that even before this time, in various writings on this topic, representatives of church denominations that recognized purgatory as such tried to define some general essence of this concept: for example, the Orthodox argued with Catholics about this back in 1231.
We will not now consider all the vicissitudes of this process; we will only note that the concept of purgatory was finally established in the theology of Catholics at the Council of Trent in 1563. Its essence is that if a person was baptized and committed a sin in his life that remained unforgiven, such a person will end up in purgatory after his death, where he will be subject to temporary punishment.
To cleanse the deceased from his earthly sins, the living can make a certain kind of sacrifice for such sinners, which can help them cleanse themselves before the eyes of Eternity. In anticipation of such cleansing - in the hope of speedy deliverance and a return to heaven with God - these sinful souls are neither in heaven nor in hell.
In turn, - continuing the theme of interfaith strife and conflicts - Protestants, for example, in the person of Luther and Calvin, completely rejected the concept of purgatory as such, for: “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Heb. 9 :27)
Orthodoxy also denies the existence of purgatory, without, however, preventing the living from praying for the dead. There is no alternative here: either eternal bliss or eternal torment. So choose for yourself...
In Islamic cosmology, the space between heaven and hell is Araf (barriers, translated from Arabic).
On the immortality of the human soul
Not a single question has worried human minds so much throughout the entire existence of man as the question of the immortality of the soul, of the afterlife. Before starting to reveal this question, it must be said that even for the present time it is the most urgent question, the difficulty of which is recognized by the greatest philosophers and thinkers. But we will be guided not only by our own reason, but mainly by the Holy Scriptures.
I know that by choosing such a question as the subject of today’s conversation with you, I will be faced with the prejudices and various teachings of the present time and will have to go against the flow of modern philosophers. Since Christianity existed, no era has been less filled with the consciousness of eternity than the present. The thoughts of modern generations surrounding us are directed to the present hour, to the region of the visible world. The question that will serve as the subject of today's conversation does not, at first glance, represent anything real or valid. This look somewhat confuses me, my hands seem to give up, I feel the inadequacy of my theological and philosophical knowledge, and I seem ready to step down from this high church pulpit with mute silence, but without losing energy. The thoughts of modern generations, as I have already said, are directed to the present hour, to the region of the visible world, but Christianity is not the religion of an era or an hour, it is unchanged in its dogmatic and moral truths. The Christian religion concerns the human soul, and not the tastes of the time, individuals or schools, trends or trends. Christianity is created on a strong foundation, the foundations of which are unshakable, and it does not seek support for itself in the dominant thoughts of the day, it seeks it and finds it in the suffering and constant aspirations of mankind.
The future life has been denied by many at all times, and it is denied by many in our time. Some come to the coffin of the deceased only to take his body as an unnecessary and even harmful thing and bury it in a cemetery. Not a single prayer comes out of their mouths, not a single divine word illuminates their sorrows, and what good do they need prayers and divine words when they do not believe in God and the afterlife. Others - believers - accompany the deceased in the hope of meeting him in the afterlife. Some people say to themselves: Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we will die (1 Cor. 15:32), and if sometimes they recognized a future life, they did so out of practical materialism. Others work out their salvation with fear and trembling. Some argue that with death everything ends for a person. In their own opinion, there is no soul in a person, and what we call the soul, according to them, dies along with the person. This is said only by those who, together with their souls, deny the existence of God. The main characteristic feature of such people is carelessness: they live without thinking about anything, nothing from the higher, spiritual realm interests them, they live for the most part lawlessly, trying only for one thing: how to live a better, more fun and more comfortable life, as long as life satisfied them, even if it was full of all lies, untruth, abomination and wickedness. That is why the existence of God and the existence of the soul is only an unpleasant phenomenon for them: they prevent their broad life from flowing the way it flows, and that is why they deny God and the soul. They realize that it is necessary to answer for lawlessness, and so they calm themselves down and say that there is no God and there is no immortal soul. Such a look at God and the soul flatters their sinful and corrupt nature, such a look gives them courage to eat, drink and have fun, because, in their opinion, tomorrow they will die anyway, but there, beyond the grave, there is no life, no soul and no account of their there is no one to give deeds to.
But let them say and claim so. We know that the soul exists and that it is immortal. The Holy Scripture confirms this to us. The book of Ecclesiastes of the Old Testament says: A man departs to his eternal home (that is, after bodily death)... And the dust (that is, the body) returns to the earth, what it was; and the spirit will return to God, who gave it (Eccl. 12:5, 7). The book of Wisdom says the same thing: The righteous live forever; their reward is in the Lord and their care is with the Most High (Wis. 5:15).
