by Wil Player

Created on: May 23, 2008

In 1907 a doctor practicing in Haverhill, USA, by the name of Duncan MacDougall, conducted experiments into the behavior of the weight of the human body after death had occurred. His idea was to weigh the human body just before death and then immediately after death. He wanted to discover if the soul really existed. He conducted experiments on both human patients and animals and in the cases of the human patients; he found that an un-explainable amount of weight disappeared from the body within 30 minutes of death. This weight is now understood to be around 21 grams.

This loss of weight could not be due to evaporation of respiratory moisture and sweat or other bodily liquids because that had already been taken into consideration. So what was this mysterious weight that disappeared once body death had occurred? Research suggests that the sudden loss of weight was due to the bio-electrical field that surrounds our bodies, disappearing, and without the magnetic attraction of this electric field, and, if the soul was some how based on electro-magnetic principles then it would also follow that it would depart the body because it would no longer be held in place. He called this missing mass the Soul Substance'.

4000 years before Duncan MacDougall the Ancient Egyptians believed that the soul departed the body from the on-set of death and then made its way to the orbit of the Sun and stayed there for 100 years before being re-incarnated into a human body.

The Egyptians were obsessed with the idea that the soul was re-incarnated and even wrote guides for the dead to transverse the underworld so that they may safely be re-incarnated. But that is not all they believed in. They believed that a person who had just died would be taken to the god of the underworld and judged. Their souls would be weighted against the feather of Truth'. Their actions in the mortal realm during their life would decided whether they were worthy of a higher existence or that they would be re-incarnated back into this Realm. See, it was every Egyptians existence to be accepted into a higher state of existence once they died. The Pharaohs of Egypt were thought to be divine and so they would not need to be re-incarnated. Their corpses were mummified because the Egyptians believed that the soul could not return to Earth if the material body remained behind.

Possible older than the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead comes the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which not only describes rituals that are to be performed

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