Neither atma (soul) nor body dies. Soul is our consciousness. Consciousness never dies; once
formed, it transforms into a mass of consciousness and perpetuates as the mass without
consciousness. Body never dies; it is formed with the mass that was once the consciousness and
materialized the body as the vehicle for realizing the goal within that consciousness. The goal is
the thing that makes the wisher matter in life and consciousness. One matters in life and
consciousness because someone is conscious of one’s presence before one embodies a body and
trades the consciousness of that someone to incarnate. One forms the consciousness because the
consciousness is already present as a potential that leads one to incarnate for harnessing that
potential. Thus, one may say that the illusion of our absence without body dies when we depart
from our body. We may depart from our body because of its degeneration and decay or because
we have realized the absolute freedom to be omnipresent within the growth of the universe
without us.