Fragments of the Soul

Most religious views consist of the idea that people have a "soul," and when people die, and this soul lives on in some shape or form.

I'm curious to know how you perceive this soul in relation to how it's thoughts mirrors the inner workings of your mind right now?

I always liked the Norse Pagan idea of the soul (or in this case, several souls), as it recognizes that people's experiences are intrinsically formed of many parts, and not within the illusion that the ego presents as one, consistent, coherent experience. Many parts of our minds have different functions and behave in different ways.

Will our subconscious also exist within the confines of our soul? Will it exist much like it does now, and work independently of our active thoughts? What about instinct? Will instinctual drives exist, and if they do, will they work in tandem with our active thoughts? A lot of these things may become useless in the spirit realm (such as hunger and the drive to eat or the unconscious activity of blinking), but many of these things also shape us as people (such as emotional responses to things that happen).

What are your thoughts on the matter?

I'm too drained to really write much, but this is a helpful start on the Kemetic idea/s,

The Ancient Egyptian Soul | Ancient Egypt Online

Rival said:

I'm too drained to really write much, but this is a helpful start on the Kemetic idea/s,

The Ancient Egyptian Soul | Ancient Egypt Online

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Very interesting concepts, and they remind me a lot of Norse Pagan ideas on the way souls work. Ba kind of reminds me of the hamingja, though the hamingja can be given to others, and exists within a given family for many generations.

The Self and Its Parts - Norse Mythology for Smart People

SigurdReginson said:

Most religious views consist of the idea that people have a "soul," and when people die, and this soul lives on in some shape or form.

I'm curious to know how you perceive this soul in relation to how it's thoughts mirrors the inner workings of your mind right now?

I always liked the Norse Pagan idea of the soul (or in this case, several souls), as it recognizes that people's experiences are intrinsically formed of many parts, and not within the illusion that the ego presents as one, consistent, coherent experience. Many parts of our minds have different functions and behave in different ways.

Will our subconscious also exist within the confines of our soul? Will it exist much like it does now, and work independently of our active thoughts? What about instinct? Will instinctual drives exist, and if they do, will they work in tandem with our active thoughts? A lot of these things may become useless in the spirit realm (such as hunger and the drive to eat or the unconscious activity of blinking), but many of these things also shape us as people (such as emotional responses to things that happen).

What are your thoughts on the matter?

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That sounds complicated, to be honest. I realized couple months ago from an experience and upbringing in nature I'm a strict animist. How I personally see it is each living are unique on its own and has its own "personality."

Inanimate objects I believe the soul of a person who owned said objects leave their impressions. Everything is made from the earth so in that sense all have souls.

I don't think of it too much unless I'm on the trails or paying respect to deceased loved ones.

Not a soul that goes anywhere. I find that strange. Though what I said may be just as such.

SigurdReginson said:

I always liked the Norse Pagan idea of the soul (or in this case, several souls), as it recognizes that people's experiences are intrinsically formed of many parts, and not within the illusion that the ego presents as one, consistent, coherent experience. Many parts of our minds have different functions and behave in different ways.

Click to expand...

An intriguing way of looking at it.

In my religious tradition, we tend to regard the soul as the form of the living body.

A being or living thing's 'soul' is, therefore, conceived of in terms of its vital functions like perception and movement, arising from consciousness or self-awareness; which makes a human being not just alive but also a free agent with a bundle of their own subjective experiences in the form of sensations, phantasmata, emotions, cognitions and volitions ("qualia").

Most of the early church fathers believed that, in the human case, this 'bundle' was subsumed within an incorporeal essence bequeathed directly by God some time after conception that made it a spiritual soul: one both immortal and capable of being divisible from the human body in death (this became the orthodox position of the Catholic Church). A minority position, represented by Tertullian in the third century, was that the soul should be understood as "material", albeit made up of a very rarefied and subtle form of matter that is imperceptible to the senses and invisible to us.

For the mainstream orthodox Catholic position typified by Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the shifting 'parts' of this seemingly consistent (and subsistent) conscious experience - equated with the most essential essence and first principle of life - were broken down into three primary powers: the memory, the will and the intellect, and a huge number of additional 'faculties'.

Behind these powers and all the "faculties" of the soul - which included the understanding, thoughts, emotions and imagination or phantasms etc. - however, lay the soul itself in its pure, bare "essential being".

This was understood to be the locus of spiritual / mystical experience i.e.





The true nature of the soul was described by the early desert fathers of the fourth century - in figurative language - as inherently "luminous" like sapphire when freed of incoming defilements (that is attachment to sense-impressions and mental images).

