The Soul Matrix: Life Beyond Life
Taking the Red Pill on Reality and What Lies Beyond the Veil
What happens when we die?
It’s the question that‘s been slipping through our fingers like smoke for eons. We don’t have nailed-down, scientific, peer-reviewed footage of the afterlife; no camera crews have gone in, no one’s sent a selfie from the pearly gates. If there was a weekly podcast from the great beyond, maybe we’d have a more solid answer to the question, but no such thing exists.
Our understanding of what comes after death is little more than just theories. Most of us in the Western world grew up believing this life is our one shot at human existence and when it’s all over, a tiny, wispy piece of us called the “soul” flits off to heaven, joins the choir, straps on some wings, plays the harp on a cloud, polishes the pearly gates, and maybe checks in on Earth now and then, remembering fondly the great life it once lived “down there.”
And some of us even believe there’s this other place reserved for those who do bad things in life, down in some fiery pit where devils poke at you with pitchforks and you share a cell with Adolf Hitler, Jack the Ripper, and the sadist who invented the self-checkout machine that freezes if you remove things from the bagging area.
That’s the picture most of us were handed by our parents or Sunday school teachers, or that we gleaned from books and movies and reruns of Touched by an Angel. Life on Earth is the headline act, and the soul that lingers when its over is just a faint heavenly echo of what once was.
But what if it’s the other way around?
What if the soul is actually the fullness of who we are, and what if the place we return to when we withdraw our consciousness from this realm isn’t the afterthought, but the actual real life?
What if life as we know it is just an interlude, and the real deal lies far beyond?
The History of Heaven and Hell
Humans didn’t always believe the afterlife was all harps, halos, devils and demons. Our collective ideas about what happens when we die have evolved over time, stitched together over thousands of years like a cosmic patchwork quilt made of ancient myths, philosophy, religion, and a fair bit of creative writing.
The earliest humans kept it simple. In Mesopotamia, in early Judaism, in Homer’s Greece, it was believed that everybody went to the same shadowy underground realm when they died. There were no punishments and no rewards, just everyone - good, bad and ugly - forever hanging out in the spiritual equivalent of a waiting room with dodgy lighting.
Then along came the Persians with Zoroastrianism, and suddenly things got moral. They split the afterlife in two: paradise for the good guys, punishment for the bad guys. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all borrowed heavily from that model, giving us the heaven-or-hell binary that still dominates Western thought today.
Meanwhile, the Greeks were busy philosophizing. Aristotle thought the soul died with the body. Plato disagreed, and Christians later ran with his idea, adding heaven, hell, and angels to the mix, and now here we are, centuries later, still carrying these old storylines like family heirlooms, with heaven as the big reward, hell as the big warning, Earth life as the main event, and everything you do here you get judged on.
But none of this came down on golden tablets. It was all philsophized, invented, borrowed and remixed, layer by layer by layer. There’s no solid evidence for any of it, we all just have to choose what we believe, and what we believe dictates how we live.
Of course, when you believe that the mistakes you make in this life dictate how you’re punished or rewarded in the next, it colors your whole existence and influences every decision you make.
From Scoreboard to Simulation
But what if there’s no punishment, and no reward either? What if this life is just an opportunity to make choices, to explore pathways, and make decisions, and these bodies we inhabit are just avatars in a giant cosmic simulation in which our soul is the player?
What if this life isn’t a moral audition at all - no cosmic scoreboard, no final judgment - just an experience? Less like a courtroom and more like a game.
Maybe real life isn’t that real at all, but more like a virtual reality so convincing that the moment you hit ‘start,’ you forget you chose it. You get so caught up in the character you’re playing - the job, the heartbreak, the ambitions, the bills - that you forget there’s a player holding the controller outside the game.
What if this messy, unpredictable, beautiful human ride we call life is actually the simulation, and the soul is the player? Perhaps real life isn’t happening here at all; it’s happening beyond the veil.
When Real Life Isn’t Real
Plato was wrestling with this concept way back in 400 BCE with his famous Allegory of the Cave. He described life as being like people chained in a cave from birth, their bodies locked so they permanently face a wall, while behind them, a fire blazes and, between the fire and the prisoners, others walk back and forth carrying objects. The prisoners can’t turn around, so all they ever see are the shadows cast on the wall in front of them, and they believe those flickering shapes to be reality. They name them, argue about them, build meaning around them, never realizing there’s a whole world going on behind them, and an even greater world outside the cave, in the blazing sun.
