THE SOUL

       CHAPTER ONE

      As a man leaves an old garment and puts on one that is new the Spirit leaves his mortal body and then puts one that is new.

       The Bhagavad Gita

      The Bushmen of southern Africa say that a star falls for the death of every human. When the hammerkop, a marsh bird of the Bushmen regions, sees the star fall into the water, he cries out. So whoever sees a falling star and hears that cry knows that one of his own people has fallen. A soul has started its journey to the kingdoms of eternity.

      The soul represents the deep mystery, the universal connection that we all have with the divine, the Creator, the Great Spirit: God. The idea of the soul cannot be confined to any one religion, for it is simply the energy that animates all of life.

      There is so much fear of death in the modern world because there is so little understanding of the soul as separate from the body and the mind. It is not that we have souls; we are souls born to fulfil a unique purpose or destiny in the physical world. Within the soul lie the qualities of peace, purity, love, wisdom and power which resonate with the never-ending spirit of the universe. Through meditation and prayer, breathing and listening quietly, we are able to touch this sacred space within. Spiritual energy work like yoga and tai chi further enhances our links with our inner soul. Soon entering this space becomes like entering a flowing river and, gradually, as the ability to go inside gets easier and easier, it brings with it a sense of extraordinary connection with the universal spirit.

      The soul is our individual link with eternity. There is within all of us a silent knowledge that a part of us never dies. This understanding that the death of the body does not mean the end of the soul’s journey has been common to all of humankind since the beginning of time. This deep knowing is expressed through religion, ritual and prayer as the living seek ways to communicate with the beyond and the origins of immortality.

      The butterfly emerging from the chrysalis has served as a metaphor for death since Celtic times. More recently in a concentration camp in Poland where 300,000 people were put to death, hundreds of butterflies were found all over the walls, etched in the stone and the wood. In the same way that the butterfly struggles to leave the chrysalis to emerge into its brilliant exquisite self, so too the immortal soul leaves the mortal body and the dark mystery of eternity draws the spirit away from the cocoon of physical life.

      This afternoon, when I sit down beside her, she cuddles up in my arms. I rock her gently.

      ‘I’m afraid of dying. I don’t know how to die. Help me please.’

      I’m struck dumb. I do not know how to die, either. ‘I think it’s easier than we think. You could say that it happens of its own accord. Maybe there’s something in us that “knows”,’ I say.

      She looks at me with her large eyes sunk in their dark sockets. Suddenly she moves her hand toward my neck and takes hold of the Egyptian cross I wear, the one that’s also called ‘the staff of life’ or ‘the key of Isis’. She wants to know what it represents. I tell her about the bas reliefs in the royal tombs of Egypt, on which one can see the dead journeying through the underworld holding the staff of life until they start climbing again toward the light. ‘Everyone has his or her staff of life, which will help to journey through death. You’ll find yours too.’

      Marie de Hennezel, Intimate Death (Little, Brown & Company, 1998)

      MAPS FOR THE SOUL JOURNEY

      Death itself has always been a focus for a spiritual vision of life. Belief systems in every culture and every time speak of the certain immortality of our soul essence. Whether it is the aboriginal belief that we simply expand into the everlasting Dreamtime, the Buddhist belief in the endless cycles of rebirth or the hope of Christianity to embrace Jesus Christ on death so that the soul may journey with Him to heaven, the key to immortality lies in the belief that death is a gateway into the realms of divine consciousness.

      Ancient cultures were compelled by death and the journey of the soul. The tales of heroic journeys to the underworld, primordial battles between good and evil and the triumph over darkness and death explain humanity’s place in the cosmos and describe the kingdoms of the dead. Mythology rises from the imagination, reflecting the ideals, aspirations and fears of the culture and the age. It is the literature of the spirit which brings vision to the hidden journey of the soul. The stories which reach us from nomadic and pastoral people rest on the simple cosmology of nature, where to enter the otherworld was to be elevated into a paradise, a beautiful, abundant version of the mundane world, while sophisticated civilizations cultivate increasingly complex ideals of the afterlife – concepts of judgement, innumerable deities and various realms of heaven and hell which the soul had to traverse.

      The journey to the realms of the dead is often a perilous one. The soul usually has to negotiate a difficult boundary: a river carried by an unkempt ferryman who demands gifts or payment for his service or a bridge of a single hair, which is crossed by Muslim souls on their way to paradise. The obstacles facing the souls of the dead include tests of judgement and temptation, demons and the hungry souls of the dead who try to prevent the soul reaching its heavenly destination.

      In Christian and Buddhist teachings the dangers are usually that the soul might fall back into earthly desire, attachment or negativity instead of forward into faith. In The Tibetan Book of the Dead there are prayers, mantras and visualizations to guide the soul on the path to liberation as it reaches for the radiant light of awareness which shines brightly on us as we die but which, in our initial confusion, we may ignore, turning instead to lesser glowing lights which represent our habitual human fears and negativity.

      The Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of highly illustrated papyrus scrolls found in the great tombs, also reveals magical incantations and formulae which the soul could use to open the gates of the underworld. The popular symbol of the ankh, key to eternal life, which symbolizes the divine union of masculine and feminine, comes from those ancient times.

      Prayers, mantras, sacred texts and symbols are the maps