In the medieval mystical tradition of the Catholic Church, this concept of the "sapphire light of the dispassionate soul" was developed further by our monks, friars and mystics into the idea that the soul was innately a dual phenomenon: with a lower seat rooted in the imagination and emotions, and the intellect; while above this (or below it, if you like) was the "apex", "ground" and "essence" of the soul (in Latin synderesis - a functional intuitive capacity - or the core of the person and the transcendental self), wherein contemplative prayer takes place, and union with God.

At this 'level of consciousness', the multiplicity of experiences is thought to fold into one coherent and numinous experience. At the end of his Book of Spiritual Instruction Abbot Louis de Blois, O.S.B., (1506 – 1566), a Flemish monk and mystical writer, sets forth at some length the doctrine of the Catholic mystics on this hidden essence of the soul/mind:





St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic theologians also believed that all growing things and sensory beings possessed some kind of soul, but that only the souls of human beings were possessed of an intellective life, in addition to these other functions. He thus classified souls into three broad categories:



So according to this schema, humans have a soul that is at once nutritive, sensitive and intellective.

As you can probably tell, the medieval theology of the soul was rather complicated

Unveiled Artist said:

That sounds complicated, to be honest. I realized couple months ago from an experience and upbringing in nature I'm a strict animist. How I personally see it is each living are unique on its own and has its own "personality."

Inanimate objects I believe the soul of a person who owned said objects leave their impressions. Everything is made from the earth so in that sense all have souls.

I don't think of it too much unless I'm on the trails or paying respect to deceased loved ones.

Not a soul that goes anywhere. I find that strange. Though what I said may be just as such.

Click to expand...

That's an incredibly interesting perspective! Do you feel that a soul is an echo, is it a thinking person, or can it be both? Is the impression left behind anything more than an echo, and can it become something unique and grow from there?

Vouthon said:

An intriguing way of looking at it.

In my religious tradition, we tend to regard the soul as the form of the living body.

A being or living thing's 'soul' is, therefore, conceived of in terms of its vital functions like perception and movement, arising from consciousness or self-awareness; which makes a human being not just alive but also a free agent with a bundle of their own subjective experiences in the form of sensations, phantasmata, emotions, cognitions and volitions ("qualia").

Most of the early church fathers believed that, in the human case, this 'bundle' was subsumed within an incorporeal essence bequeathed directly by God some time after conception that made it a spiritual soul: one both immortal and capable of being divisible from the human body in death (this became the orthodox position of the Catholic Church). A minority position, represented by Tertullian in the third century, was that the soul should be understood as "material", albeit made up of a very rarefied and subtle form of matter that is imperceptible to the senses and invisible to us.

For the mainstream orthodox Catholic position typified by Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the shifting 'parts' of this seemingly consistent (and subsistent) conscious experience - equated with the most essential essence and first principle of life - were broken down into three primary powers: the memory, the will and the intellect, and a huge number of additional 'faculties'.

Behind these powers and all the "faculties" of the soul - which included the understanding, thoughts, emotions and imagination or phantasms etc. - however, lay the soul itself in its pure, bare "essential being".

This was understood to be the locus of spiritual / mystical experience i.e.

"....The natural, normal, mode of operation of the mind during its present state of union with the body, is by sense impressions, images, concepts, 'intelligible species', reasoning; when it operates in another mode, without these means it is acting mystically. Fr Browne says:​

In theory it is necessary, unless we want to be lost in hopeless confusion, to state firmly that, as soon as one ceases to use discourse of the faculties of the soul, so soon one's prayer begins to be passive and one is really entering on the mystic road' (op, cit. p. 138). This seems to afford a true and easily applicable discriminant delimiting the frontier between mystical and non-mystical prayer...."

(Dom Cuthbert Butler OSB, Western Mysticism (published 1922))​

The true nature of the soul was described by the early desert fathers of the fourth century - in figurative language - as inherently "luminous" like sapphire when freed of incoming defilements (that is attachment to sense-impressions and mental images).

In the medieval mystical tradition of the Catholic Church, this concept of the "sapphire light of the dispassionate soul" was developed further by our monks, friars and mystics into the idea that the soul was innately a dual phenomenon: with a lower seat rooted in the imagination and emotions, and the intellect; while above this (or below it, if you like) was the "apex", "ground" and "essence" of the soul (in Latin synderesis - a functional intuitive capacity - or the core of the person and the transcendental self), wherein contemplative prayer takes place, and union with God.

At this 'level of consciousness', the multiplicity of experiences is thought to fold into one coherent and numinous experience. At the end of his Book of Spiritual Instruction Abbot Louis de Blois, O.S.B., (1506 – 1566), a Flemish monk and mystical writer, sets forth at some length the doctrine of the Catholic mystics on this hidden essence of the soul/mind:

"...Few rise above their natural powers; few ever come to know the apex of the spirit and the hidden fund or depth of the soul.

