(This article was originally meant for our Whatsapp “Golden Ox” Chat Group but found it a bit lengthy. So, this author decided to put this into his blog so that it spreads across a wider global audience)
Dear All,
I have something quite mind-blowing for us to think about this very early morning.
Part I
“Does the human soul travel faster than light to the next world?”
No need to say Good Morning to me. Just answer my very early pre-dawn 4 am question which would be more educational to me.
The other day I was explaining to my nephew Lim Mingyang a Senior Consultant ENT Surgeon and Deputy Head of the ENT Dept at Tan Tock Seng in Singapore how Einstein came out with the theory that nothing that has mass can travel faster at or faster than the speed of light.
I then casually, literally joked with him unless the ‘object’ is a spirit or soul of a dead human that has no mass or some kind of an extra-terrestrial being from another world.
Then as an afterthought this may be a reality because there were many accounts written of people who died and have near-death experiences, and they came back to tell what was on the other side.
The first time I read of near-death experiences was when I read a book in 1975 called “Life after Life” by Dr Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist who recorded accounts of people who died and came back to tell what in the other world.
He recorded accounts of people across the world so different from each other by ethnicity, socially, culturally, educationally, and with different religions and belief systems, yet all described the same thing they saw, namely, initially travelling through a dark tunnel towards a very bright light at the end, and landing up in another world where they met their dead relatives.
There were many, many other accounts and stories told and written later by others too who died and returned. Here’s just one example.
Although I was jokingly mentioning this to my nephew 2 - 3 days ago, now having recalled what I read in Dr Raymond Moody book, and subsequently by other authors who are doctors who too wrote similar experiences of their patients who died and came back.
A Rethought:
I am now rethinking this possibility that the soul that has no mass like light may even to able to travel faster than light to the next world which we in astronomy know that the next nearest world could lie tens of hundreds or even thousands, if not millions or billions of light years away. But a soul could fly away there and return to this world in a jiff, faster than light?
This means, at least to me, a human soul of a dead person could easily travel far, far, far faster than light to the next world in just a few seconds or within a minute at most, and return to this world to tell his experience over there.
Just for your information, even light takes some 93 billion years to cross from one end of the Universe to the next, but in all probability our human soul once it leaves our body could “fly away” to another world in a femtosecond or in zero second that even light would take tens of thousands of years to arrive?
At least to me, this means our soul that has no mass do travel and does not die, so unlike our physical body that has a mass that dies, and stay put in this world on death.
Our physical body living or dead limits our speed, and we can never reach another world even using the fastest space ship
I really do not know your vision, but this is clearly shown to me in this verse:
"The years of our life are three score and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet most of them are labour and sorrow; for life is soon cut off and we FLY AWAY” (Psalm 90:10).
Does that clearly ring the bell, or are we still deaf and dull in thinking?
I want you in this chat group to think, think again, and yet again and come back to dialogue with me further on this issue? I want to hear and learn from you or anyone.
Here’s part of what I wrote and replied to Mingyang a few days ago when he asked me if I understood Einstein Theory of Relativity:
“As an object approaches the speed of light, its mass approaches infinity.
Because masses approach infinity with increasing speed, it is impossible to accelerate a material object to (or past) the speed of light. To do so would require an infinite amount of energy.
He showed this using this equation, hopefully I can write it down using WhatsApp’s here:
m = m 0 / square root of (1 – v2 / c2)
where, m is the mass of the moving object, m o, its initial velocity, v its velocity, and c, the velocity of light
From this equation of Einstein, we can clearly see as an object increases its velocity (v) towards the speed of light (c), it tends toward 1 (v = c)
When 1 minus 1 in the equation it becomes zero. Square root of zero is zero, and we cannot divide any number where the denominator is zero. It is not determinable, or the result tends towards infinity – even far more massive than the entire Universe itself which of course is impossible to achieve”.
Part II
After I sent out the above Part I into the chat group, I got a reply from my brother-in-law Ong Geok Soo who is a Senior Consultant Civil Engineer in Singapore to which I replied further below:
Dear brother Geok Soo,
Thank you for your thoughts when you wrote this:
“I guess the first assumption is that the soul is weightless. Or it is near weightless? meaning it is very, very, light.
Second, is there a so call time tunnel existing somewhere, where if you get into it, one can zipped away to reach the new destination in, say, just a second even if this place is billions and billions of miles away.
If this so, I guess the speed of travel will be faster than the speed of light.
There is a time tunnel? I don't know. Cheers”
Ong Geok Soo
Thank you for your comment and question.
Let me try to answer you this with His Guidance.
