Does a soul or spirit reside in the flesh?

[botslob]

---

read this somewhere sa Theosophical digest-

The idea that their is a soul or that their is no soul are both hypothesis.
The intercourse between pure spirit & crudest matter brings forth a child called "soul"

do you believe in a soul, mam?

[Existanz]

It is brilliant Existanz! To get things more interesting, allow me to play the devil here.

Brilliant?

if there is a living soul does it follow that there is also a "dead soul"? if the soul is merely "body + mind" so it is not immortal? what about the parable of the rich man where lazarus the beggar died, and was brought by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. does this not imply the immortality of the soul?

- The fleshy “Soul” will die in the medical sense but regarding to our consciousness can we really say it is a living thing? It simply ceases to exist since it can’t express itself anymore in the physical world. From my position, all “Living Souls” are immortal by virtue of Christ dying in the cross. Since, all “Living Souls” will be resurrected to face judgment before God- resurrection to eternal bliss and on the other, resurrection to eternal damnation.

Does it follow then that as a "function," the soul terminates (co-terminus) itself upon the death of the flesh where it is kept or held?

-Yes, but terminates in a sense that our ‘self’ simply ceases to exist. Not die the way our body cease to function as a living organism.

Hmmm....if it is "not there" are expressions of the body came from out of the expression of the soul? what about expression of physical pain or a reaction to a stimulus? What separates then the expression of the soul and the expression of the physical body?

-My term “not there” is the same as the way we say there is energy in those batteries that will cause the light bulbs to emit light. If I will open those batteries can you show me where is energy there?

Pain as a discomfort exists only in our consciousness as sensation. Our brain does not know what pain is; all it does is simply parse simulating information. Our consciousness orders our brain to move our finger in contact with heat as our reaction to that stimulus.

The expressions of the soul are ideas, music, arts and the likes while the expression of the physical bodies independent of our consciousness is what we are physically for one thing; male or female, tall or short, white or brown etcetera. The brain also controls our heart beats, menstrual cycle, perspirations, pupil dilatation, Goosebumps to name a few independent of our will.

If the soul is merely an output of the brain, so it is not spirit? therefore "spirit soul" is not true?

-If spirit refers to the common conception as an ethereal thing, then I think it is not.

What about those whose brains that are sick or (mentally) ill, does it follow a defective soul? if man was created as a living soul, could we classify as "living but defective soul" those who were mentally ill at birth?

- Since I posit the soul (as consciousness) as self-emergent function not as something created therefore we cannot label the consciousness of the mentally ill as defective but rather as an unrealized soul- deprived of its potentialities. For instance some people have ‘defective’ speech but still brilliant writers. Nobody has yet called them ‘defective’ speakers but we called them instead speech handicapped people.

If it's consciousness we are to be judged, what about our consciousness in the dream state? Remember, we are still conscious while we are at sleep. In a sleep state, the brain is only at rest but still conscious. Given, if we dreamt of a hot chick other than our wife, are we also to be judged for the misdemeanor committed in the consciousness of our sleep?

-I think we are, because this is a manifestation of our deepest sexual desire as an adult. Even when we are awake we do it most of the time. This is part of the fallen nature of Man that he can’t make himself righteous in his mind much more in his actions before God, so much so that Christ once said that by mere erotic thinking of another man’s wife is already fornication. Come to think of it, a child innocent of what it meant to have seks does not dream about having seks but rather about fairies, dwarfs and Santa Claus. It had to do something to what we ‘really’ desires.

If the immaterial consciousness equates to the soul, why do we have to be judged for the offenses of the flesh? Don't you think it would be more appropriate to use instead an "immaterial criteria" for which the soul is to be judged?

-Simply because it is our consciousness that wills this sinful acts to happen. The flesh is simply incidental to that willing consciousness.

[Existanz]

this is crazy. dugay na ta sa kalibutan, naka ad2 na ta sa buwan, pero wa pa ta kahibaw unsa ta

who am i?

Mao nay misteryo's tao, kusog kaayo maninguha ug solbad ug paradox sa lain butang pero iyang sarili iyang gikalimtan o di kaya gi-ignore hehe..

Ang Ginoo gani gipangutana kung kinsa siya mitubag ra ma'g "I AM WHO AM"..na samot! hehe

[Lovely Charm]

do you believe in a soul, mam?

