Firefighter here. I was reflecting on a fatality I attended recently. My thoughts wandered to how a body looks like it is ājust matterā in a way that a living thing does not, even when sleeping. Previously I assumed this observation was just something to do with traumatic death, but this person seemed to have died peacefully and the same, āabsenceā of something was obvious.
Iām not a religious person, but it made me wonder if there actually is something that āleavesā when someone dies (beyond the obvious breathing, pulse etc).
Iām not looking for a āmy holy book saysā, kind of discussion here, but rather a reflection on the direct, lived experiences of people who see death regularly.
Medic 30+ years.
Life āenergyā is gone. Of course no one knows what happens to the electrical energy in a human upon deathā¦ but, it definitely leaves the body.
This is where peopleās belief system kicks in. Iām not religious and donāt believe in heaven/hell. I do personally believe in a spirit world.
I kind of like the most remote possiblity of becoming a ghost.
Of course no one knows what happens to the electrical energy in a human upon deathā¦ but, it definitely leaves the body.
Of course we know.
Cells create electric potential by pumping different kind of ions in or out of the cell. That requires ATP which is produced during metabolism. If youāre dead your cells stop producing ATP and everything, including the ion pumps, stop working. So no more electricity.
It doesnāt āleaveā the body. The body stops generating it.
Sure. It stops working. I get that. As I mentioned, I believe, maybeā¦ just maybe human energy might continue as a spirit/ghost. Definitely not saying itās true.
Everyone is entitled to their belief. I also kinda like the idea of maybe being a ghost one day and while I donāt necessarily believe in ghosts I also donāt believe that they donāt exist either. I want to haunt an amusement park.
Iāve been in enough futile codes that I hope there isnāt any consciousness beyond the ālights outā point. Especially since most of the codes I participated in were in a pediatric hospital. It doesnāt matter that the brain shut off more than half an hour agoā¦you just have to keep doing compressions and pantomiming the code until the parents consent to calling it. Iāve seen it get dragged out an extra 45 minutes past where the physician would have called it because the mom didnāt want T.O.D. called until after the dad got to the hospital from work. Itās better with adults, but not by much. Thereās only been a handful of times where caving in the sternum was actually worth the destruction involved.
You āpersonally believe in a spirit worldā - that is exactly heaven/hell - religion is belief in a spiritual worldā¦
Semantics -
They didnāt say āspiritual,ā they said āspiritā and āghost.ā Ghosts are not in any heaven or hell but unseen among us on Earth. Not necessarily something to worship or fear either. I think itās a step apart from religion.
Eh, I donāt think itās fair to erase all nuance between spirituality and religion.
Heaven/Hell are these ordered places where some sentient divine being is supposed to judge you at death and sort you into. Whether itās Anubis or God or whatever. It places a sort of human sense of control over the natural world.
Thinking there might be some sort of spiritual something or other, at least on my end, is thinking that well, weāve got energy in our bodies that dissipates as we die. That energy ends up recycled in some way, first law of thermodynamics and all that. I donāt know if that energy can linger around as ghosts, or act as some new āsoulā in some reincarnation cycle, or if it just gets dispersed or what, but you donāt need to believe in religion to consider it.
Though thereās definitely some overlap.
Religion is a set of organized, ritualized practices based on spiritual belief. You can be spiritual without being religious, and I know a bunch of active, practicing Catholics who donāt believe in anything supernatural, so I would say you can be religious without being spiritual.
You might be interested in the story of Luigi Galvaniās experiments with frog muscle tissue. It was seminal work in anatomy as well as physics.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1631069106000370?via%3Dihub
