What is a Soul?

[Marek]

Re: What is a Soul?

To me..

The soul is what exists in the trinity of human form. It has three primary characteristics, inseparable from the other. The first characteristic is the Physical, that which is diminished in age or use. This represents the body. The second characteristic is the Speculative, that which is neither enhanced nor degraded in use. This is your logos or even your flowing consciousness. The third characteristic is the Spiritual, that which is enhanced when shared or used. The Spiritual is the portion of us that is enlightened through life. The "soul" is not something within us that animates us, it is the by-product of our trinity already being active.

Reincarnation I am unsure about. As a druid I believe in the Underworld where the souls of the dead go. If souls can be reincarnated then why honor the ancestors when we can just await their return in our future lives? As a healer I believe that reincarnation is a constant process of our own Spiritual selves as we shed our old patterns to be reborn or enlightened. However as a person who is mostly in-tune with my thoughts and emotions I feel as if I am older than my body. But perhaps I feel like that because I align more easily with the thoughts and philosophies of the classical era.

Just my two cents..

[Gaiano]

Re: What is a Soul?

The soul, in my eyes, has always been a kind of force that drives all living things. I belief EVERY living organism has a soul that drives live, but I believe a spirit is something different. I like to think, in humans, the spirit is something that is a little more personal than the soul. The spirit is essentially a copy of the physical body and mind that is held together by the soul. Souls always reincarnate, the spirit doesn't. I believe the spirit goes to another plane after death, usually to Summerland or the Otherworld and in some cases they stay here in ours. I believe the Soul passes through Summerland and the Otherworld, essentially dropping spirits off. The Soul returns to our plane, where it reincarnates to another form of life.

[Geckgo]

Re: What is a Soul?

Just my two bits...

As to whether I believe plants and animals have souls, short answer? yes.
I tend to think that individual atoms also carry little bits of soul with them, but that is another matter.

My philisophical perspective (shortened up obviously):

The brain directs the body, but the brain is just a biomechanical device that sends and recieves signals. It's the ultimate "black box". Nobody knows how it works exactly, but essential information is fed "in" through the senses, and the outputs are muscular music that makes us move, talk, look around, etc etc. In theory there is nothing else necessary to make a human being work, however...

We are aware that these things are going on. We are in fact watching ourselves, and our thinking process. It just seems that there is something "missing" from the above description when we apply it to ourselves. There is something doing the "feeling" while the brain does the thinking. I.E. my brain thinks, but I can hear it and feel it!

So apparently (at least as far as I am concerned, your mileage may vary), we are a body +1. That +1 is the soul.


My religious perspective:

A soul is a collection of spiritual energy/matter/whatever that attaches itself to physical entities, so, any kind of matter, even individual atoms. Living creatures carry around quite a bit of it, sometimes some seeps off and new energy is picked up, so souls are kind of fluid in nature. When we die, the energy goes back into the pool and when new beings come into existence they scoop from the pool.
^--this is my hideously oversimplified version


My scientific perspective:
That spiritual energy I was talking about, is actually the superposition of EM energy. In lay terms, all matter emits em radiation (light, heat, ect) and em radiation is everywhere around us in all forms. The spiritual energy is the patterns formed around a body when the outgoing interacts with the incomming. Unfortunately, I still haven't found a way to measure this. In animals, the interference is much more than in plants because we put out all sorts of frequencies produced by our brains and nervous systems that plants don't have, but every cell does put out an array of frequencies. Atoms only put out light and heat, and occasionally some "radioactive" frequencies (gamma, xray, etc). Basically, the more complicated the EM output, the more interesting the mixing with the incomming signals, and the harder the equations get.

I'm gonna shut up now before I write a book, if anyone is interested in hearing more about my theories, just pm me or something. These are my views, hopefully they provide you with some food for thought and I wish you the best of luck in "hammering out the details" of your beliefs.

-the geckgo

[Avior]

Re: What is a Soul?

I definitely believe that we have a soul that resides inside our bodies and leaves our bodies upon death. I think the soul is basically what makes us "alive". I believe in reincarnation, after a period of rest in between lives, where the soul will go on to inhabit another body.

I think that all living things have a soul, but that the nature of the souls are different for different creatures - i.e. plants have a different "type" of soul to animals.

[Wednesday]

Re: What is a Soul?

This is what I am thinking about today so I thought it might be interesting to see how others would answer these questions.

Do you believe in the existence of a soul?

If so, what is it? Where does it come from? Do animals and plants have a soul or is it human specific? What happens to it when we die? Is there a finite number of souls or are new ones continuously being created?

I don't know my answers to any of these questions yet so will save my answers for a later day

To me, the term soul defines a pre-being that's separate and superior to the conscious mind, and that's not a concept I believe in. I think that conception creates an individual person that will grow what we think of as "soul" throughout his or her life time. I think we're whole in both body and thought and that we can utilize these in interesting (shamantic?) ways, but that you're tied to your bones. There isn't a higher ethereal you-soul in my beliefs.