Well the word "believe" is a safe word for the idea about soul.

Two opposing concepts at hand, That their is a soul vs. theirs no soul
im inclined to believe that their is a soul as the REAL SELF in us.
Its just that the soul concept nowadays are very much tainted w/ the religious distortions w/c makes it badoy na

[brownprose]

Well said existanz...I have issues of course. hehehe...I will deal with them later.

Brilliant?

- The fleshy “Soul” will die in the medical sense but regarding to our consciousness can we really say it is a living thing? It simply ceases to exist since it can’t express itself anymore in the physical world. From my position, all “Living Souls” are immortal by virtue of Christ dying in the cross. Since, all “Living Souls” will be resurrected to face judgment before God- resurrection to eternal bliss and on the other, resurrection to eternal damnation.


-Yes, but terminates in a sense that our ‘self’ simply ceases to exist. Not die the way our body cease to function as a living organism.



-My term “not there” is the same as the way we say there is energy in those batteries that will cause the light bulbs to emit light. If I will open those batteries can you show me where is energy there?

Pain as a discomfort exists only in our consciousness as sensation. Our brain does not know what pain is; all it does is simply parse simulating information. Our consciousness orders our brain to move our finger in contact with heat as our reaction to that stimulus.

The expressions of the soul are ideas, music, arts and the likes while the expression of the physical bodies independent of our consciousness is what we are physically for one thing; male or female, tall or short, white or brown etcetera. The brain also controls our heart beats, menstrual cycle, perspirations, pupil dilatation, Goosebumps to name a few independent of our will.




-If spirit refers to the common conception as an ethereal thing, then I think it is not.



- Since I posit the soul (as consciousness) as self-emergent function not as something created therefore we cannot label the consciousness of the mentally ill as defective but rather as an unrealized soul- deprived of its potentialities. For instance some people have ‘defective’ speech but still brilliant writers. Nobody has yet called them ‘defective’ speakers but we called them instead speech handicapped people.



-I think we are, because this is a manifestation of our deepest sexual desire as an adult. Even when we are awake we do it most of the time. This is part of the fallen nature of Man that he can’t make himself righteous in his mind much more in his actions before God, so much so that Christ once said that by mere erotic thinking of another man’s wife is already fornication. Come to think of it, a child innocent of what it meant to have seks does not dream about having seks but rather about fairies, dwarfs and Santa Claus. It had to do something to what we ‘really’ desires.



-Simply because it is our consciousness that wills this sinful acts to happen. The flesh is simply incidental to that willing consciousness.

[miyay]

- The fleshy “Soul” will die in the medical sense but regarding to our consciousness can we really say it is a living thing? It simply ceases to exist since it can’t express itself anymore in the physical world. From my position, all “Living Souls” are immortal by virtue of Christ dying in the cross. Since, all “Living Souls” will be resurrected to face judgment before God- resurrection to eternal bliss and on the other, resurrection to eternal damnation.

totally disagree but ok

[Existanz]

totally disagree but ok

Hello! I know what's the rough spot there hehe..anyway, in the spirit of the istoryans way of life I have something for you..

This article first appeared in The Evening Standard

Things that go bump in your brain

RITA CARTER

TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL have changed little down the ages - they always feature the same clutch of spine-chilling phenomena: vampires and ghosts; werewolves and zombies; astral bodies, doppelgangers, alien visitors and demonic visions.

Sceptics may deride such things as superstitious nonsense, but the fact that they endure, even in today's material age, suggests that they may be rooted in real experiences. But are they really glimpses into a world beyond? Or can they be explained by science?

Take ghosts. a Lancet survey showed that 12% of a group of perfectly sane and sensible people admitted on questioning that they regularly had ghost-like hallucinations. These particular people had eyesight problems, but other studies have suggested that seeing spectres may be nearly as common among people with perfectly good eyes.

The condition is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS), after the Swiss philosopher who first described it. People with CBS know perfectly well that what they see is not real - but most of them keep quiet about their visions because they don't want to be thought dotty.

