Life’s Meaning and Disney Pixar’s Soul

Spiritual reflections on reality, the meaning of life, and existence compared to what this movie portrays

Disney Pixar’s Soul is groundbreaking because it portrays a non-traditional representation of the afterlife. It’s about a man who is pursuing his dreams to be a professional jazz musician, but he dies and becomes a soul before he can realize it and he tries to break free of the system of life and death. He tries to go back to his body to complete his life’s work and ends up in some places he isn’t supposed to be. It’s a great movie on many levels, but I have some problems with it on a fundamental, philosophical level. It just doesn’t give us a look at reality in a way that makes sense to me.

We aren’t just living this life in some random set-up where nothing has meaning and we have very little freewill. But the movie seems to want us to accept this notion. Let me explain.

Pre-birth and Post-death in the Movie

We are constantly searching for reasons. Our universe has reasons, and when we understand the cycles and reality that we exist inside, it is obvious that we don’t begin and end — there is no true birth or death. We are infinite. I’ve written about this before here: My Daughter Told Me Where She Was Before Her Birth

Yet, in Soul we are supposed to believe that before birth, we are somehow born another time, so that human birth is a second birth after our soul birth. According to the movie, our souls just emerge from nothingness somehow (we don’t see this in the movie), and we start out as a totally blank slate in a place called the You Seminar with no pre-existing personalities or karma. These higher beings called the Jerrys tell us what personality traits we’ll have and then force us to get some “spark” for life. We live life, and then we pass to a second death after death, where we are consumed or absorbed by The Great Beyond, a giant ball of light at the end of a conveyor belt. And this just doesn’t sit right with me.

Maybe I don’t have the universe totally figured out, but then again, maybe I do. It just seems strange to go to the trouble of inventing an afterlife when all we do is exist there for a few minutes before really dying. So, what’s the difference between this and saying that human life is all that exists and when we die, it’s the end? Who cares if we get a few minutes beyond death to be ‘just a soul’? And what meaning can there be in our lives at all if we just pop out of nothingness into some You Seminar where we are programmed to be a certain way, where everything about our place in the world is pre-determined before birth, so we can go to Earth and live, just to completely disappear after death? It all seems to point to the fact that our lives are totally random, out of our control, and meaningless.

And I just don’t buy it.

There is Meaning in Life, I Swear!

In the You Seminar, no one explains what the point of any of it is. Why go through conditioning and programming to be a certain way, and find a “spark”, just to go to Earth and live then die? I don’t see the point. Is it all just a game for the Jerrys to watch and chuckle at?

None of this makes any sense to me. Life has meaning. We aren’t just playing some game or acting as pawns in someone else’s game. We are active agents of change in the world, responsible for our own choices and personality, living in a meaningful manifestation. We aren’t just randomly programmed and forced to be here — we chose to be here. We aren’t just here by chance or randomness. We carry energies and karma from lifetime to lifetime, learning and growing, and we never stop. We want to live, we know who we are, and we aren’t random — nothing is.

Why are humans always so eager to take the meaning out of life? I don’t get it.

The Afterlife is No Different than Earth Life

The movie also makes it seem at times like the afterlife is nothing more than another Earth. The characters can’t taste food or feel pain, there are infinite higher beings named Jerry making sure everything goes smoothly, but pretty much everything else about the You Seminar is the same as Earth. And again, no one tells anyone why any of this is happening.

The Jerrys in the movie really worry me. To me, they only show that no matter what happens to us helpless souls, we are always being kept in check by the Jerrys. There’s a Jerry making sure we are always where we are meant to be, with little freewill, and we are told exactly where to go, when, and how. The Jerrys are terrifying. They remind me of guards in a concentration camp. Sorry if that offends anyone.

Sure, we could argue that the Jerrys are merely a manifestation of the laws of physics or something. But it still feels wrong to me that we are just slaves to a system instead of living in infinite possibilities.

And how is this different from the Earth that most of us believe in? Society’s hierarchy ensures that most of us on Earth have few choices in life, and the caste we’re born into largely stays with us through life. We get few choices. And for the movie, there was never any freedom from this prison of life, even beyond life. We are forced to be conditioned, sent to live on Earth with much suffering, and then we die and there’s a Jerry sitting there counting our arrival on an abacus and adding up all the souls as if they were identical and meaningless. We never had a hope of deviating from the Jerry’s plan.

How depressing. But I don’t buy it.

Life isn’t this way. There are no authoritative, terrifying Jerrys. There is only love, mercy, and bliss beyond death. It is nothing like life on Earth, which is why we chose to be here. Living is interesting, something very different to experience from what lay on the other side of the veil of reality. And we have a ton of control over who we are and what happens to us. Trust me in that.

Final Thoughts

Pixar’s Soul is amazing. There are no other children’s movies I can think of about life and death. It’s something to help us all think about our place in the big picture. However, I think we should look deeply at reality to decide for ourselves what brings this existence meaning. Movies are meant for entertainment, which Soul certainly offers. Maybe they don’t always need such philosophical analyses as this! I just wanted viewers to know that they shouldn’t give up on oneness and meaning.

Don’t ever give up on the notion that you are infinite and full of love.