Who Are You When the Body Dies?

Grief, the Gospel of Mary, and the Part of You That's Irreplaceable

Many Greco-Roman sources talk about the soul having three parts. My go-to, the Gospel of Mary, refers to these three:

• Pneuma — the spirit: vitality, appetite, passion, life of the senses
• Psyche — the soul: memory, personality, attachments, ambitions, our logical mind
• Nous — the higher mind, the faculty that knows God, seeks truth, intuition

Pneuma I could readily relate to as the body, or the part of ourselves that is rooted in the body. Nous is the part of us that is connected to the divine source. The Psyche was all the other parts – the part of us that calls our congressperson, fills in a timesheet, or drives to the grocery store with a list. So far, so good. We can envision those parts of ourselves pretty easily. The real test comes, however, when we apply the Gospel of Mary test – what happens to each of these things after we die?

...Will matter then be destroyed or not?

22) The Savior said, All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.

23) For the nature of matter is resolved into the roots of its own nature alone. – Gospel of Mary, Page 4.

Here's David Curtis' translation of the same passage:

Teach us about the material world. Will it last forever or is everything impermanent?" The Saviour answered: “All that is created, everything that is formed, every natural thing, all exist interdependently in and with each other. Then each will be dissolved again back into its own roots. It is [the way of] nature that everything will eventually decompose back into its own elements. – The Gospel of Mary, Page 4.

The Pneuma, or part of ourselves that is intertwined with the body, will return to the earth. Our bodies are just a confederation of calcium, proteins, water and fats. The elements were once part of dying stars, and like the stars we offer up our components to universe as we burn away.

The Nous, or the part of us that connects us to God, Divinity, the Universe, etc. will simply roll up into Source like a snail in a shell...or for a better metaphor, melt back into Source like an ice cube in water.

But the Psyche?

When I wrote "Heaven Is Now: The Gospel of Mary on the Afterlife," all I could figure is that what remains would be the cultural traces of existence – our fame, for those of us who earn a place in the history books. Our wealth could be another part of it, perhaps, but I don't know...would that ever be part of our soul at all? Probably not. What would remain, I reasoned back then, would be our names on voter rolls, on deeds, in the texts and inboxes and photo albums kept by our friends. These cultural reminders of our existence – that's all I could come up with.

That worked for a while.

Then, my dog died. Or rather, Galaga, the only dog I've had in adulthood died. My woods-walker. My beach-runner. The one person in my family that I didn't have to worry about...often, I mean. Yes, one summer she did extinguish her liver function with her love of poisonous mushrooms, but all in all, she was solid as rock. My husband and son and stepdaughter gave me acid-reflux, tears, and a bright ring of silver hair to frame my forehead, Galaga just licked my face. She died suddenly, unexpectedly, after being diagnosed two days beforehand with an aggressive, metastasized cancer.

Then one of my oldest and most treasured friends suffered a ruptured aneurysm while swimming at the Y. Bess nearly drowned a couple of days ago, and is in the hospital now with a tube down her throat and everyone who loves her gathered around. Nurses move in and out. Machines pump and monitor. We're all waiting for signs...for news...but the doctors have none.

As they say, suddenly, everything can change.

And this is when the Psyche opened itself up to me. It's not the body, and it's not the God-self. It's the thing that makes us who we are. It might be the only thing that makes us who were are. It's what makes my dog different than any other dog. It's the thing that makes her irreplaceable. The world is full of wonderful dogs, but none of them are Galaga.

I want her.

My beloved friend even moreso. I have other friends, but the threat of losing her is, to me, like losing the moon out of the sky. We met on a street in Europe in April, 1985 – 41 years ago exactly – and though we've each lived in different cities, different countries, different continents since that time, we've always, always, always been there. We've always shown up for each other. She introduced me to my husband. I'm godmother to her daughter. Browse through the photos from the past four decades and there we are, together, again and again and again.

I could describe her in perfect detail, but for you to get the full picture, you'd have to think of someone from your own life that's ever-engaged, ever-forgiving, ever-devoted.

She's irreplaceable – as unique as a star in the sky.

Whatever this is that I'm trying to describe here, this is the psyche. Our personality, and the thing that we talk about when we talk about ourselves – what happens to that part of us after death? When the body returns to the ground, and the soul returns to its source, what happens to us?

I don't know, yet.

But I know more than I did a month ago. The Psyche is more than our voting records.

Let's keep exploring.