The Soul

What is the difference between a living and a dead person? Being a doctor I have witnessed scores of deaths first hand. What is the exact moment that a living, breathing, vital body is converted in to dead body is a question that has haunted me since long. One moment the person is alive and the very next he is just a body… a dead body… gone forever. What is the difference between these two states? When exactly does a person kick his bucket? When he stops breathing or when his heart stops pumping life giving oxygenated blood or is it when his brain tissues die out?

This question is the scourge of intensive care medicine professional because they can keep a person breathing, his heart pumping and brain tissues alive by artificial means on ventilators. When does one give up hope and pull the plug of the ventilator? How and on what basis does one arrive at that decision? No clear answers exist for that one (ask the grieving mother or wife of the patient on an artificial respirator and you will understand what I mean)? What is that something, which, when it leaves the body no amount of technology can bring the body back to life? What is that something which when it leaves the body, rotting and maggots creep in almost immediately. People who have loved the person all their lives are reluctant to even touch the body once the slightest decay has set in (we have all experienced the nauseating smell of dead dogs on the higway… the human body would smell worse because of the larger body mass). Is it what people call soul?

If there is such a soul, what happens to it after it leaves the body leaving it dead. Does only one soul inhabit a living body? Human body is composed of millions of cells each of which is a living entity in itself. These cells replicate, they consumes food and oxygen and display all the properties of a living organism. A human being is actually the combination of millions of living, vital organisms performing as a team. Then does the human body consist of one soul or millions of souls? Do bacteria and viruses have souls? Do trees and flowers have souls? Then with millions of organisms dying every day are there millions of souls floating around in the atmosphere (imagine a million souls in your hand when you clasp your fingers in to a fist)? Do souls exist on some hitherto unknown plane? Do souls get rebirth in to new bodies? If so, then at what exact time of conception does a soul enter a body? Who are we? From where have we come and where do we go after death?

Science has no answers to these and myriad other questions. Neither does religion. I mean religions have answers, but they are so varied that it is almost certain that most of them can’t be true. Isn’t it strange that we worry no end about hurt egos, quarrel over a tiny piece of land, over hypothetical boundary lines separating countries, over amassing of weapons of mass destructions, over global warming, over recessions, about our next raise or the next promotion, about the running nose of our child but almost no one ever gives serious thought to the above questions? Isn’t it frustrating not to know and not to have the means to know?