In the womb of our mother, we lived in a self-contained and personal universe, small but sufficient in size to provide everything we needed for our existence. That parallel helps us understand why we need to prepare in order to progress. By analogy, the time we spend in this world serves as the gestation period for our birth into the next. That 36- to 40-week period of gestation prepared each of us for our physical survival in this world. This becomes evident when we compare the following two questions: “What was the purpose of the time spent in the womb of our mother?” and: “What is the purpose of this earthly life?” Hindsight makes the former question easier to answer than the latter. We often see the purpose of something best in retrospect. – Baha’u’llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah. The world beyond is as different from this world as this world is different from that of the child while still in the womb of its mother. This life prepares us for what comes after death, just as our pre-natal existence within the womb prepared us for this life: On this physical and ephemeral plane, however, the body and mind are necessary to the process of our spiritual development. The body and mind act as the instruments of our individual physical and intellectual existence, but the soul transcends their limitations and possesses abilities which the other human realities do not – including the potential to recognize the existence and glory of God. – Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah.īaha’is believe that the soul forms the ultimate reality of the individual creating one’s true identity. It is the first among all created things to declare the excellence of its Creator, the first to recognize His glory, to cleave to His truth, and to bow down in adoration before Him. Know, verily, that the soul is a sign of God, a heavenly gem whose reality the learned of men hath failed to grasp, and whose mystery no mind, however acute, can ever hope to unravel.
The comparisons of Moses were simple and direct, while Christ chose to teach his followers using parables, a special form of narrative analogy with hidden spiritual meanings. As times changed, however, so did the analogies.
This descriptive problem, common to all religions throughout the ages, makes death and the afterlife a mystery, so the messengers of God in each age have employed in their holy scriptures analogies of things familiar to the people of their times. As the mystics have known for millennia, intimation is perhaps the only way to describe anything metaphysical in nature. The Baha’i teachings tells us that the human soul and life after death are neither tangible realities nor intellectual abstractions, and because of the limitation of our experience their existence can only be alluded to.
We can only understand the afterlife by analogy – because we can’t describe the soul in absolute terms like the physical phenomena of this world, or explain it in conditional terms with abstract concepts.
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