Between Life and Death

“Is there a state between life and death where spirits hang out?”

I was asked this question recently. My first reaction was that it almost seems a bit silly, then I realized that it’s a reasonable question, given that our culture doesn’t officially recognize any sort of life after death, outside of religion. I suppose there’s a whole book to be written about the way people invoke God, Jesus and a Higher Power in one breath and distain for the supernatural in the next, but that’s not for today. I should just accept that most people are either completely ignorant when it comes to spiritual matter, or have aa very simplistic, childlike conception that hasn’t been thought about since they were six.

Short answer about life after death: There appears to be another place where souls go after death. Some call it heaven, others like to objectify it as another “plane of existence” or “energy level.” Whatever it is, the transition is often described as a journey through a tunnel to a white light. However, not all spirits make that transition, and they end up hanging around with us, unseen and unheard, for the most part.

Souls can stay for many reasons. Common ones are, fear of punishment/judgment from a religious upbringing, addiction or drugs, power or sex, unfinished business, and, perhaps the saddest cases, souls simply don’t know they’re dead. This can be because they died suddenly, or while unconscious, and, because they believed that death was nothingness, conclude that they must be still alive.

I know that seems odd, I mean, how could you not know you’re dead? Aren’t there lots of clues that *something* is different? The problem is that souls need a physical body to function properly in this reality. Without it, the tend to lose track of time and space, and even memory gets tricky. Without a body that keeps track of time through its needs and process, awareness tends to live in a perpetual “Now.” With, perhaps, only a dim awareness that they’ve repeated the same actions and asked the same questions, over and over again. Physical bodies seem to also play a role in forming the new memories that allow a conscious to draw conclusions, make deductions and “move on.” Souls appear to be more or less stuck in the attitudes and state of mind they had when they died. Souls usually can only be reasoned with on a basic, emotional, immediate fashion. Childlike, in a way, you can reason with what’s right in front of them, part of their current reality, but if you try and get too complicated or abstract and you will lose them.

I’m sure that, right now, people with extensive experience with the “other side” are probably giving me a hard time right about now. They have had contacts with spirits that were highly intelligent and helpful, or otherwise don’t fit the description I just gave, and I agree. The reason is, there’s a distinction between “souls” and “spirits.” Souls are the departed that have not yet returned to the light, and Spirits are entities that either have gone to the light and returned or have never incarnated in the first place. There is a process of reintegration that all souls must go through to be able to function effectively in a discarnate form. You can look to Sylvia Brown’s books, Answers About the Afterlife or many other places for descriptions about what that’s like. The point here is that I’m talking about Souls that have not yet gone back to the light, not Spirits, that have returned.

Could you say that souls, stuck in transition, so to speak, are between life and death? In a way, I suppose, but I wouldn’t say that. Their bodies are most definitely dead, no question there, but their souls have not completed the incarnation cycle, so perhaps. It occurs to me while writing this that immortals would also be “stuck” and unable to complete the cycle. I have no personal interest in living forever. I think eternal life is overrated. Without the periodic refreshing of viewpoint, knowledge and enthusiasm that comes from each incarnation, existence would devolve into a increasingly meaningless succession of days and events that would blur together into utter blandness.

As a final note, I want to add that I feel that the “supernatural” is much more complicated than anyone seems to think. It’s as rich in variety and life and experience as our “natural” world, perhaps even more so. We only see a small portion though our very limited lens, and one of the reasons it seems so confusing is we only see disconnected parts of it. Like the Blind Men and the Elephant story, where each man touches a small portion of the animal and concludes that the whole animal is like the tail, the foot, the trunk or the ear, we each get our own piece of the “other side” and we draw our own conclusions, which are distorted further by our own limitations and beliefs. All in all, it’s not surprising that people from different cultures and different backgrounds paint very different pictures about what they perceive.