In Einstein’s equation light has no mass
E2 = p2c2 + m2c4
According to Dr Christopher S Baird, in one of a question-and-answer sessions, the above equation, E represents the total energy of a particle, p is the momentum of the particle which is related to its motion, and c is the speed of light, and m is the mass of the particle.
This equation is derived from the relativistic definitions of the energy and momentum of a particle. The equation tells us that the total energy of a particle is a combination of its mass energy and its momentum energy, not necessarily related to its mass.
When a particle is at rest (p = 0), this general equation reduces down to the familiar E = mc2. But for a particle, say light or the soul of a dead human with no mass (m = 0), the general equation reduces down to E = pc.
Since the particles of light called photons have no mass, which I strongly believe is the same with the human soul, they must obey E = pc and therefore they must get all of their energy to travel from somewhere else.
Now there is an interesting additional effect contained in the general equation. If a particle has no mass (m = 0) and is at rest (p = 0), then the total energy is zero (E = 0). But an object with zero energy and zero mass is nothing at all according to Dr Christopher.
Therefore, if an object with no mass is to physically exist, it can never be at rest. Such is the case with light or perhaps our soul.
Furthermore, if an object travels at some speed v that is less than the universal speed limit c, we can always choose a reference frame traveling along with the object so that the object will be at rest in this reference frame.
Therefore, an object that has no mass like a soul or light (photons) can never be at rest but must always travel at the universal speed of light because this speed has the interesting characteristics that it can never rest (like a soul) which is an extension of my own personal belief about the soul.
As far as your idea of “time tunnel” I think this too exist for anything that has no mass that needs to travel through this tunnel or a “dark tunnel at the end was a bright light” as described by almost all people throughout the world who died and came back to tell their near-death experiences - irrespective of their race, religion, social, cultural or educational background after they underwent near-death experience.
All of them described almost exactly the same thing they saw when they came back from death.
Let me give you an analogy to illustrate using a field – astronomy and astrophysics I am familiar
We in this area of astronomy know that it may take billions of years for even light to travel from one world to the next. But astrophysicists speak of the existence of wormholes that may exist, that we may use to tunnel our way through to short-cut this horrendously vast distances in just a fraction of a second.
Time Tunnel, Wormholes and Hyperspace:
Let me explain using a parable.
Imagine we have a very huge sheet of paper say 10 km wide. Imagine we put two points, one each at the end of this immensely huge paper, and we try to connect these two points.
This may be possible, but it is going to be very laborious and time-consuming to draw a line 10 km long to connect them.
Instead of traveling like light between these two points, why not just fold-up this huge paper in such a way that these two points are in direct contact?
There we are, we have already solved the problem. The two points or worlds are already in instant contact with each other, and we need not draw a line 10 km long across the paper to connect the two points.
In short, we have already found a way to wrap up the immensities of time and space together instantly, some kind of time-space warp. Does that make sense and ring the bell?
Does Soul Exist?
First of all, an extremely, extremely difficult question confronting Science today is the existence of a soul? But I think most scientists do not believe in the existence of a soul or any entity they cannnot observe, detect or measure.
We shall try to tackle this poser from the scientific view from my personal side. Let's have a look.
The best way to answer this question as any rational thinking scientist would is this. Imagine a person was alive at one moment, and he suddenly dies either due to a cardiac arrest, a sudden accident, or a slow lingering death from a chronic incurable disease. The next question any scientific mind would ask is this. Where did that life go? He / she was clearly alive and living moments ago, a week, a month or a year ago, but he was no longer alive or living anymore. Where did he go? What was 'that something' living inside his / her body one moment then suddenly left him / her leaving only his physical body. There must be something 'living inside' his physical body that made him or her breathe, move and was conscious. Then what happened? Why was he / her unable to show those characteristics of something that was alive and living anymore? There must be 'something' there inside him / her that has left him that made his entire chemistry of life no longer able to proceed by themselves to show all those characteristics of life or something living?
This is not just very rational scientific thinking and questioning by any right thinking man or woman of science, but all ancient civilizations and cultures throughout the world in their wisdom do the same. All these civilizations even before rational scientific thinking was evolved already believed and accepted that a soul exists, else no physical body by itself can become alive, live for a few years and leave him / her. This phenomenon apples not just to humans or only for human souls, but for anything that creeps, breathes, feeds and multiples itself automatically
The Bible tells us that the living body consists of physical body, a soul and spirit.
Even from the very beginning itself, the presence of a ‘soul’ has already been revealed to us.
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis: 2:7).
In short, a human body is not just made up of some chemical elements from the soil, but he needs to have a soul to be living.
(This is just like giving two rescue breaths to an unconscious victim whose breathing may have stopped during a cardiac arrest after every 15 chest compressions when cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is performed).