It is far more inward and sublime than are the three higher faculties, for it is their origin. It is wholly simple, essential, and uniform, and so there is not multiplicity in it, but unity, and in it the three higher faculties are one thing.

Here is perfect tranquillity, deepest silence, because never can any image enter here. By this depth, in which the divine image lies hidden, we are deiform. This same depth is called the heaven of the spirit, for the Kingdom of God is in it, as the Lord said:​

'The Kingdom of God is within you'..."​

St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic theologians also believed that all growing things and sensory beings possessed some kind of soul, but that only the souls of human beings were possessed of an intellective life, in addition to these other functions. He thus classified souls into three broad categories:

Kind of Soul Characterized By

Nutritive/Vegetative Souls (in plants) = Life

Sensitive Souls (in animals) = Sensation

Rational Souls (in humans) = Intellect (Reason)
​

So according to this schema, humans have a soul that is at once nutritive, sensitive and intellective.

As you can probably tell, the medieval theology of the soul was rather complicated

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How interesting... It's a far cry from what I understood as the concept of the soul in my Christian walk. Honestly, I never thought of it that deeply then. I figured it'd pretty much be similar to the life I live now, but how could that be when considering how complicated the mind is, and how much it relies on biological function to behave the way it does right now? I believed we would be given a spiritual body, but would that body interact with the mind in the same way our body works now? Would my spiritual body blink, hunger, feel adrenaline, or any other biological function it engages in now?

SigurdReginson said:

How interesting... It's a far cry from what I understood as the concept of the soul in my Christian walk. Honestly, I never thought of it that deeply then. I figured it'd pretty much be similar to the life I live now, but how could that be when considering how complicated the mind is, and how much it relies on biological function to behave the way it does right now? I believed we would be given a spiritual body, but would that body interact with the mind in the same way our body works now? Would my spiritual body blink, hunger, feel adrenaline, or any other biological function it engages in now?

Click to expand...

Interesting....

If I may ask, were you a Protestant or Catholic in your former Christian life? While superficially the same in many respects, given both of our denominational families are Nicene Trinitarian, there are many important differences (especially in the depth of the theology, given that we're not a sola scriptura faith but a living tradition that develops).

The presentation I've given above is doctrinal and normative in Catholic theology (based on Patristic, scholastic and mystical literature) but likely wouldn't be subscribed to by most Protestant denominations, maybe with the exception of some Anglicans and Lutherans of a more traditionalist persuasion.

In terms of the human rational soul post-mortem, Catholics don't believe that it's existence (disembodied) in the state of heaven is much like our present bodily existence.

As the Benedictine monk I quoted in my prior post noted, "the natural, normal, mode of operation of the mind during its present state of union with the body, is by sense impressions, images, concepts, 'intelligible species', reasoning; when it operates in another mode", we have to try and envisage a kind of existence without being mediated through those kind of natural functions, whilst still retaining identity of personhood and substance.

Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are believed by us to be spiritual states of being (as opposed to physical locations) that occupy no location in space and are even apart from time as well, with the souls of the deceased thought (according to time-honoured, theological speculation) to exist in something mysterious called “aeviternity”.

This entails a mode of existence which is a form of “participated eternity". It lies between the timelessness of God and the temporal experience of material beings - to us, for all intents and purposes, it is akin to “no-time” - although this isn't strictly true.

Consider this answer on a Catholic website by a theologian:




Through our participation by grace in the divine nature, we also believe that we will receive a mediated knowledge of all things needful for us to comprehend - a font of immediate apprehension of knowledge, the limits of which are 'unlimited' (because God is infinite and our enjoyment of Him, and knowledge in and through Him, therefore all without end). This includes knowledge of our lives on earth and of those we love, though, too. St. Paul said that: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13:12).

But then, of course, we also do believe in the resurrection at the end of time in spiritual bodies too - so there is overlap.

SigurdReginson said:

What are your thoughts on the matter?

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In My belief system (Theosophical/Vedic (Hindu)/Spiritualist) it is more complicated than a physical body and a soul. There are also realms like astral and mental planes/realms that constitute us. So after we die we still feel (astral) and think (mental plane) at first much as we did on life but without the physical overcoat. The Soul (Causal Body) is something beyond even that and is the repository of wisdom gained through the experiences on the lower planes.

Confused yet. Here's a diagram of which I claim to only partially understand. I'll show it just to point out how complicated this gets.

Vouthon said:

Interesting....

If I may ask, were you a Protestant or Catholic in your former Christian life? While superficially the same in many respects, given both of our denominational families are Nicene Trinitarian, there are many important differences (especially in the depth of the theology, given that we're not a sola scriptura faith but a living tradition that develops).