The Lancet study found that 80% of the subjects saw visions of other people - some of them familiar, others complete strangers. Some of the spectres seemed to sit, firmly, in real chairs; others floated, ghost-like, above floors and through walls and a few seemed to be getting on with their normal day to day business. Pets, and inanimate objects featured regularly too and some subjects saw entire scenes. One woman, for example, reported watching cows grazing in a field opposite her house. It was the middle of winter and she remarked to a friend, who was with her, that the farmer was cruel to leave the beasts out in such cold weather.It was only when her companion pointed out that the field was in fact empty that she realised the cows were phantoms!

One explanation for these sightings is a phenomenon called eidetic, or photographic, memory. It is very common in children - about 50% of under-10s have the ability to remember things they have seen so well that if, for example, they are shown a picture of a zebra they can later reconstruct it in their mind's eye and actually count the stripes along its back . The imaginary playmates which people the lives of so many young children are probably created in this way.

The ability to create crystal-clear visual memories tends to be lost as we grow up, but some people seem to hang on to it. One woman with a spectacularly good eidetic memory complained that she was haunted by the ghost of her dead father. Experiments showed that when she looked at the "ghost" her brain registered the image precisely as though it was really there. If it appeared in front of a (real) light, for example, her brain did not register the light rays because her "ghost" blocked them out.

DOPPELGANGERS
Perhaps the most terrifying type of spectre is the one that looks like you. Doppelgangers - spectral images of yourself - are seen in nearly all cultures to be evil or a portent of death. In fact they are produced by a trick of the brain called autoscopy.

People meet their doppelgangers in normal waking consciousness and they usually appear as a perfect mirror image. One woman first encountered her other self when she came home from her husband's funereal. As she opened her front door she was confronted by herself doing the same thing in reverse. Her spectral twin dissolved after a few minutes, but the next day it returned, and it soon became a regular - though unwelcome - companion. "Whenever it appeared I felt myself grow shaky and cold " she says. "It was as though all the life was draining out of me. As soon as it disappeared I felt the warmth come back. Eventually I learnt that seeing it was a signal that I was tired and stressed and needed to lie down and sleep. When I did that it would go away".

Another man was so irritated by the continual company of his other self that he took to making faces at it. "People thought I was a nutter grimacing at nothing" he says. "If I had told them what I was really doing I dread to think what they would have thought!"

Some people who are constantly haunted by their other selves get so angry that they try to attack them. Suicide is closely associated with doppelganger "hauntings" and it may be that some of these suicides were , in fact due to people trying to murder their other half - a tragic situation echoed in the classic horror film "The Man Who Haunted Himself".

Neurological research suggests that doppelganger sightings may be a rare side-effect of certain types of epilepsy. It is also seen quite often among people who have suffered damage to the back part of the brain - near to the area which processes visual stimuli.

OUT-OF-THE-BODY EXPERIENCES

Out of the Body Experiences (OBEs) also seem to give you a glimpse of yourself - usually from above. About one in four people say they have floated out of their bodies at some time, and, unlike seeing a Doppelganger, most of them find it quite pleasant.

Melvyn Bragg had OBEs as a teenager, and he later wrote them into his novel "The Maid of Buttermere", instilling them, typically, with spiritual significance: "It is as if a distinct part of me - is it my soul? - leaves my body entirely and hovers above it looking back on this vacated thing of flesh, blood, bone, water....."

Other people have described a sudden wrenching upwards....or have simply found themselves gazing down on themselves. Jennifer, a professional musician, once had a OBE while she was performing in a concert: "I suddenly realised l was up above the stage, watching myself play. It went on for nearly ten minutes and throughout it all I noticed that, technically, I played better than I had ever done before..."

Sometimes OBEs happen during normal consciousness, but at other times they come on during sleep. The sleeper feels as though they have woken up....but their body remains pinned to the bed while their ghostly self floats up from it. "The first time it happened to me I was terrified" recalls Alison, now a practised astral projectionist. "I tried desperately to get back into my body and to wake up ...but I couldn't move. Eventually I seemed to be sucked back in and I woke up with a start".

In folk myth that frightening feeling of being pinned down is blamed on an evil devil which sits on peoples chests. The female version is called a succubis - so named because it is said to suck men dry. The male version is an incubus - a demon which, as in "Rosemary's Baby", rapes and impregnates sleeping women.

