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Religious views

Bahá'í beliefs

The Bahá'í Faith affirm that "the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the most learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel." Concerning the soul or spirit of human beings and its relationship to the physical body, Bahá'u'lláh explained: Know thou that the soul of man is exalted above, and is independent of all infirmities of body or mind. That a sick person showeth signs of weakness is due to the hindrances that interpose themselves between his soul and his body, for the soul itself remaineth unaffected by any bodily ailments. ... When it leaveth the body, however, it will evince such ascendancy, and reveal such influence as no force on earth can equal ... consider the sun which hath been obscured by the clouds. Observe how its splendor appeareth to have diminished, when in reality the source of that light hath remained unchanged. The soul of man should be likened unto this sun, and all things on earth should be regarded as his body. So long as no external impediment interveneth between them, the body will, in its entirety, continue to reflect the light of the soul, and to be sustained by its power. As soon as, however, a veil interposeth itself between them, the brightness of the light seemeth to lessen.... The soul of man is the sun by which his body is illumined, and from which it draweth its sustenance, and should be so regarded.

The soul not only continues to live after the physical death of the human body, but is, in fact, immortal. Bahá'u'lláh wrote: Know thou of a truth that the soul, after its separation from the body, will continue to progress until it attaineth the presence of God, in a state and condition which neither the revolution of ages and centuries, nor the changes and chances of this world, can alter. It will endure as long as the Kingdom of God , His sovereignty, His dominion and power will endure.

Heaven can be seen partly as the soul's state of nearness to God; and hell as a state of remoteness from God. Each state follows as a natural consequence of individual efforts, or the lack thereof, to develop spiritually.

Bahá'u'lláh taught that individuals have no existence previous to their life here on earth. The soul's evolution is always towards God and away from the material world. A human being spends nine months in the womb in preparation for entry into this physical life. During that nine-month period, the fetus acquires the physical tools (e.g., eyes, limbs, and so forth) necessary for existence in this world. Similarly, this physical world is like a womb for entry into the spiritual world. Our time here is thus a period of preparation during which we are to acquire the spiritual and intellectual tools necessary for life in the next world. The crucial difference is that, whereas physical development in the mother's womb is involuntary, spiritual and intellectual development in this world depend strictly on conscious individual effort

Buddhist beliefs

According to Buddhist teaching, all things are impermanent, in a constant state of flux; all is transient, and no abiding state exists. This applies to humanity, as much as to anything else in the cosmos; thus, there is no unchanging and abiding self. Our sense of "I" or "me" is simply a sense, belonging to the ever-changing entity, that (conventionally speaking) is us, our body, and mind. This expresses in essence the Buddhist principle of anatta (Pali; Sanskrit: anatman).

Buddhists hold that the delusion of a permanent, abiding self is one of the main root causes for human conflict on the emotional, social and political levels. They add that understanding of anatta (or "not-self") provides an accurate description of the human condition, and that this understanding allows "us" to go beyond "our" mundane desires. Nirvana is solely recognized as being distinct. Buddhists can speak in conventional terms of the soul or of "self" as a matter of convenience, but only under the conviction that ultimately "we" are changing "entities". In death, the body and mind disintegrate; if the disintegrating mind contains any remaining traces of karma, it will cause the continuity of the consciousness to bounce back an arising mind to an awaiting being, that is, a fetus developing the ability to harbor consciousness. Thus, in Buddhist teaching, a being that is born is neither entirely different, nor exactly the same, as it was prior to rebirth. It helps if one remembers that buddhism holds that there are 3 minds: Very-Subtle-Mind, which isn't disintegrated in incarnation-death, Subtle-Mind, which is disintegrated in death, and is "dreaming-mind" or "unconscious-mind", and Gross-Mind. Gross-Mind doesn't exist when one is sleeping , so it is more impermanent even than Subtle-Mind, which doesn't exist in death. Very-Subtle-Mind, however, does continue, and when it "catches-on"/coincides-with phenomena again, a new Subtle-Mind emerges, with its own personality/assumptions/habits and that someone/entity experiences the karma on that continuum that is ripening then.

However, scholars such as Shiro Matsumoto have argued that a curious development occurred in Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, stemming from the Cittamatra and Vijnanavada schools in India : although this school of thought denies the permanent personal selfhood, it affirms concepts such as Buddha-nature, Tathagatagarbha, Rigpa, or "original nature". Matsumoto argues that these concepts constitute a non- or trans-personal self, and almost equate in meaning to the Hindu concept of Atman, although they differ in that Buddha-nature does not incarnate. One should note the polarity in Tibetan Buddhism between shes-pa (the principle of consciousness) and rig-pa (pure consciousness equal to Buddha-nature). The concept of a person as a tulku provides even more controversy. A tulku has, due to heroic austerities and esoteric training ( or due-to innate talent combined with great subtle-mind-commitment in the moment-of-death ), achieved the goal of transferring personal "identity" ( or nature/commitment ) from one rebirth to the next (for instance, Tibetans consider the Dalai Lama a tulku ). The mechanics behind this work as follows: although Buddha-nature does not incarnate, the individual self comprises skandhas , or components, that undergo rebirth. For an ordinary person, skandhas cohere in a way that dissolves upon the person's death. So, elements of the transformed personality re-incarnate, but they lose the unity that constitutes personal selfhood for a specific person. In the case of tulkus , however, they supposedly achieve sufficient "crystallization" of skandhas in such a manner that the skandhas do not entirely "disentangle" upon the tulku's death; rather, a directed reincarnation occurs. In this new birth, the tulku possesses a continuity of personal identity/commitment, rooted in the fact that the consciousness or shes-pa (which equates to a type of skandha called vijnana ) has not dissolved after death, but has sufficient durability to survive in repeated births.

The compatiblility of these concepts with Buddhist orthodoxy remains in dispute. Since, however, subtle-mind emerges in incarnation, and gross-mind emerges in periods-of-sufficient-awareness within some incarnations, there isn't really any contradiction: very-subtle-mind's original-nature, that-is irreducible mind / clarity / whose function is knowing, doesn't have any "body", and the coarser minds that emerge "on" it while it drifts/wanders/dreams aren't continuous. Any continuity-of-awareness achieved by tulku is simply a greater continuity than is achieved by/in a normal-incarnation, as it continues across several, is all. . . only a difference of degree. . .

Many modern Buddhists, particularly in Western countries, reject the concept of rebirth or reincarnation as incompatible with the concept of anatta . They take the view that if there is no abiding self, and no soul, then nothing remains to be reborn. Stephen Batchelor, notably, discusses this issue in his book Buddhism Without Beliefs . However, the question arises: if a self does not exist, who thinks/lives now? Buddhists hold the view that thought itself thinks: if you remove the thought, there's no thinker (self) to be found. A detailed introduction to this, and to other basic buddhist teachings, appears in What the Buddha taught by the Buddhist monk Walpola Rahula.

Gurdjieff taught that man has no soul. Rather, man must create a soul while incarnate, whose substance could withstand the shock of death. Without a soul, Gurdjieff taught, man will "die like a dog."

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