What is the soul?

I tend to agree with you here, Faith. I think the mystical notion that you can lose your self and become one with some universal Self is an illusion arising from the tendency to conflate the consciousness with the entire self (i.e. the self including all unconscious mental processes).Our conscious mental processes are just a tiny, tiny part of what is going on in our brains. When we still those conscious processes through meditation, or prayer, the rest of our perceptual processing is still going on regardless. Because the conscious processing has been reduced our perception of the world seems richer and we seem to respond to things much more immediately.The conclusion that's drawn by mystics (because they're not aware of the immense complexity of the brain) is that in this state we are closer to or even a part of some universal thing that isn't the individual self.So maybe the final illusion that a Buddhist should overcome is this one. Maybe the ultimate truth is that Nirvana is Samsara. (Oh, I think that is a Buddhist idea!)

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

And I would say that your model of interacting processes is just another conceptualization imposed on the reality itself. Don't you think there is a wonderful mystery about the notion that we are surrounded by things that exist independently of how we think of them?My feeling, both from my own experience, and from reading around the latest neuroscience research, is that the human experience of the world has many levels, many layers. We are pre-eminent amongst animals in being able to generalise and abstract from our perceptions - to such an extent that we very often don't even notice things that are obvious to any animal (a piece of card flapping from a pole is a major distraction to my dog; I don't even notice it). But our experience of the world isn't just this abstraction - that's just a part of what we experience. The whole visual and aural world is flowing through our eyes and ears.To adjust to the reality of the world seems a worthy ambition. To ignore the reality that separateness is a permanent state for humans seems to me a fatal illusion.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Well, I butted into a conversation between Faith and Ifen, so I guess you're entitled to do the same . Ifen has already given you an answer from the Buddhist perspective. What I'd like to add is that, if you think about the process of enlightenment as a psychological process rather than a metaphysical one, then only you are changing, not the reality around you. The world is the same when you end your journey as when you started it. Only now, your experience of that reality is different.This process is summed up by a phrase that was very popular amongst hippies in the sixties: This message has been edited by JavaMan, 04-26-2006 07:40 AM

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

You don't ask much do you? Even if my personality is a process, fundamentally interlocked with other processes, the effect is to create the appearence of myself as a discrete entity. And it is that experience of myself as a discrete entity that is my experience of 'me'. Even if I have moments in which I am aware of my connection with the rest of the universe, even sometimes to the extent of forgetting myself entirely, this sense of connection can never be a permanent thing even for the most dedicated monk. While I'm alive the 'me-ness' will always push itself forward, must push itself forward if I'm ever to do anything.And when I'm dead, I'm dead, whether I'm an entity or a process. For my lifetime, of course - which I guess is eternity for me. The hope of seeing the world as it is.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible