Where does your soul go when you die?

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Your soul goes nowhere, it is the most abstract thing humans can think of. When something is abstract, that means you can’t locate it relative to other things. An example of this is any math equation. Where does the equation exist, exactly? Nowhere, 1+1=2 does not exist, it is abstract.

Our minds are hopelessly mired in the physical. When people used to think of the divine in ages past, they often imbued a physical object with divinity. The ancient Jews that Jesus was a member of, considered their wondrous temple of Jerusalem to be the seat of the Jewish god.

Judaism was actually quite progressive among religions of the day, most religions created artifacts that became the deity. When an invading army came in and destroyed the divine artifact, the people would generally convert to the invading army’s religion. But not Judaism. Jews believed in a more abstract God, a god that existed outside of time and space. This is what made them both resilient and also hated throughout history. The Romans eventually got fed up with Jewish precociousness, slaughtered the whole lot, and razed the Temple.

But the Jews are still here, while the Roman Empire bit the dust over a thousand years ago.

I can think of many, many, many very abstract things relating to consciousness and existence. But I cannot locate the soul because by definition it must lie absolutely outside of even the most abstract of ideas about how things can exist. I can posit non-physical realms, defined only in terms of how minds think about them. I can’t posit how all the souls within them are organized.

I can think of varying qualities of existence. Joining God or remaining separate, different kinds of immortality. Why one might choose to die or not. What might happen to your existence if your body is erased and you have just your mind, dreams are really good for that kind of thing.

But the soul remains unfathomable. Even more unfathomable, I’ve come to understand, than God. God can be thought of in the agent sense, or in the source sense. The agent God has plans and wants things. Source God merely provides, we read intent into source God’s actions but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s acting with intent.

But the best I can do with the soul is to consider it as kind of an egg that grows with us. To understand the difficulty think about what it means to exist. Existence, ultimately, means that you are relevant to something else. It simply does not make sense to consider one thing existing all by itself. The first thing you want to do is to subdivide it so that you can have things interacting with other things.

Souls only really interact with us, the things the soul is eternally attached to. Do souls have agency? I really don’t think so, all of a soul’s agency is wrapped up in us.

So while souls are eternal and formless and project all that matters about them into our bodies and minds and consciousnesses, consciousness is of the world, it exists relative to other minds and bodies. When the physical body dies, consciousness carries on existing. I have all kinds of ideas for how afterlives proceed, if you want to read them, I’ve written quite a bit in my dedicated blog. Or reincarnation works just fine too.

The point is, individuated consciousness continues to proceed despite the death of it’s Earthly host. Where does it go? To ask where implies a relativity to this place, with its physical structure and physical rules. It’s a question bound up in the need for our minds to think physically. It’s easier to think of it in terms not so bound. Direction is meaningless.