In this article we want to talk about the most mysterious and little-studied Supreme Mind – the Soul.
No one knows exactly what it is and what it looks like, but most people are convinced that the Soul exists.
The notion of Soul in our space refers to an independent meaning: ” it exists and all”, “exists and okay”. In dictionaries, the concept of Soul is treated in thousands of meanings, and if you combine them all, you get complete abstraction, confusion, chaos.
Before outlining our concept of knowledge about the Soul, we decided to review the current informational space in order to give you a general understanding of how modern science, religion, philosophy, and the various current teachings illuminate this issue.
What is the Soul, and where does it come from?
According to modern notions, the concept of the Soul goes back to animistic notions of a special force existing in the body of man and animal and sometimes plant. Early ideas about the Soul were closely merged with the belief in spirits.
Since ancient times, man has wondered about the distinction between the living and the non-living. In the course of the development of mythological thinking, the concept of the Soul as some attribute of a living being was formed. Observation of the breath of the living, which after his death disappeared, contributed to the emergence of the ancient notions of the Soul as a breath originating from the outside.
In Greek philosophy, the Soul was understood as a kind of substance. It was first attributed to the property of the ethereal matter in the blood.
According to Plato, the Soul is immortal, immaterial and precedes existence in a physical body. Before birth the soul contemplates ideas in the immaterial world, and after being embodied in the body it “forgets” them. Hence Plato’s conclusion that all knowledge is only the memory of forgotten ideas, which the Soul has learned before birth.
According to Pythagoras, the Soul possesses the memory of previous incarnations; he identified the Soul with the psychic “I”.
The disembodied status of the Soul was first substantiated in philosophy by Aristotle.
In European culture there is an idea about immortal and disembodied Soul, which is organically connected with religious understanding of immortality.
Religious, or rather Christian philosophy, connects the phenomenon of the Soul with God the Creator of the world, who endows each person with an immortal Soul.
The Orthodox Church has no dogmatic judgment on this subject; there are simply the opinions of various Christian authorities. None of them had a unified view of the Soul’s place in the composition of human beings.
There was an opinion that man is a union of the Soul and the body, and it is this union, not only the Soul, that constitutes the essence of man.
The inseparability and uniqueness of the connection of a particular Soul with a particular human body was emphasized.
The classical Christian doctrine of the Soul was formed in the works of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine. According to their theory, the Soul is primarily Mind, it is immaterial and resides in all parts of the body, animating it, and the body is the instrument of the Soul.
The soul in the Arab-Muslim interpretation was often identified with the spirit. According to the Qur’an, God breathed the Soul into the first man Adam. Adam’s descendants receive it in the womb through the intermediary of a special angel. Separated from the body after death, the Soul will be reunited with it on Judgment Day.
According to the version of Kabbalah, the Soul is a spiritual organ that gradually originates in a human being in our world. The birth of the Soul means the sequential development of sensation caused by the influence of spiritual forces, the emergence of new altruistic desires, and the emergence of a minimal perception of the Creator. Thus, along with the physical body living according to the laws of physiology, a spiritual body appears in man, existing in the spiritual world. Just as without knowledge of the laws of nature and society, we would not be able to exist physically in this world, so our Soul, our spiritual body will not be able to stay in the spiritual world without familiarity with its nature. The opposite is also true: a person who has no spiritual knowledge will never acquire a Soul, because he will immediately harm it.
In Buddhism, the concept of the Soul was viewed depending on which theory of the spiritual world one or another adept adhered to and what he preaches in the spiritual realm. Depending on this, the concept of Soul was interpreted from different points of view:
– According to the Mentor who believes in eternity, the Soul is eternal; it also exists after death.
– The materialist Mentor would be convinced that the Soul is temporary and ceases to exist after one’s death.
– The preceptor, Guru Buddha, denied the existence of both a permanent and a temporary spirit.
In Vedic philosophy, the Soul is associated with the personality of man. In Sanskrit, the Soul is jiva. The root “jiv” means “to be,” “to remain alive. The soul is described in the Bhagavad Gita as follows: “The soul is neither born, nor does it ever die; nor having once existed, does it ever cease to be. The soul is without birth, eternal, immortal, and ageless. It is not destroyed when the body is destroyed.” (BG 2.20)
According to Vedic philosophy, the eternal Souls, coming from the spiritual world to the material world, put on the shell of the material body and under the influence of the illusion (maya) begin to identify themselves with the material body. The Vedas state that as a result of false self-identification with the body, the Soul is compelled to suffer. Since the physical body is subject to disease, aging, and death, identification with it brings suffering to the eternal soul in the material world.
