The last line of the Apostles’ Creed reads, “I believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

Just like the resurrection of the body, the idea of eternal life is a great mystery. Indeed, there’s nothing in our earthly experience which is anything like a life that is everlasting.

While many people imagine eternity as an endless progression of time, my spiritual experiences suggest something quite different: a transcendent state outside of time altogether, in which all moments (past, present and future) are present at once.

Such a reality is impossible to explain, even for those of us who have experienced it. Nevertheless, I believe it’s where we are headed.

For this reason, I tend to prefer the word eternal to “everlasting.” Not only does it seem more accurate to me, but also more appealing.

Indeed, there’s nothing particularly appealing about living forever, per se. An endless life in these earthly bodies, with all the limitations and temptations that go along with them, would be closer to hell than heaven. But to be truly eternal, no longer bound by either time or space – that’s pretty exciting!

Sometimes it can be hard to believe in eternal life – especially when we consider that our consciousness is stored in our minds, and it appears that all brain activity stops when our bodies die.

Even so, there’s reason to believe that our consciousness could be brought back to life – whether immediately after bodily death, or some time later.

As an analogy, consider computers. When a computer dies, the hard drive (which is the closest thing computers have to “consciousness”) shuts down and stops working.

But as most people who have computers know, this hard drive can then be placed inside a new computer, where it can be accessed just as easily as before. Theoretically, this process could go on forever (as long as there are people alive who know how to build computers, and the materials to build them with).

Similarly, when our bodies die, our consciousness (or our “hard drive” if you will) stops; but could not the designer of the body (God) upload our consciousness into another body – or even spread it across the entire universe?

My experiences suggest that this is indeed what happens – though there’s much that still remains a mystery, and must remain so.