Let's have a look at how this verse works from a scientific point of view.
Astronomers tell us that we are made from star dusts generated from supernovae explosions in stars. These dusts then arrived on Earth were made up of the same elements as found in the chemical periodic table of Dmitri Mendeleev.
These elements such as potassium, sodium, calcium, iron, nitrogen, phosphorus, etc..., together with hydrogen, and oxygen in the water enter into the soil which then make up the chemical composition of the human body.
However, these elements by themselves are not alive or living as much as a dead body containing these elements that make up the various organic and inorganic chemical compounds including proteins, sugars, fats, DNA and nucleic acids, etc, etc, being non-living.
They need something else far more than mere chemical elements and chemical compounds to trigger them into life so that they can fall within one of the over 100 definitions of life, even though most of these biological definitions are still not satisfactory.
Definition of Life:
Scientists have since attempted to define life for at least 500 years,
and there are now over 100 different variations in its definition, the most common
ones being, it moves, it reproduces, it respires, it feeds, it responds to stimuli,
such as the popular acronym MRS GREN to mean Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth,
Reproduction, Excretion and Nutrition.
But these are just characteristic or properties of a living
organism, not the definition of life itself.
They only describe the characteristics or behavior of
something living, not the precise description of life per sec
What we need in its definition is what exactly is this entity
that causes something living to display these characteristics given in the acronym
MRS GREN?
Unfortunately, no one this far has the answer, let alone its exact
definition.
The description of some characteristics, features, behavior, requirements
are just the effects of something living. They still do not tell us or define
the precise cause or causes that result in these characteristics.
Because scientists have no clue what causes something to
become alive, they try to avoid answering this question let alone come up with
a precise definition.
But they know with complete certainty that life exists by
observing their presence through their actions, behavior, requirements and characteristics,
but they cannot measure them, or what causes them to display these features.
Hence, they do not have a proper and specific definition for
it, and thus they try to avoid answering this question.
Obviously, they cannot see, detect, feel, let alone measure
the presence of an entity called ‘soul’ or a ‘vital force’ that causes a living
organism to creep, crawl, feed, breathe, grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce itself,
they try not to answer this very question that gave themselves life to read and
understand this very sentence being typed (for instance)!
Hence, there must be an undefined entity unknown to science outside the physical body (made from these elements and chemical compounds in the soil) that need to be pumped into them for them to come to life.
Once biologically and spiritually-activated they trigger off the normal biochemistry of something living.
This to me is the breath of God that has no mass, and this represents the soul of the body residing inside as long as it has not left the body.
This means, the most important ingredient to life is not all those thousands of chemical compounds including DNA and nucleic acids, hormones, enzymes, etc, etc and their various actions and interactions in the body as most scientists think, but the soul that commands them all.
Once the soul or the breath of God leaves them, all their chemistries without any more guidance, stop instantly and break down to return to the soil from where they came.
"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shall thou return"
(Genesis 3:19)
Does that not sound scientifically logical that bread (food) drives the various metabolic pathways and cellular signallings in our body but does not last long without something else much higher that commands their chemistries and pathways.
The verse "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" clearly tells us these elements in the soil (claimed by astronomers to arrive as star dusts from another star or stars through their supernovae explosions), at least to me, need to be activated once again through the life-giving breath of God for them to become a living soul which means this:
chemical elements + life energy force (God's breath) = physical body + soul = A living body with a living soul.
These elements arriving from other stellar systems seem to suggest to me that there may be life existing elsewhere till they are destroyed by supernovae explosions, and they need to be activated once again into life on arrival into our soil.
See further explanation here:
“The Mystery of Life”:
2. Jesus First Miracle:
Besides the above scientific explanation, there are also many other verses given in the Bible indicating the presence of a soul in a body, but we shall quote just a few examples:
"May your whole spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus" (I Thessalonians 5:23).
Our material bodies are evident, but our souls and spirits are less distinguishable.
"And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell."
(Matthew 10:28).
“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26).
Even in the last Book in the Bible the word “soul” is repeated as in Genesis.
“When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne” (Revelation 6:9)
The Soul that Flies:
The presence of a soul in a human body is thus undisputable, but can it depart from the physical body and fly away on death?
Most people associate death as something physical in that the body just drop down dead and becomes motionless on the ground. This is true for a physical body, but not for the soul
We need to bring back Psalm 90:10 where it clearly tells us:
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we FLY AWAY”
To most people a dead body cannot even move, let alone FLY AWAY if this verse was interpreted literally
It is so obvious to me at least, there must be an entity within us that neither has a mass, nor can it be seen, detected or measured that instantly leaves our body on physical death and flies away.