[Ophidia]

Re: What is a Soul?

I've actually got a pretty developed cosmology for the soul. I think the Universe has a vast, unified 'over-soul' - it is the driving force behind the destructive and constructive energies that make and unmake everything from stars to galaxies to planets to us. It is made up of all the unique experiences of life and organic material everywhere. It is Divine and Sacred, and Gods are made of greater proportions of soul-stuff, but the Over-Soul itself is not exactly Deity. It permeates everything, weaving us all together in a common tapestry. It is also infinite because bits of soul-stuff are leaving and returning constantly.

Bits of this over-soul will become separated from the main body (I haven't worked out the hows & whys of that yet), and it will end up inhabiting an individual 'something' and giving it life. As long as that bit of soul-stuff dwells within us, or a rock or tree or amoeba, it is learning and experiencing all it can from that thing it is calling home. When we or an animal or plant reincarnates, it's because that bit of soul-stuff isn't satisfied with one single lifetime of experience, but wants to continue onward. It can, because it is made up of that Divine Over-Soul, while organic bodies become fragmented or die. When that bit of soul-stuff is 'full' of experiences, be it from one life or many, it returns to the Over-Soul, where all its experiences and memories are diffused throughout the Over-Soul. The Over-Soul is continuously curious and life is continually evolving, so it will be a long time before it has experienced everything it can possibly experience.

I think rocks can die. When people dig up rocks from the ground, extract useful elements from it, melt it down... that rock is dead - which is why in my cosmology, most manufactured items, even tools made or used by apes, are 'dead' and have no souls. Just because something is 'dead' doesn't mean that it's unnatural - but I don't believe purely synthetic manufactured things get souls. No matter how evil Teddy Ruxpin is, he's made of dead oils that have been spun into polyester and plastic, and therefore soul-less. I also believe that sometimes, when someone suffers a particularly traumatic event, the soul can and will flee from that body, leaving it biologically alive, but no longer connected to the Over-Soul or the rest of the Universe. I also believe that people or animals can be born without a soul, or may end up with a soul later on in life. Multiple births, where the siblings have that weird bond between them? That's a bit of soul-stuff too big for just one body - which is also how soul-mates are created.

Souls can also fragment & be accidentally (or on purpose through various means & ways) left in various places to subtly interfere with the souls of other people/things. Sometimes bits of the soul end up too permeated by the mentality and personality of the person or thing they inhabit - and when that body dies, the soul becomes attached to the physical world - which is where ghosts come from. 'Psychic echoes' are the personality/mentality of the body which is sort of stuck and didn't move on with the rest of the soul. It just repeats the usually traumatic event that left the echo over & over again, and doesn't break pattern.

[habbalah]

Re: What is a Soul?

This is what I am thinking about today so I thought it might be interesting to see how others would answer these questions.

Do you believe in the existence of a soul?

If so, what is it? Where does it come from? Do animals and plants have a soul or is it human specific? What happens to it when we die? Is there a finite number of souls or are new ones continuously being created?

I don't know my answers to any of these questions yet so will save my answers for a later day

Yes, I do believe in a soul, but I believe we have a soul and a spirit, and they're two different things.

The spirit is what you're made up of for this lifetime and is unique to each living thing with sentience. It's shaped and changed by your experiences with this lifetime; if your ghost ends up hanging around after death, that's your spirit. It's specific to the now. Does that include plants? Depends on if you think plants can think and feel.

Where does it come from? Where ever you believe all life comes from--God, the Divine, the Universe, where ever.

Your soul, however, is what goes on to be reincarnated. I don't believe that when we come back around, we come back wholesale; that's why there's a difference between the spirit and the soul. If it helps to make sense of my rambling, think of the spirit as your memories and your soul as your life energy. The soul may have some impressions left over from each lifetime--things are affected by where they're stored, after all--but I don't think it would be possible to retrieve every moment from my life before this one.

[anunitu]

Re: What is a Soul?

If "symbiotic" is used to mean "a mutually dependent relationship in which each part provides a real benefit to the other," then yes, I'd also call it symbiotic.

In most people, though, one or the other (and I'd also toss the third member of the holy trinity - spirit, which in Alchemy is different from the soul - into the mix) tends to be dominant. The particular mix of strong & less strong, combined with the way things play out in life (environment) determines personality.

I don't think most people are aware of this, but it is possible to self adjust the mixture and create a different personality - but, in life, people do this all the time (i.e.: you aren't the same person at home with your family as you are when you go on a job interview). So from my particular perspective, it is a matter of choice.




Have you ever noticed how many "religious" practices are designed to beat the body into submission? When I was raised Catholic I was taught to admire as "spiritual heroes" people who destroyed their bodies "for the sake of their soul." Mortification of the flesh, martyrdom, abstinence... Crazy stuff...

This is supposed to be good for you?

I have never understood this practice. In a California history class I got in trouble when my response to the teachers(Hispanic) lecture about the priests doing self flagellation,was that is just masochism..Teacher was very upset with my take on the matter.