All the Old Testament righteous people also believed in the immortality of the human soul (and therefore in the afterlife). But the immortality of the human soul is felt especially clearly in the New Testament. It directly says: Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but are not able to kill the soul ; but fear Him more who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna (Matthew 10:28); God is not the God of the dead, but of the living (Matthew 22:32). Those Christians who have died and achieved the resurrection from the dead can no longer die, for they are equal to the angels (Luke 20: 35–36). That is why our Lord Jesus Christ repeatedly repeated and said to His disciples and followers: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal (Matthew 6:19-20). Or read the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew about the ten virgins - the five wise men and the five holy fools, how He warns His followers to stock up on oil along with the burning candles, so that the candles do not go out and the Bridegroom does not suddenly come. The moment of the Last Judgment is revealed here. If there were no afterlife or, what is the same, if the human soul were not immortal, then why would Christ the Savior warn His followers about the coming Judgment.
In addition to the words of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, we are also convinced of the immortality of the human soul by the intercourse of the souls of dead people with living people. This intercourse always took place in all times of the Old and New Testaments. This can be seen from the lives of Moses, King Saul, the prophet Samuel and others. But we will not give examples from the Old Testament life. Let's take the relatively recent past. Two hundred years ago, Russia was proud of its famous scientist Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov. Sailing (from Holland) to Russia on a ship, he had the following dream. He sees the endless Arctic Sea, on which he often sailed as a child, and on the sea he noticed a boat and his fisherman father sitting in the boat. A strong wind and storm arose, the sea waves were ready to swallow his beloved parent. Lomonosov wants to rush to his father to help, but his hands are numb. The boat crashed onto the shore near a rocky island and broke into pieces. Lomonosov sees a terrible and terrible picture. His father struggles with the high gigantic waves of the cruel sea; Having plunged into the water for a minute, he again appeared on the surface of the water and cried out: “Mikhailo!”, but soon plunged into the water again and disappeared from the eyes of Mikhail Lomonosov, his son, and a few minutes later he was thrown ashore. Lomonosov woke up immediately. He was greatly disturbed by the dream he had just seen and decided in his heart that his father had really drowned in the sea and, thrown ashore by the waves, lay unburied.
Upon arrival in St. Petersburg, with great difficulty he found his fellow countrymen here and asked about the fate of his father. They told him that at the beginning of spring his father and his comrades went to sea, but four months had already passed and there was no news about them. Having no peace in his soul, Lomonosov himself wanted to go to the island he had seen in a dream, which he had known since childhood, but he was not allowed to leave St. Petersburg. Then he begged the local fishermen to visit that island and, if they found his father’s body there, bury it. Indeed, in the place indicated by him, the fishermen found the body of Father Lomonosov and buried him. Isn’t it clear from this that the very soul of his father appeared to the son in a dream in order to speak about his dying languor and posthumous pain due to the fact that the body was left without burial and prayers? The famous Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov himself believed so.
The souls of the dead appear not only in dreams, but also in reality. The immortality of the human soul here is more precise and reveals itself even more clearly. Here a person sees with his own eyes the deceased as alive, and since before his death he knew the deceased well, then he can unmistakably say that he sees exactly this, such and such an acquaintance or relative.
The purposes for which the souls of the dead appear to living people are different. Very often they appear in order to improve their position in the afterlife in one way or another. For, as all of us Orthodox Christians know, the prayer of the living, especially the prayer of the Church, brings great benefit to the souls of the dead: it alleviates their difficult fate if those who died suffer torment in the afterlife for their sinful earthly life. And so the souls of many dead come to earth to ask for prayers for themselves. And sometimes the souls of the dead, by the will of God, appear on earth for the benefit of one or another of their relatives, wanting to provide him with some spiritual benefit. Most often they are those relatives who begin to lead a bad life - godless or depraved. In this case, in one way or another they help their relative to improve, help him get back on the path of truth. Or they come to do something good for their close relative that they did not have time to do during their lifetime. Consequently, a soul without a body is for some time, as it were, a continuator of the vital affairs of the soul in the body.
Sometimes the souls of the dead appear to relatives simply out of a sense of kinship, as if missing them. Obviously, the soul, after leaving the body for some time, does not lose the connection with them that it had while in the body, and now, by the will of God, it shows this connection one way or another. At the same time, often by their appearance the souls of the dead bring relatives some kind of worldly profit, clarifying one or another misunderstanding that was not explained during their earthly life, or showing them what they should do to get some profit for themselves.
