Question:
Is there life after death?
Answer:
I like to call it life after life! In order to understand life after life, we must first ask what is life?
Our body is not who we are. When the Creator created us, what exactly did He create? And did He create my body first or my soul first? The answer that Kabbalah offers is that He created the soul first. The soul is the energy, the conscious, the subconscious, and the life force within. It is the essence of who we are. The body is the vessel that contains the soul. So what is alive right now? The soul is not physical, and because it is not physical, it never dies. The body is physical and it is alive only because it has life force within it.
So what dies? What dies is not the life force. When a battery dies, we say the energy or the juice died. This is not the case with us. As long as the life force is inside the body, the body is alive. And once the life force leaves the body, the body has no life of its own. Just like the moon has no light of its own. The life force within us is like the sun, always shining. When it leaves the body it is like the sun setting, there is darkness. But the sun is still shining; we just can’t see it. Likewise, we can’t see the soul that continues living after the body dies.
Life force cannot die. That’s why we call it life force—it is constant; it’s always there. Physicists say that energy is never created and never disappears. It may change form, but there is no loss of energy in the process. The soul is just another name for energy. Therefore yes, after death of the body, the life force keeps on being. The real me keeps on being, keeps on seeing without eyes to see, keeps on hearing, keeps on understanding—consciousness is constant.
Another way to look at things is this: there is life inside the body and there is life outside the body. If I wear eyeglasses with pink lenses, the reality I see is pink. If I wear green tinted glasses, all I see is green. I view my experiences in a different way, but it’s only the lenses that make it different. Likewise, when my soul is inside my body, it experiences life through the lens of the body. When my soul leaves the body, it experiences life in a different way. Metaphorically speaking, after the body dies we are not limited to a particular lens any more. We see all the colors. Our reality is limited by who we are in this body. Once we are outside the body our experience is unlimited. This is life after life.