Life’s Most Important Ingredient:
All scientists, doctors, and nutritionists when asked which
is the most important ingredient besides air and water needed to keep a body
alive, all will perhaps instantly name food and nutrition.
As a member of the above professions myself, I do not think
so. I think we are all wrong.
As I have already explained undoubtably the presence of a soul
in us, I think the soul un-hesitantly is the single most important entity that
keeps our physical body alive, with all its physiological and biochemical
functions intact, and in perfect coordination and working order
At least to me our soul is the only eternal partner we have
being given, endowed in us that faithfully keeps us alive, laboring together with
us till it departs and flies away as described in Psalm 90:10.
No other human partner has shown such tribute and
faithfulness as our own soul
We need to cherish, nourish and be very grateful to the
presence of a soul in our physical body every moment of our life, and not let
it depart from us, for the very instant it does, we die and return to the soil
from where we came without God’s life-giving breath being pumped into the
elements of the soil anymore.
It is definitely not the food we eat and the water we drink
that merely physically sustain us, but our own soul that both physically and spiritually
keep us into existence
Just do not allow it to depart from our body and fly away
Societal Beliefs on Death and the
Soul:
Having described what I feel about the presence of a soul from biblical revelation, and other religious belief systems, and also in the eyes of science as a scientist, someone then asked me how does that fit in with thousands of years of other ethinic, and ancient cultural and societal beliefs who do not have clue in modern science or blessed in religious system ?
Before we answer this question, let us give an illustration.
Imagine a developer builds a house from bricks, sand and soil. On completion, the house is just like an empty shell without anyone living inside. It would be dark with no light, lack of sound, lack of anything living there, lack of movement, or any evidence of life within. It would be like an empty shell left behind by a shell-fish that once lived inside found on the seashore.
Imagine we have a family now moving in to stay there. There would now be an obvious difference between an empty house and one that is now living. There will be lights, sound, laughter, cries, physical activities, and movements of someone living within. That’s the presence of life inside.
Suppose now we have a situation where the family stays there for a very short while and decides to shift out and stays somewhere else better and more permanent. It would be just like a situation when we leave this world and go on to stay in the next world.
In such a scenario, the temporary house they once stayed would once again become lifeless, dark, soundless, and empty. That house is now dead, representing a lifeless empty body left behind by someone who once lived inside. It is now an empty shell.
This is similar to a man when he was first created from the soil. He was lifeless, till God (the Creator and Developer) breathed into his nostrils, and man became a living soul, meaning the presence of a physical body (empty house) with a soul (life) within. The body became a living soul (Genesis 2:7), and when he dies, he returns to the soil from where he was created. He left behind a shell once again, evidence of a foot-print.
Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (Genesis 3:19).
Having illustrated that, let us now look at how society collectively describes death?
In all civilizations, nations, ethnicities, cultures, belief systems, religions, ancient till the present, normally they do not describe death with words like “finished, does not exist anymore, disappeared forever, no such person, extinguished, no trace, no evidence of such person existed…etc.”
In every society throughout the world, their belief systems tell them that the person has merely passed on through this world and has left for another world, and that the physical body was just his temporary home for him for a few short years.
They would use euphemisms like “he has moved on, he left us, he passed on or passed away, his soul has left to rest in peace, rested in peace, eternal rest, asleep, departed, slipped away, gave up the ghost, breathed his last in this world, called home, went away to be with the Lord and Creator, went to a better place.
Here we are talking about western belief systems and their cultures. Even here in the East in Malaysia among the Malays and Chinese, the Malays normally describe someone who has died as “meninggal dunia” meaning “has left this world”, and the Chinese would describe it as “kuih sin” meaning “has passed through this physical body - came from somewhere, and has now passed through this physical body”
According to a source, Hinduism too believes in some kind of reincarnation after death in that life cannot be destroyed.
“Most Hindus believe that humans are in a cycle of death and rebirth called samsara. When a person dies, their atman is reborn in a different body.
Some believe rebirth happens directly at death, others believe that an atman may exist in other realms. Hindus believe that an atman may enter swarg or narak for a period before rebirth.
Some Hindus believe that humans may be reborn in animal form, and that rebirth from human to animal form only occurs if an atman has repeatedly failed to learn lessons in human form.
Living life according to teachings in the scriptures will eventually lead to moksha. Some Hindu scriptures describe moksha as the atman becoming absorbed with Brahman, from where each atman is believed to originate”
Hindus in Malaysia and elsewhere too believe in karma or 'intentional action'. Many believe good or bad actions in life leading to positive or negative merit, determines the atman's rebirth.
