I have never seen a dead person that looked like they were “just sleeping.” I can say this with experience as I’ve seen more than my fair share. When you see a dead body, you become shockingly aware that our physical shell is just that… skin, bone, muscle, and organs if you’re lucky enough to have kept them all. Just a container to carry our soul around, or whatever you want to call it. When I see a dead body I don’t even feel right giving it a pronoun. It’s "the" dead body.
You can tell there’s nothing there. It does not look like they’re sleeping. The transformation is instant. One night, I was with someone, walked out of the room for a minute, and returned to find just a body. I didn’t even have to ask if they were dead. There is a blank look in the eyes and you know they’re not seeing. Their skin is cold and you know they’re not feeling. They are gone. It’s just a body.
Because I have seen this shocking instant transformation from a person to a body, it comes as no surprise to me, that someone tried to weigh the phenomenon of a soul leaving a body.
In 1907 scientist MacDougall attempted to prove his theory that the human soul had mass. He weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis. When death was only a few hours away, the patients were placed on an industrial sized scale which was sensitive to grams. His research showed a varying amount of mass was lost in most of the six cases. This supported his hypothesis that the soul had mass, and when the soul departed the body, so did this mass. He determined the soul weighed 21 grams, the average loss of mass in the six patients within minutes or hours after death.
You can tell there’s nothing there. It does not look like they’re sleeping. The transformation is instant. One night, I was with someone, walked out of the room for a minute, and returned to find just a body. I didn’t even have to ask if they were dead. There is a blank look in the eyes and you know they’re not seeing. Their skin is cold and you know they’re not feeling. They are gone. It’s just a body.
Because I have seen this shocking instant transformation from a person to a body, it comes as no surprise to me, that someone tried to weigh the phenomenon of a soul leaving a body.
In 1907 scientist MacDougall attempted to prove his theory that the human soul had mass. He weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis. When death was only a few hours away, the patients were placed on an industrial sized scale which was sensitive to grams. His research showed a varying amount of mass was lost in most of the six cases. This supported his hypothesis that the soul had mass, and when the soul departed the body, so did this mass. He determined the soul weighed 21 grams, the average loss of mass in the six patients within minutes or hours after death.
Comments
Post a Comment