The Tripartite Death Model: Body, Mind, and Soul in Convergent Testimony

A human being consists of three distinct parts—Body, Mind, and Soul—each of which is dismantled in a different way after death and goes to a different destination. Drawing on Christian, Vedantic, Buddhist, and Sufi traditions, near-death experience research, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Jungian psychology, and mystical accounts of union, the argument proposes that materialist, religious, and mystical descriptions of death are not contradictory but are incomplete perspectives on a single underlying structure. The work is presented as a metaphysical synthesis, not an empirical hypothesis, and acknowledges its evidentiary limits throughout.

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Abstract

This work advances the Tripartite Death Model: the claim that a human being is not a single entity facing a single fate at death, but three distinct constituents — Body, Mind, and Soul — each deconstructed by its own logic and arriving at a genuinely different destination. Drawing on Christian, Vedantic, Buddhist, and Sufi sources, near-death experience research, the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, Jungian psychology, and the mystical literature of union, this thesis argues that the apparent contradictions between materialist, religious, and mystical accounts of death are not competing claims to be adjudicated, but incomplete reports from different levels of a single structure. The work is offered as metaphysical synthesis rather than empirical hypothesis, and states its evidentiary limits throughout.