The presentation I've given above is doctrinal and normative in Catholic theology (based on Patristic, scholastic and mystical literature) but likely wouldn't be subscribed to by most Protestant denominations, maybe with the exception of some Anglicans and Lutherans of a more traditionalist persuasion.

In terms of the human rational soul post-mortem, Catholics don't believe that it's existence (disembodied) in the state of heaven is much like our present bodily existence.

As the Benedictine monk I quoted in my prior post noted, "the natural, normal, mode of operation of the mind during its present state of union with the body, is by sense impressions, images, concepts, 'intelligible species', reasoning; when it operates in another mode", we have to try and envisage a kind of existence without being mediated through those kind of natural functions, whilst still retaining identity of personhood and substance.

Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are believed by us to be spiritual states of being (as opposed to physical locations) that occupy no location in space and are even apart from time as well, with the souls of the deceased thought (according to time-honoured, theological speculation) to exist in something mysterious called “aeviternity”.

This entails a mode of existence which is a form of “participated eternity". It lies between the timelessness of God and the temporal experience of material beings - to us, for all intents and purposes, it is akin to “no-time” - although this isn't strictly true.

Consider this answer on a Catholic website by a theologian:

We will have no need for our memory after our death, because we will see everything as the Lord sees things: eternally. We will see all previous historical events and all future historical events because of, as the Catechism states [this perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity — this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels and all the blessed.] — from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1024, on Heaven.​

Through our participation by grace in the divine nature, we also believe that we will receive a mediated knowledge of all things needful for us to comprehend - a font of immediate apprehension of knowledge, the limits of which are 'unlimited' (because God is infinite and our enjoyment of Him, and knowledge in and through Him, therefore all without end). This includes knowledge of our lives on earth and of those we love, though, too. St. Paul said that: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (1 Corinthians 13:12).

But then, of course, we also do believe in the resurrection at the end of time in spiritual bodies too - so there is overlap.

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Thanks for the explanation!

I come from an Evangelical/Baptist/Fundamentalist background. I had a very literalist interpretation of the bible, and I didn't accept anything outside of the bible. Very Sola Scriptura in nature. In retrospect, my ideas on spirituality were very limited, so it's nice to explore more and see different people's perspectives on things.

SigurdReginson said:

Most religious views consist of the idea that people have a "soul," and when people die, and this soul lives on in some shape or form.

I'm curious to know how you perceive this soul in relation to how it's thoughts mirrors the inner workings of your mind right now?

I always liked the Norse Pagan idea of the soul (or in this case, several souls), as it recognizes that people's experiences are intrinsically formed of many parts, and not within the illusion that the ego presents as one, consistent, coherent experience. Many parts of our minds have different functions and behave in different ways.

Will our subconscious also exist within the confines of our soul? Will it exist much like it does now, and work independently of our active thoughts? What about instinct? Will instinctual drives exist, and if they do, will they work in tandem with our active thoughts? A lot of these things may become useless in the spirit realm (such as hunger and the drive to eat or the unconscious activity of blinking), but many of these things also shape us as people (such as emotional responses to things that happen).

What are your thoughts on the matter?

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I'm a non-believer and I suspect much of this sort of belief is tied to the fear of our own mortality.

But I do like the idea, personally. I've lost loved ones and like the idea of being reunited eventually. My rational mind sees this as absurd so it's not something I believe. But I can enjoy liking the idea, and wouldn't;t mind being wrong about.

SigurdReginson said:

That's an incredibly interesting perspective! Do you feel that a soul is an echo, is it a thinking person, or can it be both? Is the impression left behind anything more than an echo, and can it become something unique and grow from there?

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I'm not sure what you mean by echo? Like a consciousness or person apart from the human body?

Unveiled Artist said:

I'm not sure what you mean by echo? Like a consciousness or person apart from the human body?

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Hmmm.... When I read "impression" i imagine something left behind like a finger print. A memory. An echo. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent.

SigurdReginson said:

Hmmm.... When I read "impression" i imagine something left behind like a finger print. A memory. An echo. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent.

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Yep. Like fingerprints since each person even twins don't have the same finger prints. I guess you can say everything has their individual personalities. Memory is a good word too.

SigurdReginson said:

Hmmm.... When I read "impression" i imagine something left behind like a finger print. A memory. An echo. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent.

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What's also interesting is my mother actually sees spirits ever since she was a teen. I never seen one and always have wanted to. She relayed stories before and now. She's not religious but I bet if she channeled her aura and opened it to positivity and so forth she could be a spiritualist. If she were interested and means to go into different cultures, I'd assume she could also be a healer as well. Things totally I missed out on because of other things unfortunately.