The soul is described as immortal, that is, having no beginning or end. Thus, it is not created by God. According to the Vedas, it is a particle of God.
In the philosophy of the 17th-18th century the concept of the Soul was interpreted differently. In the philosophy of René Descartes, the Soul was identified with the mind, the thinking Soul, according to his version, constitutes the essence of man, imagination, and feelings. The problem of interaction between the Soul and the body became one of the central problems in the philosophy of this time.
The problems of the Soul were widely discussed in Russian psychology at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries (D. S. Anichkov, A. N. Radishchev, A. I. Galich, A. P. Kolyvanov). Aspects of the Soul were considered as a manifestation of the universal cosmic force.
The question of the existence of the Soul has tormented more than one generation of scientists. After all, the scientific approach to life did not eliminate the belief in God for many of them, except that it required not a blind worship, but the search for evidence.
All world religions are certain that every person has a soul, but no one has ever managed to touch it, if not with hands, then at least with devices.
Scientists had different approaches to the study of the essence of the Soul.
One of Russian scientists, Professor Konstantin Korotkov, in St. Petersburg filmed the aura of the dying people and proved that the luminescence continued even after death, gradually disappearing. It was as if the body turned into an inanimate object. And the aura was spreading out into space. Which proved that the energy shell lives longer than the body.
Another Russian, Professor Pavel Goskov from Barnaul, several years ago managed to prove that everyone has a Soul, which is unique, like fingerprints.
In 2013, American and Japanese scientists announced that after 27 years of research they finally managed to unlock the mystery of the Soul. With the help of special devices, they were not only able to record the exit of the Soul from the body, but also determined the matter of which it consists. It turned out that the human Soul is a clump of proton-neutron structure, which completely repeats the structure of the human body.
American anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona Stuart Hameroff concluded that the Soul is in fact immortal and is a quantum accumulation of the products of the vital activity of the brain, and stored in neurons.
In modern psychology of the 21st century, the Soul is a psychic system that performs a number of certain functions and generally determines the essence of each person, his individuality, character, spiritual and moral essence, his “I” – including the meaning of his life. According to this concept, the fundamental, general MEANING of any Soul is LIFE itself – with all its joys and disappointments, successes and hardships, goals and their complete absence (in all spheres of human activity), starting from conception, birth and ending with death.
In the esoteric concept at present time, one of the most fundamental and serious studies about the Soul is the information provided by Sal Rachele. It covers a variety of issues related to the evolution of the Soul. Sal Rachele is an American mystic, channeler, and healer.
According to his information, the Soul is a tiny spark of Divine Light. He first described the downward fragmentation of the Soul from higher densities to lower densities.
According to his information, the Soul’s journey begins with an immersion into the lower worlds and a slow awakening to its higher nature. The Soul went to the periphery of Creation, to explore the manifested realms where anything is possible.
One manifestation of the Soul’s power is the ability to Co-Create, to experiment in a vast range of different energies and experiences, from ecstasy to horror. Unlike the static, unchanging deity represented in various religions, according to Sal Rachele, God grows and evolves by sending aspects of himself in the form of the Soul, expressing himself through the human individual and other, multiple life forms.
Definition of Soul in the Great Russian Encyclopedia:
Soul is a fundamental concept, represented in different cultures, religions, philosophical teachings, a wide range of meanings: as a universal life force, vital force present in every living being, as an immaterial immortal substance, giving integrity and continuity to individual existence, as the substance of all conscious and unconscious mental processes, the ability to sense, think, be conscious, have feelings and the will, a property of character, the basic personality traits, usually opposed to the body.
Our research on existing concepts and knowledge about the Soul is not a research paper in this field. The purpose and goal of this article is to demonstrate the diversity of existing viewpoints on the concept of the Soul. Undoubtedly, there are other philosophical interpretations that we have not mentioned in this article.
So, summing up all of the above, we see that the concept of the Soul is represented differently in different conceptions:
– In religious and idealistic perceptions it is viewed as an immaterial life principle, a non-physical being that remains after the death of the human body.
– In psychological terminology, it refers to the totality of psychic phenomena, experiences, the foundation of a person’s mental life, their inner world.
– In esoteric concepts, it is described as a tiny spark of divine light that travels through space, incarnating in different spheres, dimensions, and worlds. Endowed with free will, it chooses from infinite possibilities the lessons it wants to learn.
The concept of knowledge about the Soul, which we want to cover in our next article, does not claim to be the ultimate truth, but it is quite possible that it will complement and form a more comprehensive picture of such a concept as the Soul.
To be continued…
Article by Sofoos (translated by Marianna JJ)