On Death.

Today I stood by as members of my office destroyed a soul. It made me wonder about the nature of the soul and death.

Kabbalistically speaking there are four layers to the soul: The Chiah or the Divine Spark, the Neshama or the Higher Self, the Ruach or the Intellect and the Nephesh or the Animal Soul. According to Kabbalistic thought, when we die, the Chiah is automatically reunited with the Divine, whereas the Neshama may also reunite or be reincarnated. Sometimes the Ruach and the Nephesh get left behind, and this is what Kabbalists refer to as ghosts or "shells."

So, if this is true, and it certainly make sense with my experience at Orpheus, then the ghosts we work with may have the intellectual personalities (in some of the higher functioning classes) and the basic desires of the people they were once part of, but they are not the person in whole.

What happens when we send on a ghost or destroy it? Is there really a difference? Do the ghosts we send on reunite with their higher aspects or just get absorbed into the life-force energy of the divine like the Chiah does? If we destroy it, does that destroy some of that divine energy or just disperse it to become another type of energy? How does this affect reincarnation if such a thing exists?

And more importantly: is destroying a ghost the same as destroying a life?

Was I just an accessory to murder, however well deserved it might have been? Do we at Orpheus have the right to make the decisions as to whose souls are to be sent on and whose are to be destroyed?

And if we don't, then who does?