If you have convincing evidence for the existence of souls, please present it.
I have faith ... that's all I need.
If you have convincing evidence that we do not have souls ... please present it.
In the meantime I'll do my best to convey my personal experiences where souls are concerned - with regard to human death and life.
This is just one example of many I have witnessed during the course of my life which, has seen many deaths. Yet this one is most personal.
As a teenager I watched my grandfather die of oat cell lung cancer. It was a horrible death in which, over the course of about a month, he slowly suffocated to death.
On the night he died in his home on our farm I watched him go through his death throes ... using all the hand gestures he had used during my childhood to tell stories of his life, he relived his life during those final minutes before he gave his last breath.
He was a hunter, an ex Calvary man, a Texan, who lived through the great depression and WW II and ... he had these bird dogs, rip raff pointers, that he loved. And they loved him.
When he became ill so quickly, my mother and father gave the dogs to a nearby neighbor, and farmer, a close friend of my grandfather's, who wanted to take care of the dogs and hunt them as they were meant to do. He lived about two miles from us as the crow flies or, as we used to say back then, "on the little farm beyond the north creek."
When my grandfather gave his last breath, in the middle of the night surrounded by his family and far sooner than any of us thought it might happen .... the phone rang. It was our farmer neighbor. Because, at that very instant, those eight dogs had started howling and would not stop ... to which the farmer felt it meant something, as if something had passed by, and it caused him to get out of bed and dial our party line.
But it doesn't end there.
Some years later, after I had served, as all the men in my family have done, I found myself doing contract work in Central America. Eagle Aviation here in Columbia, SC had made it's bones as Air American during the Vietnam war, and now it was doing the same under Reagan in Central America in the late 80s and I had returned from my time in service with a particular skill set which made me an attractive hire to interests involved in Central America at the time.
During one of our later, for lack of a better terms, missions ... my unit found itself stranded in a rather precarious situation where our C-123 failed to show for extraction. We later found out that it had been shot down and one of the mechanics, a guy by the name of Gene Hasenfus, had been captured ... but that's another story.
So anyways, here we are left to E & E back to Ilopango on our own devices ... and this is where the story continues.
It was a long hike. Details not important but everyone in that part of the world was looking for us for obvious reasons - both sides. During the course of the hump I was basically surrounded, in a jungle which I'll leave to your imagination, by the bad guys. I was tired, hungry, sick from drinking bad water and I was at my wit's end.
I gave up and in a last gasp to evade capture I lay down in a gully full of creepy crawly things that you cannot imagine, covered myself in jungle gunk and waited to be stepped-on at which time I had resigned myself to death because my intention was to come up guns-a-blaring. I had already said my prayers and asked that my Mother not suffer in her grief.
I could hear the bad guys talking and shouting at one another, they knew they were close. I figured one of them had probably seen me because they came in with intent from both ridges - it was only a matter of them closing their ranks upon me.
But a peacefulness and calm took over which I cannot explain and I heard footsteps coming towards me on the mushy jungle floor.
As I looked up through my quilt of cover I saw my grandfather standing there just above me to my left ... looking down upon me with his fingers to his lips as if shushing me. He was much younger than I had ever known him to be personally ... although few pictures existed of his younger days, I suspected he was young as if pre-war, maybe in his twenties, still strong, before the glasses and dentures, his hair still blonde and his eyes still twinkling blue and he was healthy and confident.
I lay there amazed, afraid to even twitch thinking I was already dead and he was there to take me somewhere ... wherever he had been since his death.
I'll never forget his teeth. He had lost his teeth during WWII before my birth ... but there he was with this smile full of teeth.
Then he moves off not silently, but with physical sounds and the next thing I know gunfire erupts and I hear all the bad guys moving south from my position. I laid there for a moment wondering what I had just witnessed before uncovering myself and hauling tail north ...
But it doesn't end there.
Back in South Carolina, we think around the same time, my mother was awoken by a feeling that her father had passed through the room. She had been having bad feelings for days that something had happened to me. I was estranged from the family at the time and they had absolutely no idea where I was or what I was doing - all they knew was that I had returned to the states from Italy and disappeared.
She was asleep on the top of her bed - depressed at the feelings she was experiencing that I was in great danger. Then, she suddenly felt like everything was going to be okay, as if she knew I was being watched-over by her Dad.
Not knowing what to do she got in her car and first drove to our church, I was raised devout Lutheran, and she prayed with our pastor, an old German fellow who we all loved and respected. He comforted her to some degree but it wasn't enough. So she had heard of this physic woman in Columbia back then ... I can't remember the gal's name but she was one of those spooky women who claimed to have the ability to talk to whomever ... I dunno. This part I cannot explain.
She drove from our farm to Columbia and visited this woman who took her money, then took something of mine which I shall not mention, and proceeded to tell my mother that I was indeed in danger, but her father had interceded (which my mother had never mentioned her feelings that her father had passed by) ... and that I was on a river, on my way home, and I was alive and well.
I finally made it home 47 days later.
I had been there for several days before my sister told me the story of what my mother had been through ... and I approached my mother to tell me her version of her experience, which she did.
And here is the rest of the story.
I listened to Mom ... then I told her what happened and about my experience - and she cried. And oh, about that river? It was true. I had been picked-up just east of Las Lomas and boated up a river, for two days, to a road where I was then trucked/snuke near Somoto and crossed over into Honduras on my way back to Ilopango.
That's my story.
Am I being honest or am I full of bravo sierra?
You decide.
In the meantime, I believe in souls. There is way more out there than human being has yet to come close to understanding. Times were simpler millennials ago. We've let modern science and the many mitigating parties disrupt our natural ability to accept the possibilities that abound around us. Some call it an aura, others faith .... whatever it is, it exists for me and that's all that matters in my little sphere.
Take it for what it is worth.
I've paused many times before hitting the submit button ... perhaps this will do someone some good.
Good night.
