Is our soul eternal? How can we know for sure? Do those parents who give this advice know for sure?

“Be good, son, if you want to go to heaven.”

Being good is about your attitude. The world might slap you down, but keep smiling, and you will go to heaven.

Really?

Does it make any difference what I learn or if I help others when they get slapped? If I try to help others, doesn’t that mean that what I do has value rather than being willing to do it? Do I help others because it makes me a better man, or do I help them because they need help?

     In his advice to be good, the dad asks for attitude rather than action. Good thoughts, my son, because you will go to heaven if you do.

Rudyard Kipling offered his son a promise in the Poem “IF” advice on a stoic’s focus on goals.

“Yours is the Earth and everything in it,

and, what is more, you’ll be a Man, my son!” 

     Kipling’s promise is at least to offer that the son will be a man, and the definition of being a man perhaps was also Kipling. What about the father’s promise that his son will go to heaven? That father can offer the promise but can’t provide the evidence.

If you, or at least your soul, does get to heaven, you must live with yourself for eternity. So the next question might be: then what?

Some religions believe the soul returns after death and reunites with a resurrected body, while others are unsure whether the soul exists without its original body. Either way, a spiritual existence for each of us should carry the experiences, knowledge, and skills we can from our current life journey.

     Plato, Aristotle, and many others wondered about this when they wrote about the existence of the soul. A more recent philosopher, Will Durant, wrote about the history of man, looking deeply into the lives of all things. He noted that he had little doubt that the soul existed as part of human existence, a view shared by many intellectuals.

Some, like Durant, are influenced by a belief that the universe brings about and creates life, taking matter and evolving it into living forms, and they even suggest this is the universe’s purpose. This view states that all matter has a spiritual essence.

     Durant was fond of his unique soul but said he did not expect it to survive the complete death of his body. He concluded this in Fallen Leaves, ironically the last of three posthumous titles, saying he felt the body’s death would likewise be the death of the soul. That conclusion seems at odds with his passion for life and views that energy exists within all things. It looks odd on several levels since he didn’t understand what the soul was.

     Durant said he wanted to bring the “future into focus,” and his method was to focus on the raw experience of history. This approach is brilliantly reflected in his extensive work writing the eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization. Durant believed that life flowed from what he thought was a mysterious source that moved like a river from an unknown beginning to an abrupt end with the body’s death. The sudden end of the soul is often the conclusion of intellectuals that seems to be tied to the concept of determinism: the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will.

When you place great value on individual experiences, it suggests that free will and agency are essential.

     My own opinion is that Durant was on the right track. His conclusions on the nature of the soul were incomplete because he needed to live longer to experience and understand all the options, such as spatial dimension theory.

     We live in a world clearly defined by three spatial dimensions plus the further dimension of time. However, Durant needed more information about the fourth, fifth, and other dimensions. In 1919, mathematician Theodor Kaluza presented a new idea, stating that in addition to the three dimensions of location, objects occupied a position in time: the fourth dimension.

Today, string theorists present more complicated theories,s saying it’s pretty easy to assume there are ten or eleven dimensions and more. Maybe these other dimensions include or await our participation with our spiritual soul.

     Seeing life metaphorically, like a river of influences and forces, is a poetic approach that ties things together, but it ignores where the river starts and assumes that it ends.

I conclude that the soul continues after death, and the soul's life is eternal. The implications of Durant’s thoughts and what has been learned about string theory are compelling, but my religious teachings also make a great deal of difference for me.

     As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I believe Jesus Christ died on the cross, rose on the third day, and appeared again to his disciples. I also conclude that the soul leaves the body at death for all of us and, at some point, is resurrected again, regaining a physical body.