Imagining spiritual reality:
From death to life
The New Mindscape #A4–2
The power of your imagination allows you to imagine yourself beyond your body, in another world. You can imagine yourself living in the distant past, living in another country, living in the future, or living in another world after your physical death.
Life after death can be neither proven nor disproven.
But it’s a fact that all societies and religions have an imagination of life after death, and that this imagination has implications.
When we discuss the issue of life after death, we can only use our imagination. Even if there is such thing as life after death, it would be impossible for us to conceive of it. So we can only imagine it.
The material world is the world of space/time; beyond the material realm, can we speak of space and time? Without framing our vision in space and time, how can we imagine anything? So, even if life continues after death, our understanding of such a process can only be aided with our imagination, using images, symbols and metaphors that can only be derived from the images of this material world, and can never be more than an approximation of a reality that is beyond the mind’s ability to comprehend.
How do different religions imagine life after death? All religious traditions use images and metaphors based on life here to imagine life after death.[1]
Some of them imagine life after death to be essentially a reflection of this life. Chinese folk religion is a good example. That’s why you want your ancestors to have cars, mahjong tables, a nice house in the afterlife, and so on. And just like here, they have social hierarchies, corrupt officials and so on. You live in the afterlife just as you lived here. No big change.[2]
Other religious traditions imagine life after death to take place in a spiritual world that operates differently from our world. These religions have different kinds of imagination, conceptualization, symbolization, and rituals in relation to death. But there is something in common throughout all of them.
They consider that beyond the visible material reality, there’s another reality. Beyond this material reality which you observe with the senses or instruments, there’s something else. This spiritual reality is described in many different ways. It’s described with a complex set of symbols, but it can be simplified in a certain way.
Two Poles of Spiritual Reality
These religions conceive of spiritual reality as extending between two poles. At one end, there’s a state of bliss with absolute and perpetual joy; it can also be described as a state of oneness, love, truth, clarity, pure consciousness, nearness to the Divine, and reunion with God. All of these can be described as Pure Light or Heaven — this is the positive pole of the spiritual reality.
And there’s the opposite side of the spiritual reality. This is a state of deep spiritual suffering: confusion and separation, loneliness and isolation, ignorance and loss. This is described as Darkness or Hell.[3]
Sometimes the spiritual reality is described as a physical place, and sometimes as a spiritual state. If we take the terms “heaven” and “hell” literally, perhaps you could understand Heaven as a particular place, where, I suppose, you would fly to in an invisible rocket, flying up to some other place in the universe. Or you go underground to some big pit of fire in the centre of the planet, called Hell. These are literal understandings.
On the other hand, symbolic or metaphorical interpretations take terms such as “hell” or “heaven” as metaphors for a spiritual condition. Heaven is a spiritual condition of purity, closeness, and blissful joy. Hell is a spiritual condition of pollution, loneliness, and suffering.
These different states are conditions of the spirit.
The spirit is attracted to purity, love, oneness, and divine qualities. So, for the spirit, to be in such a state, or to be close to such as state, is truly heavenly. It’s heaven. But to be far from such a state — to be far from what it most deeply desires — is truly a condition of hell.
The imagination of heaven and hell can thus tell us something about our spirit.
What is the spirit? Beyond our material reality, what we perceive with our body, the things we own, or the words and labels by which we describe ourselves — there’s something else.
We’ve previously discussed the idea of our true self, the state of the “uncarved block”. What will happen if we strip away everything that we can see and describe? If we strip away the body?
What remains, in the view of most religions, is our spirit, or our soul. Different religious traditions have different names to designate the spiritual reality of the human being. For example, in Buddhism, it’s sometimes said that there is no soul; but Buddhism also states that all sentient beings have a spiritual nature, which is called the Buddha-nature or foxing (佛性). Other terms are our divine nature (shenxing 神性), our spiritual nature (xinxing 心性), and so on. No matter what the term is, and the variations in the nuances in the meanings of these terms, all major religions consider that our spirit or spiritual nature is the most essential aspect of the human being.[4][5]
Religious teachings consider that our spirit is attracted to the heavenly state. It yearns for that state of bliss, consciousness, knowledge, and oneness. The life of the spirit is a journey towards that heavenly state while trying to avoid the hellish state. The heavenly state is where the soul is true to itself — to its essential reality.
On the other hand, in the state of hell, the soul has forgotten what it really is; it has turned away from its own nature. It has been attracted to other kinds of things, to power, fame and wealth — to the desires of the body and of the ego, which draw it away from its true nature, and lead it to ultimate suffering.
