Do you believe the soul leaves the body immediately after death, or do you think there’s some lag time?

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The soul was never in your body to begin with, any more than your mind is. Your mind is not your brain. Your mind is a collection of patterns that builds up over the course of your life. Your brain is a lump of flesh that sends electrical signals across itself and responds to those it senses coming from the nervous system. You won’t find the patterns of mind in the brain.

Where is the mind then? The question, just as yours does, reveals the limitations of our ability to conceive of things. Not all things have physical positions. How to understand this? Well, ask yourself, where is Harry Potter? Well, you can’t answer that question, Harry Potter does not physically exist. But obviously Harry Potter exists somewhere right?

The answer here is that Harry Potter is abstract. There is a wall between us and Harry Potter that will never be breached. We can think about Harry Potter, but we can never actually touch Harry Potter.

It’s the same thing with our minds, and it’s the same with our souls. There are certain physical interactions that you can point to, for example if you destroy all the Harry Potter books and make it illegal to read Harry Potter, then there will be no new Harry Potter stories. If you put a bullet in your brain, then your mind will cease functioning. Just because something interacts with the world, doesn’t make that thing physical.

Numbers are abstract things, you can’t point to the actual number two anywhere, except a physical representation of it. But you can hold two apples in your hand, and add an apple and be sure you will have three apples when it’s all said and done.

The nature of Harry Potter is literary, he’s best thought of in literary terms. The nature of the mind is patterned thoughts, what we call mental.

So then what is the nature of the soul? I can tell you, as a mystic, that the soul is one of the hardest things imaginable to fathom. It’s easier to approach God than it is to approach one’s own soul. One can reason about God, bring God into the domain of reason. You can even talk to God if you approach Him right. One can come to an understanding of self, of ego and pride and awareness and vice and wisdom. There are many areas where God and self shade into each other and intermingle.

But that direct fulcrum point, where self actually touches God, that is perhaps the hardest thing to fathom in all of creation. It resists all mysticism. Without mysticism, the ability to explore divine reality directly, all that’s left is belief.