Where Is She Now?

Reflections on the Soul

A scholarly friend posted something recently that set this train of thought moving. What follows began as a hurried response and has since become something I want to address more carefully.

I should be honest about the occasion. My late sister Nancy had been on my mind all that day. Her twin had texted me about various "signs"—the kind of thing that is easy to dismiss from the outside and nearly impossible to dismiss from the inside. I don't know what to make of them. I only know they point toward a reality I find difficult to put into words, and that the difficulty is not a failure of the experience but a feature of it.

Many of the people I sit with ask some version of the same question, often wrapped in profound fear.

Do souls even exist? I want to believe, but I'm afraid he's lost to me forever.

Sometimes, after a death no one was prepared for, the question becomes simpler and more heartbreaking.

My God—where did she go?

Over the years I've come to wonder whether an enormous amount of our anxiety lives inside that one small word.

Where.

We naturally imagine that if a person continues to exist, they must exist somewhere. We picture the soul traveling, arriving, waiting—occupying another place, even if we know better than to picture the place too vividly: Heaven, the next life, the other side. Whatever we call it, the grammar is the same: the beloved has moved from here to there, and the terrible thing about death is that we no longer have the address.

But what if location was never what made anything permanent?

Spinoza's strange consolation

Baruch Spinoza is not anyone's obvious source of comfort. He was expelled from Amsterdam's Portuguese Jewish community at twenty-three under a herem so severe it has become famous, and his Ethics is built like a geometry textbook—definitions, axioms, propositions, proofs. There is not a consoling sentence in it, at least not in the way we normally use that word.

And yet near the end of the book he makes a claim that has outlasted three and a half centuries of readers trying to work out exactly what he meant: the human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains which is eternal.

Here is the catch, and it matters. What remains is not what most of us are hoping for.

Spinoza is unsparing about this. Memory, imagination, the felt sense of I, the accumulated narrative of a life—all of it, he says, belongs to the body and ends when the body ends. He states plainly that the mind can neither imagine nor recollect past things except while the body endures. So there is no version of this in which Nancy is somewhere remembering me.

What remains is something else. Spinoza calls it the idea of the essence of this particular body, conceived, as he put it, sub specie aeternitatis—under the aspect of eternity. In plainer language: the irreducible fact that this particular expression of reality occurred. That there was, once and unrepeatably, this way of loving, this way of understanding, this way of being understood. That fact does not wait somewhere. It does not decay. It simply is the case, permanently, in the way that true things are the case.

He ties this to what he calls the third kind of knowledge, scientia intuitiva—the mind's direct grasp of things not as scattered impressions in time but as they follow from what is eternal and necessary. And from that knowing arises what he names the intellectual love of God, amor Dei intellectualis. Then he makes the claim that always stops me: this love with which the mind loves God is not a separate thing from the love with which God loves. It is part of it. The loving and the being loved turn out not to be two.

What has truly occurred can never be made not to have occurred.

I find that strangely comforting. Within myself I remain in contact with certain moments that shaped me—times when I felt completely loved, completely safe, completely known. Those moments are not merely recollections filed away in my brain. They are realities that helped make me who I am. Nothing can erase that they happened.

Eternity is not a very long time

This is the piece readers tend to slide past, and everything depends on it.

When Spinoza says eternal, he does not mean everlasting. He is not describing duration stretched out infinitely, a life that goes on and on and does not stop. He means something categorically different: existence considered apart from time altogether, the way a mathematical truth is not sitting anywhere waiting, has not been true for a while, and will not eventually stop being true.

This distinction neatly dismantles the question we started with. If eternity is not a long stretch of time, then it does not need a container to happen in. And if it does not need a container, then where isn't the right question. It's a category error dressed up as a reasonable request.

What physics can and can't say

Those of you who have endured years of philosophical conversation with me know I have a deep appreciation for science, so let me bring in another voice—carefully, because I don't think physics, or any single field for that matter, proves anything about the soul. I would be suspicious of anyone who said it did.

Still, physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that at the deepest level, reality is not assembled the way our everyday intuition assumes. There is no single universal now sweeping forward through a container called space, carrying events along with it. What exists, he posits, are events and their relations to one another. The world is better described as a happening than as a collection of things.

Consider the American Civil War. It is not somewhere—there is no location we could travel to and find it still going on, no archive that holds the thing itself rather than its traces. And yet it is emphatically not nothing. It occurred. That fact became part of what is, permanently, and no subsequent event can revoke it. Its reality doesn't depend on anyone remembering it or on the survival of a single document. It would remain true if every record burned.

