Where does the soul go after death?

It is the great question of this entire path. Tom examines, one by one, the destinies the traditions propose — and shows why each violates the nature of God. What remains is the great choice.

— Then where do souls come from? When were they created?

— We will look at that later. Before that, we need to understand where the soul goes after death. Will it go to a heaven or paradise? To a hell? To a limbo? Will it go into the universal whole, as the pantheists maintain?

— I do not know, tell me.

— If the soul went to a heaven or paradise, would it remain eternally in a useless beatitude? Does that not seem to you a different kind of punishment?

— Indeed, an eternal contemplation would be a torment. Continue.

— If it went to a hell, would it remain in suffering eternally, without any possibility of repentance? That idea contradicts at least two attributes of God: that of supreme intelligence, because, if even one of the souls He created went to a hell, it would be the confirmation of His failure towards that soul; and that of supreme justice and goodness, because God would need to be very evil to leave one of His children in eternal suffering without remission. A single misdirected existence would suffice for God to decree upon that spirit an eternal torment, in an act of vengeance against His creature. That is not just, it is not good, and it is not intelligent.

— Indeed, the idea of hell turns God into a terrible and punishing being. Continue, my friend.

— If it went into the universal whole, it would lose its individuality for all eternity. We saw that the soul is an individual being, it had a beginning and will have no end, therefore it cannot lose its individuality. Pantheistic thought has yet another problem: the idea that the universal whole is constituted by God and by His creatures contradicts His attributes. If that were so, then God would no longer be the supreme intelligence, since there are beings of very little intelligence who would form part of the universal whole. The attribute of God's immutability would also be annulled or diminished by the same principle, as would the attribute of God's omnipotence. The attribute of sovereign justice and goodness would also be annulled or diminished, because some souls are more good than others. The attribute of God's infinite perfection would also be annulled, since some souls are better than others.

Roger then says:

— Yes, one understands that the soul had a beginning and will have no end. That it will be eternal. One also understands the impossibility of the soul's destiny being some heaven or paradise. One also understands the impossibility of the soul's destiny being some eternal hell. One also understands the impossibility of the pantheistic ideas. It is also logical that the soul's destiny is not some limbo. Yes, my dear Tom. All of that is profoundly logical. There is no way to sustain those absurd and irrational ideas. But, after all, what will be the destiny of the soul?

Tom breaks into a smile and says:

— My dear Roger, the soul has already lived before, animating other bodies, and it will live again afterwards, animating new bodies. In a succession of material existences. The name for that is REINCARNATION.

Roger, surprised, says:

— Reincarnation? But is that not a religious, Eastern idea?

— That is what many think, Roger. But reincarnation is not the property of any religion. In ancient Egypt, more than three thousand years ago, the idea of the survival of the soul and of its return was central to their view of the world. In India, philosophers explored reincarnation long before the rise of the great organised religions. Plato defended it in ancient Greece. So did Pythagoras. So did the Celtic druids. The philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned by the Inquisition, in part for defending similar ideas. Cultures that never communicated with one another arrived at the same conclusion — which is in itself significant. And more recently, as we shall see, scientists from various continents have investigated this phenomenon with academic rigour. Reincarnation is not a matter of faith — it is the logical conclusion of everything we have already discussed. It is the only answer that does not violate any of the attributes of God that we have established.

Excerpt from the work The Great Discovery, by César Manuel Malainho de Oliveira.
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