A Question of Soul

The question of the reality of the soul and its distinction from the body is among the most important problems of life as we know it, for within it is bound the doctrine of a future life.

The soul is the unconscious, autonomous, illogical, receptive 'earthy human nature' within us all. Spirit, is its partner that inspires it to become more through certain catalysts in change. Some might argue that there is no soul.

Consciousness is a field that can be acted upon by brains to acquire and manipulate information. Soul is just a word used to describe a certain state of information.

Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Guess which part we have the most of. I accept the mystery of life and accept that I will never have the truth. I will delude myself from time to time. I will forget my creed. I will die. I accept this. Accepting the inevitable brings comfort. I am the universe experiencing itself, I am you, you are me. Let us leave this simulation of reality and find the core reality!

The soul came from the "separation" of mind and body. People don't say "I am a body," they say "I have a body". This is one question I cannot answer for you. It's part of your path, and once you accept that, it'll manifest itself for you.

This reminds me of Crowley. When asked if how we should deal with the will of others considering "your Will is law". He explained that when we fight our Will, we run into more obstacles, and, along those lines, we cause ourselves the trouble.

For me, the soul of an individual is a small spark of the cosmic consciousness or the term we are more familiar with "God". You and I are God and we are playing The Game with ourselves right now. A game where we have forgotten who we really are. In this game, we experience limitations, pain, and separation of our other-selves. The goal is to remember who we really are, rejoin the Cosmic and bring with us all the experiences we have had so that God may learn from Himself. And what better way to appreciate your infinite intelligence and infinite energy than to experience the opposite? Have fun. You have no choice but to play, but don't get scared, ever...because this is just a Game.

In this investigation, the concept of "where," especially in its ordinary, mundane meaning, isn't very applicable, and more often misleading. The "soul" is everywhere but nowhere. The soul is a soul of the paradox: it's eternal yet in and of a temporal being. It resides in the space between supervenience and phenomenology. It's both the answer to and problem with dualism. "You" feel it, you intimately know it, but it escapes description, discussion, and any attempts at analytical rigor. It's akin to the "problem" of consciousness, albeit even more fundamental. It's a great mystery that provides us with a key into the other great mysteries: and to deny it is foolish, but the pretense to play at complete understanding is somehow worse.

So how do we feel, or locate, one's soul if you will? It's a difficult enterprise to try and share such an esoteric fundamentality with another. Language is strained to its breaking point on such testing grounds. It's a hard road, but a worthy inquiry! And never despair! There is much beauty and truth to the inquiry.

First, you must define what the soul is. Many cultures around the world specify different parts or aspects of the soul. That being said, the soul, to me, is our eternal self that is connected to a god. I see it shining around the area of the solar plexus.

The soul doesn't have a where. Go beyond the concept of where when you go searching for it or you'll always search in vain. Don't believe me though! that's just in my humble delusional opinion, in my quest to locate, understand, and reintegrate the soul.

If a soul is a bookkeeping mechanism that identifies who it is that is you, then it is wherever the bookkeeper is, in much the same way as social security number identifies you to the government or bank account number to bank and its meaning lies in your relationship to whatever that is keeping these books.

If the soul is in your identifiable behavior then it is emergent in your relationship with your environment - how your different aspects of personality happen to interact with whatever you are observing.

In neither case are you bound to your soul, even though in the first case there would be some enforcement of connection between the soul and you - and neither interpretation excludes the other. So one might ask, therefore, what is the difference between the soul and the spirit of man?

ii-wy em Hotep -Patrick Gaffiero