“They were also the first to broach the opinion that the soul of man is immortal, and that, when the body dies, it enters into the form of an animal which is born at the moment, thence passing on from one animal into another, until it has circled through the forms of all the creatures which tenant the earth, the water, and the air, after which it enters again into a human frame, and is born anew. The whole period of the transmigration is (they say) three thousand years.”
~ ‘The History’ by Herodotus (George Rawlinson translation. GB6 - p. 75)
The book continues Herodotus’s fascinating account of Egyptian life. It is like drawing a curtain, looking through a window, and seeing people 2,500 years ago, and being awed by their way of life. I was so surprised to read about the Egyptian belief that the soul goes through different animals before entering the human body. I had always thought that this concept was unique to India, especially among the Hindus. Even though different cultures may not believe in reincarnation, most humans probably don’t want to think that death is the end. They want to believe that life is continuous and that death is not an end but a transition. I recently watched the last season of Upload2 - a futuristic, thought-provoking, emotional, yet funny TV series where people upload their consciousness to a virtual world where they can live forever. Of course, like all great things in life, it is accessible only to the very rich! So, even if the scientific method were to establish firmly that there is no life after death, technology could actually make life after death possible, given the intense human yearning for it. In one of the most dramatic scenes in Westworld, the hosts jump off a cliff to die to exist forever in ‘Sublime’3, a blissful virtual world.