What actually happens is that when we are asleep the brain paralyses our muscles in order to stop us acting out our dreams and injuring ourselves. Sleep paralysis usually switches off the moment our conscious minds switch on, but sometimes mind and body get out of synch and the paralysis lingers after we have woken up.

FLYING DREAMS are similar to OBEs and they are probably related, too, with NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCES (NDEs) in which people report leaving their body behind and floating down a dark tunnel towards a bright light. NDEs are often reported by people who temporarily "died" on the operating table - and this may be because they are triggered by certain types of anaesthetics. When it is starved of oxygen the brain produces chemicals which protect its cells from the effects of asphyxiation. A side-effect of these chemicals is to produce the depersonalised, euphoric state of mind reported in NDE, and some anaesthetics contain substances which mimic these chemicals.

The bright light which is so often reported may be the result of accompanying changes to the retina. As the cells in the eye start to die they fire at random, and each firing sends a light stimuli to the brain. The area with most cells - and which is therefore likely to produce most light - is right in the centre. So the effect may be very similar to seeing a bright light at the end of a dark tunnel.

Sci-fi classics like "Invasion of Bodysnatchers" and "The Stepford Wives" may be inspired by a curious condition called Capras syndrome, in which people believe their nearest and dearest have been somehow "taken over".
It is among the most terrifying and destructive of all psychiatric disorders.

One woman woke up one day and was convinced that the man lying beside her was a stranger who had somehow instilled himself into the body of her husband. Another was so convinced his father had been replaced by a robot that he tried to slash the imposter's throat open, looking for the wires.

Capgras' syndrome is thought to stem from a disturbance in the pathway which shunts stimuli to the part of our brain which registers familiarity. When we see someone we know we register it both intellectually - by sending messages to the cerebral cortex where we do our thinking; and emotionally - by sending messages to the deeply-buried limbic region of the brain which is the seat of our feelings. The French acknowledge these two ways of knowing in their language: savoir means to know intellectually, whereas connaitre means to know in the emotional sense. People with Capgras' syndrome are fully capable of knowing the "savoir" sense and they can tell that a person looks the same as ever. They just don't feel like the same person - and in an effort to square the conflict their brain comes up with the "imposters" explanation.

VAMPIRES have generated an entire horror industry of their own. At the last count there were more than 300 novels and 200 films about them, plus countless journals, newsletters, comics - even cookbooks. But vampires are not entirely fictional - more than a thousand people worldwide claim to be the real thing and clinical vampirism is recognised as a definite psychological disorder. The symptoms include an incomplete sense of identity, a morbid fascination with death and sexual craving for blood. Some vampirists (as they are known) injure themselves in order to get their "fix" of blood. One psychiatrist reported a case of a man who did this so often that he need repeated blood transfusions.

The origin of the vampire myth is lost in time, but one theory is that it grew up around people who suffered from porphyria - the disease which caused the Madness of King George III. As well as causing peculiar behaviour the symptoms of porphyria may include anaemia and emaciation (vampires are traditionally thin and white-faced) extreme sensitivity to light (vampires have to be back in their coffins by daybreak) bloodshot eyes and - in extreme cases - pink-tinged teeth. The disease makes it impossible for the body to metabolise iron and some researchers have even suggested that sufferers may have tried to cure themselves by taking iron-rich blood from other people...

Lycanthropy is a rare psychiatric condition in which people believe they have been turned into WEREWOLVES. Researchers at Harvard University recently collected 12 cases of people who thought they had been transformed into animals and found that, unlike vampirism, the condition only afflicted people who were severely psychotic. Along with the wolves there were two people who thought they were cats, one who thought he was a bird - and a gerbil.

© Rita Carter 2007 -

More of this at: Rita Carter: the workings of the brain - Things that go bump ...

[miyay]

^hahaha i always thought of myself as dotty, now, i'm a complete mental

but know what? sometimes, just sometimes, mind you, experience is way cooler than theories and blind faith

[Lovely Charm]

^hahaha i always thought of myself as dotty, now, i'm a complete mental

but know what? sometimes, just sometimes, mind you, experience is way cooler than theories and blind faith

ooouuuccchh

[Sinyalan]

Question is, does anyone seen a spirit or a soul? Then we have an agreement that IT resides in the flesh.