What happens to the soul after it leaves the body?

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The soul was never a part of the body or in the body in the first place.

We need to distinguish spirit from soul. Consciousness, the locus of experience, needs a vessel. At the moment, that vessel is the body. But when experience continues on after death, consciousness detaches from the vessel and proceeds onward. But there’s no body so what’s doing the thinking?

Consciousness enters another plane. A plane that operates by different rules than this one. A plane where the mind is king, rather than physical laws. The mind can construct and deconstruct reality directly. It’s like being in a dream, only you’re fully awake and aware.

What makes Christians so adamant that you accept Jesus into your life so that you can go to Heaven is that there’s not a whole lot in this plane to guide you. Heaven is another place, much like this one, where Christians go to exist after they die.

There’s no ultimate purpose to existence, and after you die, there’s nothing keeping you from just deciding you don’t really want to do anything anymore. There’s all kinds of stuff to do, create realities, interact with people you knew in life, go approach God and see how He works. But you have to do it for your own reasons, and eventually you’ll run out of reasons to exist. This is especially true if you never work with spiritual reality during your life. You won’t find spiritual existence pleasant or fun.

This is you existing as a spirit. When you’ve made the decision to stop existing, this is where the soul takes over. The soul is your connection to God, it contains the core essence of who you are. When you were born, this soul projected itself into your body and guided your development into a human being.

It did not enter your body in any way, because the soul is not a physical thing and can’t be said to enter into anything. It’s consciousness that enters and leaves, consciousness is both physical and spiritual.

So after you decide to stop existing, God then takes your soul, and does something unfathomable with it. I think most of us get new bodies. Most people just aren’t ready to exist as anything other than a human.

I think there’s a large flow between humans and animals. A soul can project itself into any vessel that can self-direct and be aware, it’s just a question of how much expression and agency you’re going to get. Generally there’s not much mismatch between what a being is capable of and the vessel they’re projected in.

The Buddhists hold that eventually you stop existing altogether through the process of surrendering self. What I take this as meaning is that eventually after you decide to stop existing, God does not project your soul into another vessel, and rather holds on to it, I think of this as your ‘birth’ as a new God.

I suppose the Buddhists could then say that Godly existence is just more separation from everything and you’ll eventually give that up too. My response to that would be that existence flows out of stasis, it always has, and will always continue to do so.