Can People Come Back to Life from The Beyond?

[jrh1524]

I know people can come back to life in the Cosmere before their spirit goes to The Beyond.  Can people come back to life after going to The Beyond? 

Also, side question, do Kandra and such have their own spirits?

[Yados]

I doubt it. 

Because of the way it functions and the way Sanderson has spoken about this subject, I read the Beyond as a personal/spiritual buffer that lets Sanderson tell a big stories about "gods" and "resurrections" ... but at the same time you have souls passing on to an unknowable fate. There's the Cosmere's expansive domain and the Beyond's more traditional spiritual unknowable domain.

That feels like it wouldn't be there if it wasn't meant to be a hard line. 

The "gods"/shards are just entities with a lot of awareness and power that can mess around with the world of the living but can't touch the afterlife any more than I can. So they aren't actually "gods" and people coming back to life aren't real "resurrections" but they allow you to write about and explore those things because they look and act like those things and, to the inhabitants of the Cosmere, they effectively are those things. 

But the Beyond makes sure that they are not. 

It makes sure that the Cosmere and the Shards and resurrections function as allegories rather than explorations of the pure, uncut concepts that have real world significance to many. 

It feels weird to speculate about something like this, but there might be a concern re: personal religious/spiritual beliefs of "playing god"? Even in fiction? 

I don't know if that's the answer, but I think that if it was a concern, the way the Beyond functions would effectively sidestep those concerns. 

But that's all speculation AND I am way out of the loop these days. 

[Yata he/him]

I will not say that is impossible in theory...But Brandon said he didn't want to dig in what the Beyond is...therefore I think we will not see somebody return from there.

About the Kandra, yes the Kandra have a soul, like almost everything else in the Cosmere.....In the end remember that a Kandra quite an Human with a Cognitive Block and a trick to overcome that block

[Jedal he/him]

5 hours ago, jrh1524 said:

 

I know people can come back to life in the Cosmere before their spirit goes to The Beyond.  Can people come back to life after going to The Beyond? 

 

Well, that is yet to be seen. As the posts above me have so beautifully articulated, while Brandon is incredibly forthcoming about information on the Cosmere, he is less generous with information about the Beyond. It seems to function in a similar fashion to Heaven in Christian mythology. So, unless we see some sort of pseudo-messianic figure in the Cosmere(and I highly doubt we will) then no! However, I get the feeling that this question would be better answered by Brandon himself! You could try and get someone to ask it for you, or go see him at one of his nearby tours!