Around the 1600s, along comes René Descartes - the “I think, therefore I am” guy - and he posed the idea that an all-powerful trickster might be messing with us, fabricating our entire reality so convincingly that we’d never know the difference. Basically, he birthed the idea of virtual reality centuries before it actually existed.
Then in 1981, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard released Simulacra and Simulation, claiming that we are living inside layers of representation - simulations stacked on top of simulations - and in 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom ran the numbers and suggested that it’s far more likely that we’re living in a simulation than not.
This idea has been steadily gathering speed for over two thousand years now; what if what we call “real life”….isn’t?
Tales from the Nearly Dead
Stories of what lies beyond this reality have been told for millennia. Humans have been nearly dying and then talking about it for as long as we’ve been around.
Plato (yes, him again) recorded one of the first known “near death experiences” back in 400 BCE. In The Republic, he told the tale of a soldier named Er who fell in battle, left his body, journeyed through the afterlife, saw souls choosing new lives like items off a menu, and then woke up on his funeral pyre to report everything he saw.
From there, right throughout history, scattered accounts pop up - from medieval mystics describing journeys to heaven, to Enlightenment-era physicians recording “visions of the dying,” and even 19th-century writers noting people who technically died, came back, and spoke of tunnels, lights, and peace beyond words.
But it wasn’t until 1975 when psychiatrist Raymond Moody actually started studying these “near-death experiences”, that he discovered the same core experiences turned up over and over, as people repeatedly spoke about leaving their body and watching the whole scene - doctors, family members, the flatline on the monitor - from somewhere near the ceiling.
Many described moving through a tunnel or being drawn toward an unbearably bright but somehow soft light, radiating peace and a kind of love they say words don’t touch. They spoke of reunions with dead relatives, friends, even strangers who felt like old companions. Some met what they called “beings of light.” Others just described a presence so full of love it left them wrecked in the best way possible.
Most spoke of a life review - a panoramic playback of everything they’d ever done in the life they had lived, but not in a judgy, clipboard-wielding way. People said they felt the impact of their actions on others, like they were experiencing it through every set of eyes involved.
And almost all of them came back changed; less afraid of death and more interested in love, compassion and connection, as though brushing up against whatever waits beyond rewires something fundamental.
Today, thousands of these stories fill entire databases, the patterns repeating so often it’s hard to call them coincidence. Scientists argue about whether these recollections are brain chemistry fireworks or glimpses of a greater reality, but either way, people who’ve had NDEs don’t talk like they dreamed it. They talk like they went there.
But where exactly is “there”? Nobody can say for sure. But if something comes after this life, what it is might best be told by one who remembers what came before.
Memories Before the Veil
Unlike Plato or Descartes or even Bostrom with his Oxford spreadsheets, Christian Sundberg doesn’t just ponder what life beyond life is like - he claims to remember.
In his book A Walk in the Physical, Christian describes memories from before he was born - memories of existing as a soul, choosing a life, reviewing multiple possibilities, and then watching the “veil” drop before plunging into human experience. He says this wasn’t metaphorical or dreamlike; it was clear, conscious, and so real it makes this life feel like the simulation.
As a soul, he recalls reviewing potential lives like a gamer scrolling through character settings, weighing courage against heartbreak, love against loss. Certain challenges, certain relationships, even certain fears were baked into the plan, he says, not for punishment or reward, but for growth. A soul, according to Sundberg, intentionally selects experiences that stretch them, teach them, and help them heal.
And then there’s the veil - that moment where awareness narrows, memories vanish, and the soul fully immerses into the game. Sundberg remembers it being applied, and being told it was important that he not remember his true self - his soul self - or else he would not be able to take the experience seriously, as its the forgetting that makes it feel real.
Christian says he actually resisted incarnation the first time because the density, the fear, and the separation felt overwhelming. The second time, he made it through, but the veil didn’t fully hold, and he’s lived this life with glimpses of that wider perspective intact, like a player who half-remembers they’re in a game while everyone else insists the game is all there is.
And his memories line up with what many spiritual traditions have hinted at for centuries - that time isn’t linear at the soul level, that we travel in soul groups, often incarnating together in different roles, and that love, not fear, is the point of the whole thing.
Christian calls Earth life a kind of training ground, a video game for the soul, where every choice, every limitation, every heartbreak exists to help us grow in love, courage, and freedom. And he says that life here is immersive precisely because it feels so separate from the wholeness we come from.
