Inspiration for The Last Soul

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I wanted to give some in depth background information about why I wrote The Last Soul . I recently listened to a podcast, “The Portal,” with Eric Weinstein.  I found it interesting that he was able to sum up my desire to write this story after I had already completed it. He aptly describes the reason for his podcast.  Hidden in that description, I found the truth in why I wrote The Last Soul.

When I was growing up, I constantly dreamed of going to another world, having powers, or being special in some way. I don’t think I am alone in this. Eric talks about the same thing. As we grow up, children are inundated with the idea that they can be more than they are. Nothing is impossible, and if you only put your mind to it, an idea can become reality. I think a lot of fictional stories are based on this yearning for something more. Eric calls it “The Portal.” If I’m being honest, I sort of agree with him.

He mentions that in so many stories we know as children, there is a portal, or the representation of a portal. This portal takes us someplace. It was done beautifully in the movie; The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy is taken from Kansas and thrust into Oz via a tornado. It was the first movie to use Technicolor, and they used the transition from one world to another to do this. It’s interesting that as a director, Victor Fleming chose to utilize the first use of color on screen to play out another world – a world that is full of wonder, imagination, hope, and beauty.

None of my ideas for The Last Soul were inspired by The Wizard of Oz – at least not consciously. But somehow, they fit. Some people might go to the extreme and say that originality doesn’t exist, and I was simply gathering inspiration from many different sources. Maybe that’s true. I don’t think it is. But, I’m also not arrogant enough to say that I am right, and someone who thinks otherwise, isn’t. I believe there is something in all of us that desires to cross that threshold – to go into the unknown and become better than we were.

My inspiration for The Last Soul was death. The threshold that we all end up crossing is going from this life into death. It is the great unknown. No one truly knows what’s on the other side. I also think that’s why religions are so potent in our civilization. Religions try to answer this question. They try to comfort those that fear death, and they try to guide people on how to live so in a way that will benefit their next life – their life after death.

But, is it really life after death? Or, is what we call death simply another version of the same life? Think of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. The caterpillar doesn’t analyze why he creates the cocoon. He just does. The life as he knew it is over once he starts to spin that cocoon around himself. The caterpillar literally digests himself into soup. Some cell groups survive and literally remold his body into a butterfly. After the butterfly hatches from his chrysalis, it flies away and lives a new life.

From what science understands, butterflies remember experiences from their life as a caterpillar, which lends strength to the argument that they remember parts of the process of change as well. Maybe not all of it, but in some part, they probably do. However, butterflies do not interact with caterpillars, nor do caterpillars interact with butterflies. They live in separate worlds; the ground and the sky.

When we die, who is to say that we don’t remember our previous life? Maybe death is just the next step, and we remember everything! Maybe we only remember experiences from life and some of the things we learned. Maybe we remember nothing, and it’s just black. I really don’t believe that’s the case, but some do.

Duncan MacDougal did an experiment where he concluded that the human soul weighed 21 grams. This experiment was highly contentious, so let’s not assume it is a fact. However as a society, I think that we need to lend credit to theories instead of trying to debunk them at ground level. They should be given an infantile period where we protect them and explore them. If we only look at things with the intention of disproving them, we’ll never move past where we are.

Let’s say that Duncan was correct. If that’s the case, then maybe that soul is an imprint of who we are. Maybe that imprint gets attached to something else after death. It sure would be cool if a super powered body was the physical manifestation of an individual’s soul. Not that likely, but it would be cool.

Maybe it’s as simple as the soul turning into energy and lending its imprint onto the universe. The universe would accumulate all this information and it would factor into future life and creations. Maybe souls take up harbor at a distant point of the universe, and they simply wait to be connected with another body. Maybe the universe is actually a sea of consciousness that lives and breathes in ways we can’t comprehend. Anything is possible. If you can think of it, it’s possible. There are plenty of things that the human race never thought of in earlier times, but once we did, and once we sought out the answers, we found both truths and falsehoods. But, we also found an ocean of new questions about things we simply don’t understand.

That’s where I’ll leave you this time. The inspiration for The Last Soul is death and what happens next. Maybe it’s just a portal to the next destination – one filled with hope and beauty.