What is meant by the soul?

I think it's multiply determined. I think soul is an explanatory reference that arose thousands of years ago partly as an explanation of death and then of dreams.Having been present at births as well as at deaths I would say that death to me is the more difficult thus "miraculous" event. You've known someone all your life and suddenly their body is lifeless! It's a very strange thing. The notion that something has left them presents it's self. And then you dream about them. Awaking you know they died and yet they spoke to you in a dream and for that time seemed real again.Religion was and is very much an important functional part of the social fabric of humans and the authority through tradition maintains these early approximations of how things work.And we do have this sense, this "egoic" sense of ourselves as an entity. Soul is an explanation of that and an explanation that is taught and upheld by the authority of tradition.That is how I see it.lfen

Faith,There is something. I think "soul" is a poor explanation, a poor approximation of it.Observe the flow of consciousness. Observe the activities of the organism and the world it observes. The body changes. The emotions, beliefs, activities change. Even awareness changes. All these phenomena depend on other phenomena for their arising and passing away. Everything is interconnected. I am aware of things from my perspective. You from where you are.What we call our "selves" are all things that are objects to us and that change. We aren't our hair color, we aren't our knowledge, or our feelings. Those are things the subject "I" is aware of. All can be lost. The subject "I" is a mystery. If I haven't misunderstood him, Sidelined thinks the mystery will eventually be explained by neuroscience. I don't see how at this point but I can't rule it out.It's not that there isn't individuality it's that individuality is utterly dependent on everything that makes it up and none of that is unique. My example is of a tapestry that has some people and camels or something in it. You see a woman perhaps in a red robe and some camels and tent. But if you examine the tapestry closely from the back you discover that the same threads that make up the womans red robe are part of the camel and part of the background. Every thread serves multiple objects and it's all ONE tapestry. No figure can be isolated or removed from it. There are no individuals in the tapestry there is only the appearnace of individuals.This is how I understand the Buddha, Ramana, Bernadette Roberts, Franklin Merrell Wolff and many others. They looked into their experience and discovered that they only appeared to be an individual. That there was no soul there. There was no "I" there. What there was was a figure in the tapestry of the entirety of creation. They didn't exist, only ALL THAT IS exists. Anything else is appearance, imagination, something transitory.Seeing this, like many other experiences, isn't something you can do. It either happens or doesn't, another way of saying it is grace. To the ego this seems like death and is feared. Those who have experienced it, and I hold the possiblity that a historic person later mythologized as Jesus Christ might have experienced this though I don't see how we would ever know, report back that it is not death but greater life. But that is only someone else's report unless and until it's experienced.lfenedit: "the" historic person TO "a" historic personThis message has been edited by lfen, 01-14-2006 08:09 PM