Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Do you have a soul? What is a soul?
If you have one, is it mortal or immortal?

This is one of those questions that is probably impossible to answer with facts, but why do you believe what you believe?

All the world's religions deal with the disposition of the soul. Where do you go when you die and how do you get there?

i was in social movements last semester when the teacher was shocked that i had told her that i wasn't sure if i had a soul...she said "everybody beleives they have a soul" it shocked me, it was the first not so bright thing she said all semester....anyways, i'm not so sure i have a soul...there is no proof that i have a soul, i can't see it, i'm actually a very scientific person considering i suck at science and math...the thing is the concept of a soul comes from a lot of places, Plato talked about a soul...but the greeks also thought there was only public good and no private good, they also beleived that there was only one right and one wrong way to acheive...so in that case some people got souls that weren't as good as other peoples souls.

then theres religion, which i don't buy at all, and so i've also written off the idea of a soul...but i don't really know...but who does?

I don't know if I believe it either, k&d, but it makes more sense than some of the alternatives.
I've never seen a person resurrected from the dead. Or a bird or a dog or a lizard. All the empirical evidence tells me that when you are dead, you are dead.

Perhaps when we humans witness death, the finality and the certainty of it is so terrifying that we have to invent myths like the soul. We can't stand the terminal inevitability of it, so we invent fantasies

On the other hand, look at your hand. What is it? Meat and bone. If you take a piece of steak out of the freezer and leave it on the counter for a couple of days, it will start to rot. It's meat and bone. Why doesn't your hand rot? Because it is animated by something we call LIFE. It needs no refrigeration.

I'm tempted to assert that 'the soul' and 'life' are the same thing. I would probably get in trouble with Noam Chomsky if I did that. It becomes a matter of semantics.

I don't know if it's the result of hopeless indoctrination, but something inside me tells me that my life and awareness aren't limited by the bounds of physical death. I believe this because.....because....because it amuses me to believe it. When the animating force leaves the meat, does it just go away....phpttt...isn't it a natural law that energy is not created or destroyed, it merely changes forms?

Believe me
If I knew the answer
I would tell you

The only soul I"m sure about sounds like
James Brown

When the animating force leaves the meat,

Dam clay what do you mean by that. Sounds like some kind of mumbo jumbo to me...


Sounds like the phlogiston theory.

I know if I do have a soul it is black as coal.

I kind of like the idea that when I die I will have a part of me that will hang around until the last bit of flesh rots, the last maggott wiggles on home, and my bones turn to dust. Then I will fly away home.

I been editing this hope we don't cross wires here before you might get back to me

leave your dna behind..............

dna to daisies
and one child left to carry on

Clay I been debating whether I should have used an emoticon with that mumbo jumbo remark. Just a hip shot. If James Brown got soul I know I must too. Wireman says leave my DNA behind, and I am sure he is right about that. Souls ain't in the DNA I don't think. It is the empty spaces between the atoms. Because we all know nature abhors a vacuum.

Animating force

I like that a lot. Everything is mumbo jumbo to me these days. I could not make it with out my mojo working and a little mumbo jumbo. mumbo jimbo too.

phlogiston theory , hypothesis regarding combustion. The theory, advanced by J. J. Becher late in the 17th cent. and extended and popularized by G. E. Stahl, postulates that in all flammable materials there is present phlogiston, a substance without color, odor, taste, or weight that is given off in burning. “Phlogisticated” substances are those that contain phlogiston and, on being burned, are “dephlogisticated.” The ash of the burned material is held to be the true material. The theory received strong and wide support throughout a large part of the 18th cent. until it was refuted by the work of A. L. Lavoisier, who revealed the true nature of combustion. Joseph Priestley, however, defended the theory throughout his lifetime. Henry Cavendish remained doubtful, but most other chemists of the period, including C. L. Berthollet, rejected it.

Animating force, the dark energy of the universe? Science going to give us the answers one day. Our priests in white lab coats. How many quarks can dance on the head of needle?

