What is the soul? The soul is the sum total, of all you are.
The physical body is formed from the dust (Genesis 2:7) and will return to the dust at death (Genesis 3:19). It is the shell in which our soul resides. It is subject to decay.
Where is your soul located in your body?
The Ancient Egyptians believed the soul was in the heart. All organs were cut out of the body except the heart when the person died.
The Babalonians believed the soul was found in the liver.
The concept that the ventricles of the brain are responsible for its major functions derives from Greek antiquity. The soul resides in the head, but since the soul is incorporeal its locus is in the cavities (i.e. fluid-filled ventricles) rather than in the surrounding brain tissue. Some Greek scientists, most notably Aristotle, argued that the heart and not the head is the seat of sensation and cognitive functions; one loses consciousness upon excessive bleeding, and many emotions are experienced viscerally (e.g. one has a “gut feeling” or an emotional “heart-ache”). However the majority of philosophers and scientists assigned mental functions to the brain. By Leonardo’s time, the ventricular theories had become entrenched in philosophy. The brain was thought to contain an anterior ventricle (typically thought to contain the senso comune, and also phantasy and imagination); a second ventricle that mediated cognition; and a posterior ventricle that serves memory
In Buddhism the soul is thought to not exist, except as an illusion.
Mormons believe That your souls is a carbon copy of you
It is akin to the skin underneath a glove…
It is not detectable for it is made out of matter that we
can not yet measure (Where we to be able to measure it
“Faith” would not be a key element of believe)
obviously It has some physical characteristic to it, we just can’t measure it Much like once we could not see an atom…
In the popular book The Seat of the Soul, Gary Zukav encourages us to think of the body seated in a soul rather than a soul within a body. Gary states that each soul comes to the Earth with gifts. A soul incarnates to heal and to balance its energy, and to pay its karmic debts. But it also incarnates to complete the tasks of a contract which when complete will enrich the soul. Each soul takes upon itself to complete particular tasks in a contract
with the Universe. All the experiences of your life serve to awaken within you the memory of that contract, and to prepare you to fulfill it. Gary says the seat of your soul is the source of your creativity and authentic power. He also refers to it as the source of ego energy
I never really gave this question thought until now. I guess I believed that your soul laid in your heart. But then I thought “wait I am an organ donor! What if my heart is given to another person? What happens to my soul?”
The soul seems to reside in the judgment, and the judgment would seem to be seated in that part where all the senses meet; and this is called the Common Sense and it is not all-pervading throughout the body, as many have thought. Rather is it entirely in one part. Because, if it were all-pervading and the same in every part, there would have been no need to make the instruments of the senses meet in one centre and in one single spot; on the contrary it would have sufficed that the eye should fulfil the function of its sensation on its surface only, and not transmit the image of the things seen, to the sense, by means of the optic nerves, so that the soul-for the reason given above-may perceive it in the surface of the eye. In the same way as to the sense of hearing, it would have sufficed if the voice had merely sounded in the porous cavity of the indurated portion of the temporal bone which lies within the ear, without making any farther transit from this bone to the common sense, where the voice confers with and discourses to the common judgment. The sense of smell, again, is compelled by necessity to refer itself to that same judgment. Feeling passes through the perforated cords and is conveyed to this common sense. These cords diverge with infinite ramifications into the skin which encloses the members of the body and the viscera. The perforated cords convey volition and sensation to the subordinate limbs. These cords and the nerves direct the motions of the muscles and sinews, between which they are placed; these obey, and this obedience takes effect by reducing their thickness; for in swelling, their length is reduced, and the nerves shrink which are interwoven among the particles of the limbs; being extended to the tips of the fingers, they transmit to the sense the object which they touch. The nerves with their muscles obey the tendons as soldiers obey the officers, and the tendons obey the Common Sense as the officers obey the general. Thus the joint of the bones obeys the nerve, and the nerve the muscle, and the muscle the tendon and the tendon the Common Sense. And the Common Sense is the seat of the soul, and memory is its ammunition, and the impressibility [imprensiva] is its referendary since the sense waits on the soul and not the soul on the sense. And where the sense that ministers to the soul is not at the service of the soul, all the functions of that sense are also wanting in that man’s life, as is seen in those born mute and blind.
To complete your list, there are some new-age authors who claim that the soul is in the blood, which the use to claim that it is better to be buried than to be burned, because the soul suffers.
Personally, I think the soul is not in the body at all. How can it, the body dies and the soul does not!
Rudolf Steiner and many other “more reasonable” new age authors (reasonable in the sense that they are closer to my philosophy ), as well as certain hindu philosophies, think that there are different “bodies”: The material body (which we know), the “astral-body” and one more, but I don’t know the english translations of the german terms I know - and the soul.
Anyway, the point is, that there are influences from one body to the other and to the soul. When we get ill, then the reason is not a physical problem but a mental or spiritual problem. Something is not right with the way we think or behave.
The problem is immediately visible in the non-material bodies and after time, if we don’t change the way how we think, becomes imminent in our material body - we get sick.
I dunno about the soul…but my sense of “self” moves around…
When I’m conscious and working, it seems to hover right in front of my eyes…
When I close my eyes, it seems to hover right behind them…
In deeper meditation, it sometimes seems to move outside my head entirely, just behind and above the back of my head.
