Life after death.

Essay by skyfox01Junior High, 9th gradeA+, August 2003

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Is there life after death? It's a question that people have grappled with throughout history and across cultures.

From Plato and the early Greeks, through to Jesus and Paul, through most African and Oriental cultures, to spiritualists of the twentieth century, a belief in some kind of survival of bodily death has been undeniably affirmed. Jesus' assertion that in his Father's house there are many rooms, would seem to be justified by the fact that this common belief is held by such divergent peoples.

While many traditional believers tend to shy away from the topic, testimony to the existence of a spirit world actually permeates the Bible.

Jesus talks with the long-dead Moses and Elijah (Mt 17:1-3). Christian mystics and saints throughout history also spoke of spiritual experiences.

The proposition that life continues beyond physical death goes a long way toward explaining well-recognized and otherwise unexplainable phenomena, for example, near-death experiences, visions of deceased persons and the experience of authentic communication from the other side.

To understand what happens to us at death, we first need to understand of what we are made. Most of us tend to identify closely with our physical bodies, but this is only part of the picture. We are not only physical matter, but also spiritual essence. It is accurate to say that we are essentially spiritual beings who possess physical bodies. When we die, we in effect take off our physical bodies as one might take off an overcoat. The essential person remains.

In the Baha'I that the physical world is a reflection of the world of the spirit and the fundamental reality of each individual as the soul, whose education represents the main purpose of physical creation itself. Spiritual progress, which is equally available to all, and this process of development continue...