That is the category we may be missing when we ask where someone went: not present, not absent, but having occurred—which turns out to be a mode of being in its own right, and a remarkably durable one.

Rovelli has been explicit that this line of thinking led him to the second-century Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, and I think that is the most interesting turn here. Nāgārjuna's teaching of śūnyatā—usually translated as emptiness—is not a claim that nothing exists. It is the claim that nothing exists independently. Everything that is is what it is, only in relation to everything else. There are no self-contained substances underneath appearances, no little kernels of standalone being.

Which means the soul-as-object—the solid thing we recognize by appearance, clothing, personhood—that must be somewhere, may in truth be a picture we invented rather than a thing we discovered. And if the self was never a separate object to begin with, the question of where it went when it stopped being here loses much of its hold on us.

The traditions arrived first

What has long stuck with me is how many contemplative traditions got here long before any of this, each in its own idiom.

Advaita Vedanta teaches that the self, atman, was never separate from Brahman, the ground of being. Liberation is not a journey elsewhere. It is awakening to the recognition that the wave was always the ocean—that the only thing needing to dissolve was the sense of separateness itself. Buddhism arrives at a kindred insight by a different road, dismantling the separate self rather than merging it into a greater one.

Kabbalah describes the soul's return to Ein Sof, the infinite without end, in much the same spirit. The spark does not travel home. The boundary that made it appear to be a separate spark relaxes.

Meister Eckhart, whose sermons still unsettle people seven centuries on, wrote that the eye with which he sees God is the same eye with which God sees him. Subject and object stop standing at a distance from one another.

And behind all of these stands the via negativa, the apophatic tradition running from Pseudo-Dionysius through The Cloud of Unknowing, which insists that God is not a being among beings—not one item in the inventory of existing things, however exalted. If ultimate reality is not a something, then it is also not a somewhere, and asking for precise coordinates was always going to come back empty.

The Song of Solomon, read as mystical poetry, gestures toward the same mystery. So does every enduring marriage in which we can honestly say I lose myself in you—not in annihilation, but in communion.

What this costs

I want to be honest about what this view does not give me.

It does not give me a reunion. It does not tell me that Nancy is intact somewhere, recognizable, waiting, that she knows I am thinking of her, that there will come a moment when I see her face again and she says my name. Spinoza offers me nothing of the kind, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to make the argument more comfortable.

There are days when that absence is very hard, and frankly, there are days I choose not to believe it. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself:

Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

What it gives me, during my more rational moments, is this: Nancy's and my relationship is not in jeopardy. It is not somewhere fragile, subject to loss, dependent on my getting the metaphysics right. It happened. It entered reality. And nothing—not death, not time, not my own eventual forgetting—can reach back and make it not have happened.

Signs, and the limits of any interpretation

I said at the outset that Nancy's twin had texted me about signs. I have not resolved what I think about them, and I am not sure I need to.

I should say plainly that I know myself to be intuitive. I have never been comfortable making claims about what that means, and I am wary of the certainty that often accompanies such claims in others. But I am not going to pretend to a skepticism I don't hold.

What I notice is that signs rarely deliver information. They restore relation—the sense, however briefly, of not being alone with the loss. Whatever their ultimate status, they seem to function less like messages dispatched from a location than like moments in which a boundary thins. That is not proof of anything. But it is at least consistent with everything above: the persistence of relation rather than the persistence of an object at an address somewhere beyond.

I hold this loosely. And I welcome them when they come.

What I actually bring to a bedside

None of this belongs at 3 a.m. in a hospital corridor off the emergency room. I would not mention Spinoza's propositions to a family in the worst hour of their lives, and any chaplain who bluntly offers their opinions has confused their own consoling wonderings with someone else's need.

Speculation of that kind has never been my task. My calling is to accompany people as they make their own honest spiritual journey, wherever it leads—which sometimes means sitting with a mother who is certain her son is in heaven and letting that be entirely enough. Who am I to say she isn't right?

But this does change how I say what I say.

When I tell a bereaved parent that their child's love for them continues, I am not offering a comforting figure of speech. I mean it in something like Spinoza's sense—as a claim about what can never be undone. Loving relationships are not erased because death interrupts them. Love does not require a future address to remain true. Its permanence lies in the fact that it happened, irrevocably, and that once love has entered reality it belongs forever to the story of what is. Whether or not we know it, the mark of our lifetimes has an indelible, persistent quality.

Perhaps no one has ever been confined to a place that could be lost.

These remain unfinished reflections rather than settled conclusions, and I offer them that way. I do not need for anyone to arrive where I have arrived. Each of us can only live honestly according to what we sincerely find to be true—and that kind of integrity seems to me a sacred thing in its own right.