Do you believe in a soul?

[hooplala]

I believe in consciousness transcending death, but I don't believe in a "soul".

[Kai]

Rat: Many cultures hold the seat of life as being the breath. In Hawaiian, Ha (translating to breath of life) is also the number four, the number of the four great gods, and the traditional number system is based around 4.

It also makes the word aloha make sense, which literally means "in the presence of the breath of life".

[Elder Iptuous]

I believe in consciousness transcending death, but I don't believe in a "soul".

What do you believe to be the mechanism behind consciousness transcending death? and if you believe that consciousness is seperable from the body, what is the difference between that and a 'soul'?

Rat: Many cultures hold the seat of life as being the breath. In Hawaiian, Ha (translating to breath of life) is also the number four, the number of the four great gods, and the traditional number system is based around 4.

It also makes the word aloha make sense, which literally means "in the presence of the breath of life".

very interesting! i'll keep that one in my pocket....

[hooplala]

I believe in consciousness transcending death, but I don't believe in a "soul".

What do you believe to be the mechanism behind consciousness transcending death? and if you believe that consciousness is seperable from the body, what is the difference between that and a 'soul'?

A)  I haven't decided that as of yet.  I should have mentioned that I don't always believe the above.

B)  Semantics.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

What do you mean, "Do you believe we are physical manifestations of spiritual energy?"

In the first, place, matter is energy. There is no difference except in terms of density, and maybe in terms of vibration if you listen to Tool. Learn to Einstein, please.

Secondly, wtf is it with Humans and their unyielding addiction to dualism and false dichotomies? The "physical world" is merely one corner of a very big and very strange universe comprised of energy. Thinking of it this way can help you let go of the absurd pressure to wonder what will happen when you die.

What happens when you die is the same thing that is happening now: stuff happens, and you're not consciously aware of hardly any of it.

[Iason Ouabache]

If the primary 'evidence' of a 'soul' is the experience of self consciousness, then what do we make of people that have memory problems?
I was hearing this story about a fellow who had a problem with his memory (i believe it was on a radiolabs show) such that he had a perpetual sense of novelty.  He woke up every morning believing that he was fresh out of the box, brand new, just created.  He was drawing breath for the very first time.  He was seeing everything for the very first time.  He even kept a journal explaining all this, and why every other entry before this last one was false, and that this day was truly his first.
It seems that continuity of memory is integral to the concept of self and soul.  It strikes me that people don't make as much of a fuss about whether they existed before they were born, but it is the same story.....  Just not as much to worry about because that discontinuity is crossed, and every thing's ok?

This reminds me a couple of things that I've read by Oliver Sacks.  He's a British neurologist that has written a couple of popular books about his patients.  I'll see if I can dig any of them as ebooks.  I really need to reread "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat".

[Eater of Clowns]

I believe I have a soul but nobody else does.

[Bu🤠ns]

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors.
1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.

But the following Contraries to these are True
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

[Telarus]

Interesting topic. My take on 'reincarnation' come from studying alot of Zen and going back to the root words in Sanskrit, and it boils down to this:

The Self who is reading this Now is NOT the Self who walked through the door and sat down at the computer.


That's it. That's all there is to reincarnation. It happens to me countless times each day.

Now, this ties into how much the term Karma has been misinterpreted by the west (doubly so if you go with the Wheel of Karma symbolism). Karma means the inertia of thought/action (the original Sankrit does not make a distinction between the two).

Almost all Buddist/Zen metaphors deal with What Is Happening Right Fucking Now. Thus, saying that if you're attached to your negative Karma, you'll end up as an Animal (one of the categories in the Wheel metaphor), simply means that you're too attached to the fight/flight/food/fucking aspects of your body _and_ if you come into a situation where you can't let that go and those instincts will screw you over... well, you get screwed over.

You don't turn into a beetle or frog or anything "upon death". Similarly, with the 'Deva' category, if you get into a situation where your holy, aloof, compassionate, god-like attitudes will fuck you over... and you can't let go of them... you get screwed.

Now, the thing to understand about Karma is it's kinda like pirating files on teh internet via BitTorrent. You can give out a 'copy' of your Karma, but you still have said Karma. Get pissed off and yell at some-one at work? Wow. Now they're pissed off, and you still are too. This will effect both of your days unless a mindful effort to dissolve said Karma is made. And it ain't simple, yo. Say you take a deap breath and calm down, but later the girl you yelled at comes back to your desk while you're on break and poisons your goldfish. There's your Karma again, sucka.

