A reasoned look at the spirit.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

A reasoned look at the spirit.

I would like to ask how one would correlate the material body with the spirit and soul.
Let us just imagine that such things as soul/spirit/factor x are present, as we are looking at something seemingly on the outside working with what we know of the physical world. The idea here is that if we cannot find a way to correlate factor x with what we know, then notions like spirit don’t add up. To this end we are first to imagine that such things do exist, but then how.

presuming that we aren’t actually born, that there is no magic moment when something enters the body of an infant or foetus, how then does spirit enter the world ~ or does it not.

Perhaps you have other ideas that don’t include spirit, e.g. the Buddhist self, how though does the emptiness connect, does it simply mean that we don’t exist and hence we don’t enter nirvana and feel bliss etc, it is simply oblivion.

Somehow I feel we must find answers to these things, ones that add up!

This is an extract from something I wrote in one of the group forums.

As concerns birth, if we go beyond the individualistic, we may see life perhaps in two overt universal contexts;

metaphor; Gaia and the spark of Zeus.

With the Gaia aspect [yin] we see life as unending, we arise from mere cells [part of a former being] and become humans. If we take infinity to possess or literally be ‘life’ and thought/mind as one thing, then from the beginnings of evolution and indeed the universe, this life is the body of existence.

With the zeus aspect [yang] we see that running alongside the gaia aspect is the mind expression of infinity. This I would think of as the emptiness within all things [even mass] and mainly connected to energy on the subtle level. When an egg is fertilised [even if artificially], there is a moment when a brief jolt of electricity fuses the cells together to begin the foetal period [a child’s life]. At this point there would be little difference between the foetal mind and the universal mind, then gradually as we become more distinct [both foetal and in maturity after birth], the mind becomes increasingly distinct.

At death then, the mind simply resumes its former connection with the universal and infinite mind, due to the breakdown of differences created by each stage of our development.

On the spiritual multiverse level, we may see a mirroring of what we become on earth and its reflection in the universal mind. From our perspective we would at first feel distinct after bodily death, but after some time and as minds meld, there would be a gradual reunion with our celestial father [the nature of], culminating in blissful complete re-emergence with the infinite. Just as like history exists eternally [in a sense], so shall we as semi-distinct personalities, this ’body’ of mind may be called up as we so wish and the spiritual multiverse is its playground - so to say.

So there is no mind-body dichotomy until death, when the consciousness can no longer be supported.

We are a material soul! or the material is another kind of spirit.

2

Simple,… the human brain was designed to react to spiritual energies… Look at ghost hunters,… all they see is the side effects of ghosts. And this is because the soul is an energy independent of matter but has side effects in matter.

SO the human brain = each section was designed to react to different spiritual energies.

This is what seperates us from the animals,… not evolution.

3

So there are spiritual energies presumably universal, and the brain interacts with that. Essentially this would mean there is no soul or individuality of spirit whatsoever!

4

One of the problems with people wanting to experience a sort of unity with the mystical is the separation that occurs. As soon as you recognize the object (spiritual things) of which you attempting to experience, there is the subject (you) separated from and left out of unity. You see, the ‘you’ has to know what that something is first so that it can project that knowledge onto the object and then experience it. But what you experience through the help of the knowledge is not the actual; it is an illusion.

Here’s a question for you: Can you experience something spiritual if you have no knowledge at all about what spirit is?

Perhaps there may something like that, but the knowledge of it wouldn’t be there and the push/desire of the experiencing structure which is “you-that-wants-to-experience” would need to know it and much of what ‘you’ experiences presently is 99% in the material/physical world, that is, it is memory stored in the physical body.

5

I see you point, no, but how I see it is that we are spirit now in this body ~ the whole point is that we are not born as such, the spirit of what we are is the spirit which went before us. …so yes we can know.

‘because I am not born I am not reborn, neither do I die, I am life’

This is questionable imho, the material I see more as like a messenger to tell us what is out there in the material world. What you see is not light, what you feel is not electricity, these things bring you the info attached to them and even that info is non material.

6

… I guess it’s a matter of putting the horse befor the cart.

7

It’s true that thought and memory are something dead and can never touch the life in the body, however, if you cannot recall anything about something, material or non material, and you cannot think of it, then what is info if it is non material (in a sense that it doesn’t exist to the material receptors in the body)?

8

Well there are many ideas on this, I favour the one where all info is out there [part of infinity], so it is about what we can connect too. If say someone has a real bad accident and looses their memory, there is still something of them that is them [I.e. the part that remains after death] only you would notice it as it cannot be expressed if the body is unable to do that.

It’s a bit of a black room in infinity, you can access all of infinity + all of the black room in varying degrees. If something in life shuts you out of infinity then you are in the black room, the body and brain can do this to us in many ways, though once it is dead and can no longer host the spirit, then a door is opened in said black room.

Think perhaps of the body as a potential prison in such extreme cases.

9

the soul is of bio-energy

10

Yeah I think we have to think of the material as another form of spirit and vice versa.

otherwise there is a duality that i dont think exists in nature.

11

there is a duality in nature and it does exist

12

‘Soul’ = Conscious Perspective.
(Each unique) Perspective perceives a feature/moment/percept of the complete Universe, of which the ego-self is an inherent feature (often perceived as autonomous in the Universe).
I have no idea what a ‘spirit’ might be, other than the Casper variety. There seem to be so many ‘conceptions’ ‘out there’, that the term has become, to me, meaningless. I defined ‘Soul’ as I see it.

‘We’?

13

Here’s and idea on this one

God/supreme being/ - Omnipresent, all powerful

Therefore present in human beings and everything else in the universe

Spirit is the God (for want of a better word) within us

At death the spirit leaves and returns to the background god presense, like a drop of water returning to the ocean.

14

One idea, from what Ive read in things like abortionist debates as well as occult theories, is that when the pineal gland is activated, some sort of self consciousness is born. I tried googling it but cant find when it starts to function in a foetus. A couple of weeks after conception, I think.

It seems reasonable from what Ive read of incarnation: you step into a vehicle that is already in motion. Like jumping on a bike, and correlates with humanitys inability to take control of the momentum of its life before understanding of the prenatal decisions the soul has made when faced with the prospect of life.

I dont know if the pineal gland, after Decartes’ attribuition of the soul to it and subsequent disproof of most of his stabs at natural science, should be pushed aside as an antiquated idea. There are also drug related evidence for putting the gland in medical context with hallucinations of a soul_changing weight. Maybe it was the pineal gland that spoke the famous self-definition.

15

My theory on that, so far, is that there is not only a soul or a spirit, but something else.
Life begins at a sub-molecular level, then grows upwards from that point.
The aliveness of the quanta can exceed the lifespan of the physical body, maybe.
The soul is a shell of the physical body at a finer deeper level of physical structure.

Without structure no compounds can exist.
A soul is simply a structure made of tiny particles and fabrics.

I dont know what percent of our mind and strength remains in this level of our body, if it does or can live on after physical death. If any at all remains, that could be called the “immortal” part of our structure, but it can probably die later.

16

thanks for replies everyone.

Interesting. Maybe all our qualia can outlive their physical representations.

At the moment I am seeing the physical side of things as messengers, there to service us [we are borg lols]. This kinda turns the whole thing on its head, so that the soul/spirit or just ‘you’ is there regardless of the physical universe, which responds to you becoming. To make this idea simple I imagine it in a child-like sense, that we desire to come into being and the universe responds to that. In a sense the whole universe is there to such ends [if we add gods &/or infinity/eternity.

a universal communicative layer betwixt all things is crucial i believe.