As for my moral sense – the knowledge of right and wrong – it seems to get me right above the stomach… That’s the part that hurts the worst when I do something wrong…
What about the people that claimed to have died on the operating table and they felt themselves floating above their bodies? I don’t know if that was their soul.
If your soul was in your blood then it would be the mortician that killed you since that is who drains the blood from the body.
If the soul was in the blood then the body would never die of its own accord, it would always be considered “murdered”
What about those who are cryogenically frozen? If the soul was in the blood then what would happen if science did find a way to reanimate these bodies? Would the body have no soul? (Afterall the blood would have been drained before the body was frozen)
Is it disrespectful of me to interject that this may mean that your body is your soul? Everything “you are” is contained in your body. It may be that different parts of “what you are” are contained in different parts of your body. It may also be that everything except the matter of your body ceases to exist when you die.
I guess I’m asking what about your definition of “soul” necessitates anything eternal?
I was always taught that when a person dies their soul goes to heaven.
The spirit (soul) was created by God, made in His image, and is housed in a body while living in this world that is either male or female in gender (Genesis 1:27).
This scripture says that the soul is “housed in a body” which IMHO that means that it cannot be the sum of the body.
Once, when I was a new nurse, I was taking care of a brain-dead young man, getting his body ready to donate his organs. I made adjustments on the ventilator, titrated the various IV drips, monitored his urine output and his heart rhythm, etc. His body was perfectly healthy, not a scratch on him, but he was dead as a stone.
A candystriper asked me, “When does the soul leave the body? Has his soul left yet?”
All I could say was, “I don’t know. You can’t test for the presence of a soul.”
I read the book STIFF last weekend and it was intersting. It was all about human cadaevers and organ donating, etc…
This one guy wanted to prove that the soul existed so he weighed 5 near-death people and then just a minute or so after their death weighed them again. Apparently they weighed an once less then when they were alive.
He then went on to do the same procedure to a group of dogs. Only when he weighed the dogs after death there was no change which to the guy running the scientific test, he felt certain that that was proof that animals don’t have souls.
I am looking into this theory. I think there is medical proof of why the bodies weighed less at death. My theory is it has to do with body heat, blood and circulation. I don’t think a soul can be measured in weight.
My soul is on my CD shelf, between Jazz and New Age. That’s the only non-mythical soul I know of.
Isabelle we have progressed quite a bit beyond your references. If your “soul” is your personality, your morality, we know that it can be influenced by chemistry. I’m with pervert (that’s not a line I ever thought I’d write ). If you insist on us having a soul, it is our body, since the rest of our body influences our brain, and the combination of electrical impulses, synapses, memories and general wiring of our brain makes us who we are. There is no confirmed evidence to indicate anything but that when our brain is dead, so is our soul.
I probably shouldn’t be posting here at all, since I disagreed with your first two sentences, am thoroughly unspiritual and unmystical, etc.
Last I checked, I was made of, you know, atoms and stuff.
Nonetheless, I’ll pipe up because nobody else has mentioned it yet: the thing that most makes you what you are is your BRAIN. Brains have gotten sucky treatment throughout the years. For whatever reason, people insist that your essence or whatever is found in a lump of muscle in your chest. Don’t ask me why. It’s all about the brain; it’s the higher brain that separates us from most of the animal kingdom, and rest of the brain keeps us alive. And in return, we give each other paper hearts on Valentine’s Day. Nowadays, when we’ve learned how amazing and complex the brain is, most of us prefer to think it’s some invisible floaty thing because the organ in your skull is too pedestrian. Talk about a thankless job.
I’m uncertain how to distinguish between the “self,” the spirit and the soul. But sometimes when I have been in a state of meditation, I have had the definite sensation of extending beyond my skin.
Philosophically, and based only on purely personal perceptions that I have had, I think that separate selves is an illusion. I am aware of the anecdotal experiences of others who have had similar observations. But then that makes “others” a paradox, doesn’t it?
I understand this, I think. What I am asking is how does this imply the imortality of the “soul”. The heart can be described as “housed in the body”. But we don’t consider it seperate. And what is it about an “Image of God” that implies imortality? Are not all of the works of nature in some way an “Image” of some aspect of him? We don’t argue that a tree must be imortal.
Why is it that our works, the things we create, are not enough immortality for us?
Voyager, remember that a perversion of something evil is not necessarily a vice
Marley23 If I may pick a nit, I think the part which makes you what you are is your MIND. What is the difference between a mind and a brain? But I’m willing to start using brain shaped cards during V-Day:D
Well, no, that would be how you learned about it. Not what it is. What I am asking is: what about your conception of soul necessitates imortality? Perhaps I am asking for a more detailed definition of the word soul. I’m not really sure, because I have never been able to get my mind around the “super natural” part of what most people mean when they talk about souls.
If we go back to your original definition, “The soul is the sum total, of all you are.” I think that what you really mean is that the soul is that part of “the sum of what you are” which survives death. Which inevitably leads me to the question what exactly is this? What other characteristics does it have besides imortality? How do you avoid the conclusion that the soul is simply a description of what we would like death to look like?
), as well as certain hindu philosophies, think that there are different “bodies”: The material body (which we know), the “astral-body” and one more, but I don’t know the english translations of the german terms I know - and the soul.