And now, a Zen parable:

23. Eshun's Departure

When Eshun, the Zen nun, was past sixty and about to leave this world, she asked some monks to pile up wood in the yard. Seating herself firmly in the center of the funeral pyre, she had it set fire around the edges. "O nun!" shouted one monk, "is it hot in there?"

"Such a matter would concern only a stupid person like yourself," answered Eshun.
The flames arose, and she passed away.

[Bruno]

Simple answer:  What the fuck is a "soul"? And what the fuck is "spiritual energy"?

Yeah, this.

I mean, listen, I am just a superstitious savage, but I'd like to see these terms defined more completely.

OK... Do you believe in spiritual exergy?








[ +   =   ]

[shadowfurry23]

Interesting topic. My take on 'reincarnation' come from studying alot of Zen and going back to the root words in Sanskrit, and it boils down to this:

The Self who is reading this Now is NOT the Self who walked through the door and sat down at the computer.

Spiffy.  But irrelevant to the discussion at hand, methinks.

The concept of reincarnation predates the Buddha.  The idea that a portion of what you and/or others call 'you' comes back later in some other form is as old as humanity, and dates back to when someone started noticing that the sabretooth that's been stalking him and making his life hell reminds him of like his dead mother-in-law.  I think that's more what we're talking about here.

[Telarus]

Interesting topic. My take on 'reincarnation' come from studying alot of Zen and going back to the root words in Sanskrit, and it boils down to this:

The Self who is reading this Now is NOT the Self who walked through the door and sat down at the computer.

Spiffy.

Thanks.

But irrelevant to the discussion at hand, methinks.

I disagree. If you're going to talk about a 'soul' as a separate thing from the 'body' you're going to introduce a lot of a priori assumptions that come along with that dualism.

But you're right that traditions prior to Buddism had the cyclic rebirth conception of reincarnation (I touch on this briefly with the term "Jiva" in the 5 Apostles of Discordia, Part 1: Sri Syadasti post). In that mythos, even a 'godling' (~consciousness in a different reality, for everything is 'god') has to reincarnate as a human in order to achieve moksha, or liberation. This is called Samsara, or the endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Gautama's realization (and this has been kept fairly esoteric, because he chose to use the language/metaphors of the time to explain this to the lay people) was that this process does not necessitate that the body die in order to achieve the next stage in this cyclic re-birth. The reason he rejected this necessity was that the Hindic cult leaders at the time used this model as an excuse to segregate their population into different classes and seriously oppress certain of them, which they could then blame on the 'Untouchables' themselves for having bad enough Karma to get born as an Untouchable. The Jainist philosophy itself was a rejection of the Hindic bureaucracy, but they removed themselves from the societies that perpetuated that oppression and went to lead ascetic lives in monasteries, while still retaining the basic concepts of Samsara.

Now, while I reject this aspect of reincarnation, I don't place it firmly in the bullshit category like Penn and Teller would. The stories about children knowing nursery rhymes in other languages without having had exposure to those languages (as researched by Rupert Sheldrake in his Morphogenetic field theory) give at least some credit to the idea that _something_ lives on. I just don't see that _something_ as a 'soul' in either the eastern or western interpretation of the idea.

[shadowfurry23]

It seems that continuity of memory is integral to the concept of self and soul. 

I'm less sure about that - in fact I think that's part of the point about a soul, that there's an essential 'you' that transcends memory.

Interestingly, one of the best expressions of this I've seen is the final episode of the anime series "Evangelion" - the main character initiates a sort of universal consciousness event, and a large part of the episode is him experiencing he and his friends in a normal high-school as opposed to all the weird shit that had happened to him.  In this way he is shown that he is who he is and they are who they are irrespective of setting and even experience.  That was my reading of it anyway, I understand there's some debate about that ep and there's a sequel I've never seen that basically nullifies the original ending or something.

[shadowfurry23]

The stories about children knowing nursery rhymes in other languages without having had exposure to those languages (as researched by Rupert Sheldrake in his Morphogenetic field theory) give at least some credit to the idea that _something_ lives on. I just don't see that _something_ as a 'soul' in either the eastern or western interpretation of the idea.

Hoopla seems to have stated something similar.  My question is, what's the difference?

Hoopla's answer, "Semantics," strikes me as something of a cop-out to be honest.  It sounds like you're saying you believe in a soul but don't want to call it that.  Which, if you'll forgive me for saying, sounds pretty damned silly.

[Telarus]

The difference, as I see it, is conceiving the _something_ as an indivisible unit that gets passed along, or something that can get fragmented and spread out, in which case calling it "a soul" is semantically incorrect.