What happens when we die is an age old question that has confounded the human race since the dawn of man. There are endless opinions and variations of answers based on a world of different beliefs, however there are largely only two positions, one being spiritual and the other scientific.
The spiritual side of the coin believes that our souls undergo a spiritual transformation post mortem. People with this position tend to develop their belief system based on a concept of life after death, an afterlife in heaven or even condemnation to hell. Faith and religion is the root of this belief in human creation which resulted from the actions of a higher power such as God. This side of death believes the soul is the essence of the true eternal being which continues to exist after we die. Supporters of this theory feel that humans temporarily occupy a physical body which acts more like a cocoon as we grow and develop while we spend time on earth. Upon death our souls are released from human form as we again return to our natural soul energy and head home.
The physical side of the coin is usually comprised of people of science such as doctors and scientists or those with an agnostic viewpoint who tend to lean toward a general belief in evolution with death being strictly a physical process. Science says we are formed of matter from cells that evolved from the planet based on a theory of evolution. The idea of a soul existing is our imagination's way of coping with the finite reality of death and our inability to accept the possibility that we cease to exist. Science believes we are born of the earth and return to it. Simply put science believes that human existence is defined by only one lifetime and nothing more... ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
While I believe in science I also believe it can only explain what the human mind can conceive. We can only test what we discover which is limited to our own human scope. Anything beyond our world is speculation and science doesn't guess. It was science that claimed the earth was flat until we were able to advance far enough to prove otherwise. I believe spirit goes far beyond our current realm of knowledge, meaning just because science can't prove it, doesn't mean we must exclude it. Especially when people having near death experiences collectively shed doubt on the prospect of living only one life time.
Science believes everything must be proven and further supported by a logical accompanied by hard evidence. Yet when I look above into the vastness of the universe I'm humbled by the miraculous sight of the ominous unknown. How can human arrogance possibly suggest that we have an answer for everything? I believe we are far too limited to be so resolute in assuming we have seen and proven all. We've been wrong nearly as much as we've been right, therefore, science should consider being more forgiving than it is absolute.
I believe when we die our souls shed the human skin confining us to earthly capture, leaving our scars behind as we transform into beautiful eternal butterflies. Our newly released souls evolve as we are freed from the human uniform we adorned while enrolled in the earth school mastering a world of hard knocks. Dying is a process that most of us fear being so unknown and uncertain. Death is the regeneration acting as a means of shedding the old to make way for the new. Just as we are born to human mother's as children of a physical form, when we die we are born again to God as energy being children of his soul.
Will we ever definitively answer the question as to what happens when we die or is faith alone enough to guide our beliefs? I believe that dying is one area of human existence where science takes a back seat to faith. The process of dying is often hard, scary, difficult and even cruel, similar to the physical process of birth. What happens when we die, only God knows and no one else knows for sure that is until we get there.