Separation and The Soul Matrix
If the soul - pure consciousness - is infinite and one with everything, then nothing is missing and all is known. There’s no “other”, no beginning, no end, no fear, no loss, no risk. It’s beautiful, but it’s also static, being everything, everywhere, all at once.
When all is one then nothing can be known, for nothing can be experienced where there is no duality. Consciousness can only know itself through contrast. After all what is light without darkness to compare it to?
In spirit, all is one - there’s no “you” apart from “me” - but to be human is to feel seperate in a world of polarity where you can only be one thing at a time, instead of everything, always, all the time.
So the soul focuses itself into human form because when you are here, you cannot be there, and when you are this, you are not that. Because here, when you love, you risk losing, and because you choose to be alive, you will one day die.
It’s this experience of polarity that consciousness craves, and so we accept the veil, the forgetting, and the sense of being cut off from everything we truly are so we may live in a realm where every choice matters because you can’t choose everything all at once.
The soul comes for this limitation. It comes to feel time, to taste the sweetness of love against the bitterness of grief, to experience courage only made possible by fear. In the wholeness of eternity, there is no danger. Here, there are stakes.
This is the Soul Matrix - a kind of cosmic simulation where souls step into avatars, forget who they really are, and live whole lifetimes believing the game is all there is. It’s immersive on purpose. The forgetting is the feature, not the flaw.
Because when you believe it’s real, every moment matters, and maybe that’s the point: not to pass or fail, not to earn some reward or avoid some punishment, but simply to experience what it’s like to be a single point of consciousness inside a vast and temporary world of opposites.
The Game We Choose
Most of us live our whole lives believing this life is it: the job, the mortgage, the heartbreak, the drama, the victories and defeats are all there is. We grip the storyline so tightly because we think this is the main event, when its really just a momentary game we’re playing for the joy of feeling separate.
It’s the soul’s playground; the only way our higher selves can experience who we truly are in a place where we are one, but not all.
Our soul chooses this - every little bit of it - not to pass some test or win some cosmic prize, but to taste it all, and to be fully immersed, and one day, when the avatar drops, when the game ends, when our soul steps back into that vast, luminous everything, maybe we simply smile and just say, “Wow, that was a wild ride.”
No soul is cursed to walk this earth. Every life is chosen, and carefully selected.
You chose your parents, even the ones who drive you mad.
You chose the sibling who challenges you at every turn.
You chose the heartbreak, the betrayal, the love, the loss.
You chose wealth and all the lessons it brings.
You chose poverty and the strength it would call out of you.
You chose the short life, the long life, the easy path, the impossible one.
Not because you’re a masochist, but because you wanted the experience.
From the human perspective, it all looks unfair, even cruel, because if this is our only life, then shouldn’t it be great for everyone equally? But that’s the misunderstanding. The mind and body only get one go. The soul in the driver’s seat comes back again and again, each time diving into the forgetting, each time learning something new through contrast and limitation.
The human mind will always cry, “I deserve better! This isn’t fair! I want more than this!” because it only sees one chapter and thinks it’s the whole story.
But if we quiet the mind, if we remember the soul behind it all - the one playing the game - we can release our hold a little and stop gripping so hard so we might see the bigger picture and stop taking the whole thing quite so seriously.
Because if the soul is eternal, if this is just one chapter in a story without end, then maybe there really is nothing serious going on here after all.
It’s just a wild, beautiful, heartbreaking, hilarious ride we all chose to take.
And our real life awaits us, just beyond the veil.
My intention in my writing is to lessen the climate of fear around world events by offering clarity and cosmic context for what’s unfolding; to bring context to the chaos. I believe our highest calling right now is to anchor in the vibration of love & truth and call in a more beautiful world, and to do that, we must lean out of fear. I hope you read this with an open, uplifted heart.
I'm in awe of the incredible knowledge and memories Wiz is gifting to his readers. This is a deeply profound and well written treatise on life after death. During this time of noise and chaos, it's so appreciated! 💖💝💖
It’s fascinating that the words you wrote is what I’ve come to understand—following a lifetime of looking outside myself for answers, only to ultimately return to myself. This life has been about discovering/ exploring the highest expression of who I am. One of the most amazing things that’s currently happening is a profound sense of peace, despite what’s happening in our country, after recently saying goodbye to both of my parents, and entering into what many would consider the final chapter of life. It’s lovely to see you articulate this so well. Thank you for this.