The Greek philosopher Plato gives us insight into Greek afterlife and by understanding his philosophy we can understand how the ancient Greeks saw the afterlife. Ancient Greek afterlife is based on the duality between body and soul, or between death and immortality.

 For Plato explained that death and life are two different substances: “When death comes at a human being, his deathbound part, as is likely, dies, but his un-dying part takes off and goes away safe and undestroyed.” This is possible because the “soul doesn’t admit death,” and what does not admit death is immortal.

   However, this duality of life and death is more complex. Plato told us that “there’s the thing itself that brings some contrary to bear,” meaning that the word “death” brings a contradiction in itself. There are “simple fractions” that cannot “admit the idea of the Whole,” and this leads to the ultimate point that there is no duality at all. Life and death are not separate because there is no death. Life does not come from death—life comes from life—it is already there and it does not go anywhere.

   From this perspective, the word and the conceptual understanding of “death,” is the thing that brings a contrary to life. The concept itself is a separation from life, and so, there is no death, only the misconception of the separation from life. Therefore, life as the idea of the whole cannot admit death, because death is the illusion that creates the separation from the whole.   

   This is expressed in modern words by Eckhart Tolle in A New World. Here Tolle explains that the separation between “life” and “my life,” is an illusion created by the ego. He then unties the separation in a plain and simple way: “There is no such thing as ‘my life,’ and I don’t have a life. I am life. I and life are one.”

   Finally, with life being eternal, Plato let us know the consequence of the illusion of death:

If the soul is indeed deathless, she’s in need of care, not only for this time in which we call ‘being alive’ goes on, but for time as a whole; and the risk now would seem to be dreadful, if somebody is careless of his soul. For if death were freedom from time as a whole, it would be a godsend for bad men, who in death would be at once set free.