I keep trying to remember what I was before I was born but I get no information. I suspect that for me, after death, the situation will be the same as prior to my coming in to this world. A lot of nothing. I certainly hope so. I've got no soul - can't dance either.

I like that bit about the vacumm, the spaces in between the atoms is the real matter, in fact the atoms themselves are just empty spaced curled upon itself, the rest space is the soul; anyway, it is clear to me that there is a soul, the way we see it just depends upon the level we look at as well as the level from which we look. At one 'level', call it anything really, the soul is the empty space dancing back on top of itself, then the particle, at another level it is the meat, at another level it is the base awarness of existance, then further on self awarness, then an awarness of the unitiy of all things and so on, a never ending gradation of nuances all defining the same thing. What happens to the body after death at one level seems to be decay, ends up being just another transition at another. Who knows really, but I like the old movie theatre or dream sequence metaphore, when we die we snap back into a different reality that is seemingly more familiar than this one, and we laugh about how serious we got about this one, and so on...as for the Christian idea of soul, that too exists out there somewhere, but we've transended that, the soul judgement idea, we've moved on from there. The Buddha, the Christ, the Keano Reeves of the Matrix, is the guy who realizes that the movie is actually an interactive game and we can guide it if we excersize effort. That is when things get fun, but it takes learning about the self to know what means we have at our disposal to control it.

I suppose their are others here who know death as up close and personal as jimboloco. I posted something about a bad mushroom omeleted I ate. As I lay there chilled to the bone with the snake goddess dancing behind my eye lids, I wondered if I should call 911 to come and pump my stomach out. I decided that it would be tt -ing. I decided to save my dignity and just let my liver rot from the inside out. And I just wanted death to bring it on. My imagination for death is pretty vivid, I tell jimboloco blessed are those who have not seen yet believe. So I layed there waiting to die, and then the thought struck me that I would lay there and rot fully conscious until the stink drew the neighbors, then a ride in a hearse (jimboloco flew a hearse in south east asia during the war games) then a plain wood box and darkness and still I was there. There until every last bit of me was transformed to into other forms. Both animate and inanimate. Maggots, daises, earth whatever then came the worst part of my nightmare, I dreamt my soul rose up to heaven and there St Peter wanted to know my social security number or I could not get in. And I had left my wallet behind.

sorry for the ramble, I jimboloco says that laying around waiting to decompose ti a Tibetan kind of thing.
additional comments added 08/29/05
Some scientists speculate that some part of consciousness may linger in the limbic nervous system.

edited 082905

THE LIMBIC SYSTEM AND THE SOUL
From: Zygon, the Journal of Religon and Science (in press, March, 2001)
by R. Joseph, Ph.D.


THE LIMBIC SYSTEM AND THE SOUL
Evolution and the Neuroanatomy of Religious Experience1
Can a lizard comprehend a man?
Can a man comprehend a God?
Who dares speak for God?
Perhaps...
Even the gods have gods.

A belief in the transmigration of the soul, of an afterlife, of a world beyond the grave, may well have been a human characteristic for at least 100,000 years (Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 1992; Butzer 1982; McCown 1937; Rightmire 1984; Schwarcz et al. 1988; Smirnov 1989; Trinkaus 1986). Despite their primitive cognitive capabilities, even "archaic" human beings who wondered the planet over 120,000 years ago carefully buried their dead (Butzer 1982; Rightmire 1984); and like modern H. sapiens sapiens, they prepared the recently departed for the journey to the Great Beyond: across the sea of dreams, to the land of the dead, the realm of the ancestors and the gods.


Indeed, it could be argued that the essence of "God," and of our living soul, may be slumbering within the depths of the ancient limbic lobe which is buried within the belly of the brain. And not just the soul or the Great Spirit of the Lord God, for in the Upanishads and Tao it is said, and as Buddha, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Jesus (St. Luke 17: 21), the Sufis, and many Sumerian, Babylonian, Jewish, Arabic, Aryan, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Indian, Muslim, and Gnostic mystics have proclaimed, "The kingdom of God is within you."

Not sure about this guy Joseph, he maybe a charlatan. But he is interesting. I can’t find the link anymore.