The Weight of Love, 21 Grams

Sean Penn’s new film, 21 Grams, is a brilliant piece about sin and redemption and the journey through the human shadow. It’s a dark and foreboding film but it is deeply moving; his co-actors, Benicio Del Toro and Naomi Watts, are brilliant. It is said that the human body loses 21 grams in weight at death and there is a wonderful line in the script when Penn asks, “How much does a human’s love weigh?”

Some think that perhaps the human soul has weight, and that the 21 grams is the etheric or the soul leaving the body. I don’t know if that is right or not. Certainly, the etheric is composed of light, and photons have no mass, so I’d say the etheric is weightless. Then again, maybe our memories have a weight or perhaps the 21 grams idea is just one of those endearing urban myths that was suggested by someone years ago, and then passed around to where it eventually entered into our lexicon of ideas as fact.

In the olden days, it was thought that memories are stored in various specific parts of the brain. This came from early neurosurgery that found that memories could be evoked by electrically stimulating various areas of the brain. But later that idea was thrown out to be replaced by the concept of the holographic brain, which suggests that memories are not stored in anyone place, rather, they are everywhere in the brain, held suspended in the fields of interference patterns created by neurological activity.

So then you could say your memories aren’t in the brain cells at all, rather they are held in cross-hairs of force fields that are your bio-electrical life force or etheric. So, at death the cessation of the brain is irrelevant as everything that you are is stored in the fields and it is those fields that retain the perpetual memory of you. Working it backwards, if there is an after-life then memories can’t be just in your brain cells, for there has to be an imprinted field or storage mechanism that does the remembering of you after the brain stops.

There are definitely other worlds/dimensions where humans exist, we have seen those worlds a thousand times and more. There is coherent activity in there. People are working things out and evolving, so something must allow for an alternative human identity, an alternative you, to exist and evolve elsewhere.

I don’t know how much our love weighs, but it must be lighter than our ignorance. In the end, all that is earth-bound is left behind to rot and only love floats away to become something ever more glorious.