After close relatives, the person closest to everyone is his friend and benefactor. People have sincere affection and gratitude for friends and benefactors. The human soul, which never dies, is immortal, and after leaving the body retains these feelings and often appears from the afterlife to its living friends and benefactors to testify to them friendship or gratitude.
If time allowed, many cases could be told about the appearance of the souls of the dead to living people. From these phenomena, with evidence of this from the word of God, it is clear that the soul of a person after leaving the body does not die, but lives and will live forever, in other words, the soul of a person is immortal. And if the soul is immortal, then a person, having faith in its immortality, must be ready for this; he must arrange his life on earth so that it is a preparation for his future life. Earthly life can last only a few decades and is only the beginning of human life; the main, real life for a person will come after and will last not just some dozens, but an countless number of years, forever. This is something every Christian needs to think about. Everyone must believe that death is not the end, but only the beginning of life, therefore, in advance, in advance, you need to prepare for it. It can come at any time. Not today or tomorrow the curtain will close, and everyone will go to a place from which there is no return. There is retribution for everything done in this short earthly life.
Brothers! Believe in the afterlife, believe in the immortality of the human soul, believe that after death you will live forever. If you do not believe in this, then you do not believe that the Lord Christ has risen, and then your faith is in vain. Beware of false teachings and false teachers who preach and see in death the complete destruction of the human soul. This is especially noticeable in our century. But let the present age worry, try in the name of reason to establish faith in eternal life; let him find to defend his cause apologists more eloquent than Rousseau, or thinkers more profound and penetrating than Plato, we Christians can expect their results without fear. I will only remind you of the last conversation between the greatest of ancient philosophers and his students in his prison in Athens. Socrates was dying, poison flowed in the veins of the great sage, and his limbs were already freezing. His disciples, leaning towards him, asked him with restless eyes what was being presented to him behind this light, and he, a penetrating genius, an exalted and sincere soul, tried to lift the veil, he tried to show that the human soul is immortal, and reminded with his weakening voice all the evidence this great truth! But what did his efforts lead to? Has he discovered the desired truth? Alas! He, the greatest genius and philosopher, could only say: “Maybe...” To him, his future seems dark, unclear, and the day before, in front of his judges, these words full of melancholy escaped him: “If destruction is my destiny, I still prefer it life, for I have experienced that the best of my days is not worth one night of peaceful sleep.” This is how the efforts of the greatest philosopher and genius ended.
But modern philosophy, like ancient philosophy, has taken the wrong path. She thought through her own efforts to establish faith in the immortality of the human soul. Suffice it to recall the deaths of people like Roland, Valazet, Lebas, Condorcet[1] and others. Not a single voice about eternity was heard here.
Philosophy will never succeed in establishing the belief in eternal life. And no philosophical theory will satisfy the human soul. We need a voice from heaven that would announce eternal life, and this Voice was there, and we believed in Him with all our souls and with all our hearts. This voice encouraged us and all sensible humanity. Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death and revealed life and incorruption through the gospel (cf. 2 Tim. 1:10). Since Jesus Christ, sane humanity has professed its faith in eternal life. Beginning with Him, this faith took possession of the hearts of millions of people of all centuries with such miraculous power that they went to torment as if on a holiday, but not in order to get rid of life, like a Hindu killing himself, and not in order to taste the pleasure of sensual paradise , like the followers of Mohammed, but in order to enter into a life of truth, holiness and love. We, faithful to Christ God, will say together with the long-suffering Job: I know that my Redeemer lives, and on the last day He will raise this decaying skin of mine from the dust, and I will see God in my flesh. I will see Him myself; my eyes, not the eyes of another, will see Him (Job 19:25–27).
Re-reading the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ, I found the words “eternal life” 40 times in it. And, without doubt, I can affirm that the Savior set eternal life as the goal of His teaching. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matthew 6:33), He said. How can one seek the Kingdom of God if there is no afterlife? The Kingdom of God and His truth begins here, within us, but it will be complete and eternal after death, for our citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20), and here on earth we are strangers, this life is a life of expectations, we temporary travelers seeking the quiet eternal haven of heaven. I do not understand the state of soul of such people who go through their earthly course with all its difficulties without God and His help, without faith and hope. In the most difficult moments of my life, in the most terrible suffering, I had and still have a triumphant hope in my heart, which strengthens me on the thorny path. I reason like this: I do not belong entirely to the earth, my earthly life is temporary, but I can suffer, for I know that my suffering has a purpose that eternity will explain to me; I also know that whomever God has mercy on, he also punishes. With such a conviction I can suffer. Suffer, too, my brothers, in the hope that your suffering will lead you to your goal. Sow your living hopes everywhere behind you and around you, squander this hope in the night of doubt, preach about a future life, without which this earthly life would be the most stupid, unnecessary and aimless. Let us believe that Christ, having risen from the dead, became the firstfruits of those who died (1 Cor. 15:20). Amen.
