21 Grams

This was an english assignment my teacher gave us, the question was "what is that 21 grams a person loses at death?", he talked about spirits, white noise, and the movie 21 grams, this was my answer to the question.

by Seraph Valentine

---

"How many lives do we live?" Quoted Paul Rivers (actor Sean Penn) in the movie 21 grams. The premise of this movie is that, at the time of their death, each person loses 21 grams. The question here is not why each person loses 21 grams each, but what those 21 grams lost is. Some would say it is all of a person's bodily fluids leaving their bodies, but, if so, how is it that each person would lose exactly 21 grams? There is a very big difference in size of a child and an adult, for example, and they cannot each hold the same amount of fluids. It would be impossible, so one is left to wonder what those 21 grams are. The soul is a logical, albeit spiritual, conclusion. What happens to the soul after it leaves the body is another question to be pondered; believers in reincarnation would perhaps be the closest to an answer. In reincarnation theory, when a person dies, their soul is reborn in another body, perhaps the body of another person, or perhaps the body of an animal, a tree, or an insect even. The theory states that a soul can be reborn into anything else, but what if a soul, once it leaves one body, does not stay together as a mass, but instead separates and each piece of one soul joins with another piece of another soul when it is reborn? This would mean that a person does not have one individual soul, but many. It would explain why each person is unique even with recycled souls. For each piece of each soul that would make up one person would bring a different aspect to that person that was, or perhaps was not, a piece of the others' soul. Instead of entire souls migrating from person to person, as many reincarnationists would believe, but each soul splits up and joins other pieces of souls and become a new soul, unique to the others and yet partly similar to others. So, to answer the question asked by Paul Rivers, one lives many lives.