So, the soul is on a journey, attracted to the heavenly state, and seeking to avoid the hellish state. This is a journey in which there are causes and consequences. Different religions teach that pure motives and deeds will lead the soul closer to its own true nature and heavenly state. Pure motives and deeds will help to purify the soul, making it more heavenly.
On the other hand, the soul will suffer from impure motives and deeds. It will be corrupted by these deeds, bringing it closer to a hellish state.
This is the whole idea of the Chinese saying: goodness brings good rewards; and evil will bring evil rewards (善有善報，惡有惡報).
Some people understand this in a material sense; they wonder why, sometimes, a good person suffers material infortunes, and why a bad person may enjoy material fortunes. But this “spiritual law” operates at the spiritual level: goodness brings spiritual benefit to the soul, and evil brings spiritual damage to the soul. Many people with material wealth and power are living in a hellish state, and many people in material poverty live in a heavenly spiritual state.
I began by talking about life after death, and the notions of heaven and hell after death. But then, seeing heaven and hell as spiritual conditions, I started talking about heaven and hell in this life. The imagination of life after death — the imagination of a purely spiritual life — has helped us to understand something about the spiritual dimension of this life.
In different religious traditions, it is said that egoism and the attachment to the body will block the progress of the soul. These make us become more selfish. We want the things of this world and we become more attached to the world; and so, when we leave this world, we find ourselves in much pain, being torn away from those material things we are so attached to.
But if we are more detached from this world, we will not be much affected when we leave, and leave behind our material possessions and social position.
As the soul progresses spiritually, it becomes less attached to the ego and the material world; it becomes more conscious of the spiritual reality; it becomes more conscious of the interconnectedness of all things; it feels joy at the joy of others, and pain at the pain of others. It has a stronger urge to connect to the divine reality; it has a stronger urge to help and nurture suffering souls. This is the path of spirituality.
Along this journey, we go through the passage of death. This is an important stage in the life of the soul. One metaphor is that the soul loses its shell, just like you take the clothes off your body. If the soul is too attached to the ego and bodily life, it will feel an incomparable pain from being torn away from everything it loves in this world. But if the soul has progressed and has been attracted to the spiritual reality, it will continue to progress, leaving the material world behind and entering the purely spiritual reality. This soul will be liberated at the point of death and enter a blissful state.
In some religious sayings, our body is compared to a seed — as our soul grows, the husk of the seed — our body — needs to break and fall off, and only then can the soul can grow into its fullest flourishing, like a flower growing out of its seed. Sometimes, the gardener will pull the small seedling out from one place and plant it somewhere else. The seedling has disappeared from this garden, and it was a painful tearing away, but it has been planted into a more beautiful garden where it will fully grow and develop. So, maybe from the perspective of the dead person, there is no pain whatsoever, and in fact, maybe she went off to someplace better. The idea is that our basic nature and essence is the spiritual soul. The body imposes some constraint on the soul. Death implies moving on to another dimension, in which we are released from the body. All of our spiritual capacities can have greater development as we move into the next phase, after inhabiting and growing in this body.
[1] Angela Sumegi (2013) Understanding Death: An Introduction to Ideas of Self and the Afterlife in World Religions. Wiley.
Zhou, Ying. “How to Live a Good Life and Afterlife: Conceptions of Post-Mortem Existence and Practices of Self-Cultivation in Early China.” Order №13807886, University of Pennsylvania, 2019. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/how-live-good-life-afterlife-conceptions-post/docview/2282536429/se-2.
[2] Scott, Janet Lee. For Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors: The Chinese Tradition of Paper Offerings. Hong Kong University Press, 2007.
[3] Casey, John, After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory (New York, 2009; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Feb. 2010), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195092950.001.0001, accessed 6 Aug. 2023.
[4] Bering, J. (2006). The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(5), 453–462. doi:10.1017/S0140525X06009101
Kristensen, W. Brede. “The Soul.” In The Meaning of Religion: Lectures in the Phenomenology of Religion, pp. 203–215. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 1960.
Ciocan, Cosmin Tudor. “The value of the soul in the religious views. An overview targeting the salvation of an individual.” Dialogo 6, no. 2 (2019): 233–244.
[5] See here for an analysis of the role of religion in suicide prevention: https://psyche.co/ideas/why-religious-belief-provides-a-real-buffer-against-suicide-risk
See the next essay, on Death: a passage in life. Funerals as rites of passage.
See the previous essay, on The meaning of death: and what it tells us about life.
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This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