Said at the Chisinau Metropolitanate on February 8, 1910.
How do the concepts of soul, spirit and body relate in Orthodoxy?
There is an opinion that in the Christian understanding, a person is a kind of integral, integral organism, and the soul - as well as the body in it - represent a single and indivisible energy system.
Here is what Saint John Climacus said about this back in the 7th century:
It (the body) is my ally and my enemy, my helper and my adversary, protector and traitor... What kind of mystery is this in me? By what law is the soul connected to the body? How can you be both your friend and your enemy at the same time?
Knowing already what service has been served to man by his stay in our sinful fallen world, which has violated the original harmonious unity of body and soul, we can answer this question, again, by repeating the biblical idea that we can still be saved by Christ - if We ourselves will want this and will make appropriate efforts to achieve this. Since, ultimately, a Christian must understand that he was created in the image and likeness of God... And according to Gregory the Theologian,
each of us is both earthly and at the same time heavenly, temporary and at the same time eternal, visible and invisible, standing in the middle of the path between greatness and insignificance.
Trying to explain the difference stated above between the words soul and spirit, it would also be appropriate to cite the statement of St. Gregory Palamas, the essence of which is that when the body ceases to pull the soul down, seduced by the desires of the flesh, it soars along with the soul, and a person becomes entirely a spirit .
It would seem that this article could be completed with these evidence, which completely exhausts the essence of the issue, but there are also radically different views on the idea of the immortality of the soul...
A little about false teachings
In Theosophy there is also a completely coherent system of views that the source and inspirer of the very idea of the immortality of the soul is none other than the evil one. We remember that he once promised Adam and Eve immortality, saying that they would not die even if they violate the Divine covenant by eating good and evil from the tree of knowledge.
Having thus sowed distrust of God in the hearts of our first parents, the evil one gave birth to lies in the Universe and seduced the minds of the first people with the message that there is no death.
Thus, the wonderful idea of immortality played a very unsightly role here. And as a result, just as one lie gives rise to another, so life demonstrated to Adam and Eve the presence of death - and here, thanks to the efforts and sophistication of the antipode, people again had the temptation to accept the fact of their death as only a partial and temporary phenomenon... for there is supposedly, as promised, an immortal soul - and this is the main thing.
False Teaching Infiltrates Israel
Here it is forever imprinted in the consciousness of the people of God after the Babylonian captivity and is further strengthened in the years 175-164, during the time of Antiochus, when Judea was occupied by the Greeks, and also during the subsequent Hellenization of the inhabitants of Palestine. False teaching has been penetrating Christianity since the 3rd century after the influx of Greeks, Romans and other nationalities into it...
This is how, in an amazing way, turning a teaching into a false teaching, you can interpret the essence of things... Throughout human history, paradigm shifts have occurred many times and continue to occur, when a plus turned into a minus - and vice versa. What should people remember in such a situation?..
Apparently, it means that any interpretation, no matter how it appears before our eyes at one or another historical moment, should not obscure or obscure the essence of the phenomenon itself.
Death is not the end, but only a new beginning
Drawing an analogy with the system of 7 levels of reality: tests of vices or Purgatory is just the 4th level on the ladder of the divine hierarchy, where the posthumous soul really “organizes” the experience accumulated during earthly existence. And then she receives “according to her deeds,” as Christianity claims. But with a lack of experience, she is sent, of course, not to hell - Indian philosophy concludes - but only back, to the world of people, where she is doomed to continue her chain of rebirths in order to gain the lost experience. If the required level of awareness is achieved, the soul ascends to the next level of the hierarchy, or goes to Paradise , as the Church calls it. However, what awaits her there is not peace at all, but further work on tasks, only on a completely different scale, on a different, angelic level.
The mysteries of the East do not provide a definitively correct description of the posthumous path of the soul. And even the very views on the eternity of existence in different schools of Hinduism are very contradictory. One direction speaks of the cessation of the existence of the individual after leaving Samsara as a self and its dissolution in the Absolute. The other identifies the soul with this very Absolute, calling it Atman - immortal, individual and eternal.
So what is the immortality of the soul? Is individual consciousness immortal? Or maybe the soul is just a ball of cosmic dough, which the Great Demiurge continually melts into more and more new forms, each of which barely remembers its past, although it consists of it.
