A Birth Rather Than an Ending

Baha'u'llah wrote about the life after death less as a single destination than as a continuation of a journey the soul had already begun in this world. In passages gathered in Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, he describes the human soul as immortal by nature, created to know and love God, and teaches that physical death is not an ending but a birth into a new stage of existence, comparable, in an image he returns to more than once, to the passage of a child from the confinement of the womb into the wider world it could not have imagined while still inside it. The Abha Kingdom is the name given to this next stage taken as a whole, understood in Baha'i teaching as the beginning of an unending series of worlds through which the soul continues to draw nearer to God.

Nearness in this sense is not primarily spatial. Baha'i teaching holds that a soul's standing in the next life reflects the spiritual qualities it developed during its earthly life, faith, service and good character chief among them, so that the work of approaching the Abha Kingdom is described as beginning now, in ordinary conduct, rather than starting only after death. Prayers for the dead in Baha'i practice, including one Baha'u'llah composed specifically for that purpose, ask that the departed soul continue to advance through this same unfolding progression rather than treating death as a fixed, final judgment.