Among the Buddhists in Malaysia and elsewhere in a book What the Buddha Taught (1959), Theravada scholar Walpola Rahula asked,
"If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can't we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body?"
"When this physical body is no longer capable of functioning, energies do not die with it, but continue to take some other shape or form, which we call another life. ... Physical and mental energies which constitute the so-called being have within themselves the power to take a new form, and grow gradually and gather force to the full.
"Famous Tibetan teacher Chogyam Trunpa Rinpoche once observed that what gets reborn is our neurosis--our habits of suffering and dissatisfaction. And Zen teacher John Daido Loori said: "... the Buddha’s experience was that when you go beyond the skandhas, beyond the aggregates, what remains is nothing. The self is an idea, a mental construct. That is not only the Buddha’s experience, but the experience of each realized Buddhist man and woman from 2,500 years ago to the present day"
"That being the case, what is it that dies? There is no question that when this physical body is no longer capable of functioning, the energies within it, the atoms and molecules it is made up of, don’t die with it. They take on another form, another shape. You can call that another life, but as there is no permanent, unchanging substance, nothing passes from one moment to the next.
Quite obviously, nothing permanent or unchanging can pass or transmigrate from one life to the next. Being born and dying continues unbroken but changes every moment."
The Chinese may describe death as like the empty house that once was living until someone staying there has shifted elsewhere or passes away.
Similarly, it is like a hollow seashell found on the seashore, a fossil remains, fragments of DNA or some skeletons left behind as footprints of something existing inside previously.
The Lamps of Life:
Whatever our cultural, societal, spiritual or religious system of beliefs over the thousands of years, let us put this in another way as a parable to make this easier to understand. It is like this.
Take an analogy or a parable of thousands or millions of unlit lamps in endless rows. All the lamps were initially dark and unlit. Then came a flame (the spark of life) that lit up the first lamp to begin life.
Let us consider the first lamp of life originated from the breath of God, and let this be the first lamp to light up other unlit lamps.
The first lamp then passes on the flame of life to the next unlit lamp to start a different lamp slightly different in color and brightness from the first one. The second one then passes the flame over to the third lamp, and so on.
The lamp represents the body. The oil in the lamp represents the fuel from the food we eat that powers the chemistry of life and the different metabolic pathways they take in the body.
The flame, heat and the warmth emitted represent life and something living, whereas the light represents the soul of the lamp.
When the lamp (life) is extinguished, the life is snuffed out, but the heat from the lamp as energy escapes and flies away like the soul
Life and the soul is like matter and energy interrelationship according to Einstein's famous equation, E = mc2, that can never be destroyed, but enters into a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
This represents the breath of God that can never be destroyed but returns to Him on death.
“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder”
(Mark 10:9)
By the time tens of thousands or millions of lamps were lit, they all had different colors, brightness, stability, length of life, etc. The first generations of lamps would then have exhausted its fuel by the time several hundreds of other lamps were lit.
Most of them would have exhausted their fuel, and the lamps were extinguished (died, like all animals including the dinosaurs). Then the second wave of earlier lamps died off, and so on.
As the flame lit up all the millions of lamps, new and more adaptable lamps would have been created to last longer. Life on earth is exactly like that with better and better species being evolved.
The Genesis and evolution of life:
But in the beginning (Genesis), only a few lamps of limited edition were available to light up the place (Earth). It was only through repeated multiplication - (‘multiply and be fruitful’ as God ordered) that millions of lamps (millions of species of life) were all lighted up into different colors, shapes and brightness as in Darwin’s “Origin of the Species’ recorded.
If we look at the evolution of life in this light, how does Creation in Genesis conflict with the Evolution of Life as myopic scientists and lay people alike argue? Their argument is totally beyond me. To me, as I have explained here, there is order, and harmony between the two.
Evolution to me, is just an extension of the initial creation of life on Earth over a very long period:
What is a thousand years to man, is just a watch in the night for the Creator. All these were not done in a day (literally) as written in Genesis. Scientists misinterpret the Bible. Spiritual enlightenment is beyond the human understanding of scientists who insist only on objective measurements.
Further reading on:
The Apple in Bible: Lost in Transition here:
https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2010/09/apple-in-bible-lost-in-transition.html
Does not that speak volumes where we can have science, spiritual, cultural and societal beliefs in tremendous harmony with one another, rather than in antagonistic with each other?
Others may argue on this issue till kingdom comes, but as for me this verse in Psalm 90:10 about our souls that flies away on physical death stand steadfast with me throughout eternity in time and space, even to the ends of their teethers where Universe (heavens) and our souls may lie.
