What happens when someone dies? Is it only the soul that departs?

Did you know that you have more than one body? Apart from your physical form, there are two other bodies that are with you, always. Learn about what they are, what happens after death.

What happens after a person dies is something that has fascinated scientists for a long time. There is, still, no conclusive definition of death in medical science. With advancements in science, there is constant fine-tuning with theories of what makes up death. Did you know that the various organs of our body don’t die all at once? Some organs are of no use immediately after a person dies whereas others have a little more ‘longevity’. That enables people to donate eyes and other organs, even after they die.

That said, death is a finality, an unavoidable reality. It may take us a few hours to die, but die we will when the time is up.

Scientists of the world of medicine have not been able to pinpoint exactly what leaves after death. Scientists of the spiritual world have no such confusion. They know perfectly well that the atma, the soul, leaves the body on death. What does the atma look like? Why haven’t scientists, with such advanced technologies at their disposal, been able to detect it yet? You see, the atma cannot be detected. It is beyond the senses of material perception and it is divine. And mortal eyes can perceive nothing that is divine. The other thing is, it has described in Sanskrit as sukshma - subtle. Even after a thousand years, even if we make the most advanced microscope possible, it will still be undetectable.

But is it the only thing that departs after death? No, for maya-bound people like us, there are two ‘bodies’ that accompany the atma, always.

The first is sukshma sharir - the subtle body. The second, karan sharir - the causal body. These are not divine like the atma, these are material bodies, made of and from maya. But they are so subtle that any device can not detect them.

Don’t think this is strange. Have you heard of the CERN Institute? This is in Geneva, the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. It has the largest machine in the world, a collider, a tunnel-like machine, 27 kilometers long! It is a purely research-based institute, backed by major developed nations. One of its most interesting experiments was to find, in the words of science, ‘the long, drawn-out struggles of physicists to find this elusive piece of the cosmic puzzle’. This elusive stuff is officially known as the Higgs-Boson particle (Boson, named after Satyendra Nath Bose, the brilliant Indian physicist). But everyone knows it as ‘God particle’. Why call it God particle? Because it is so elusive and so subtle. The days that electrons and protons w