What is the soul?

Mind doesn't include emotions, does it?

OK, I see that "mind" can be the equivalent, but "soul" doesn't have the ambiguities that "mind" does. Or maybe you just aren't used to using the term so it doesn't have a clear meaning to you. I think it's the least ambiguous of all the possibilities. "Soul" sounds more substantial than "consciousness" too, like we're really talking about a personality.When we say "soul includes mind, emotion and will" we should probably say "intellect" instead of "mind." That would probably be clearer.The older word was "the understanding" -- medieval I suppose. I think emotion and will had different terms too but I don't remember for sure.

Isn't the operative word "entity?" Granted that "corporation" is hard to classify as either a being or a thing, though I'd go for "thing" myself. But energy, process and actions are not entities.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-24-2006 03:45 PM

I'm usually too lazy to quote from multiple posts myself, and there is no fast way I know of either. I don't know how anyone can be content with such a way of thinking. I figure our brains respond to what actually is there. It all seems academic anyway. So what if "what exists out there" are "processes" at some level? Clearly entities that are formed by those processes are no less a reality for that, and none of us has a problem recognizing that fact. I can be aware of my body as a body AND also conceptualize it as an organized bunch of organs, or an organized bunch of molecules or an organized bunch of atoms or an organized bunch of processes {abe: all "things" except maybe processes}, and of my soul {abe: a being} as something else from all of that as well while intimately connected to it all.What makes processes any more real in your mind than all those other ways of conceptualizing?This message has been edited by Faith, 04-24-2006 04:33 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 04-24-2006 04:47 PM

What you say the "thing model" refers to, the "Who am I" part, the part that says "I," the part that thinks and feels and knows and is going to live forever. Of course you've defined this part out of existence by disqualifying the "thing model" and leaving yourself with nothing but an impersonal "What am I" and an impersonal "functioning" and "an [impersonal] appreciation of the universe as a higly complexly interacting system of mutually interdependent processes" without persons, minds, or souls in it.

Yabbut, in getting rid of the suffering by getting rid of the sentient self, the mind, the soul, you get rid of the joy and happiness too.What good is an "appearance" of anything?Oh joy, I say, that the God of the Bible deals with us as real individual personal selves who will live forever in the kind of happiness that selves were made for. How can it be "richer" without personalities? How can a purely impersonal phenomenal world or universe in any sense be "richer" than the world of beings, the possibility of connection between mind and mind, soul and soul?

Now you are denying that your vision is impersonal but I was using your own terms, calling it a "what" and a "function" as opposed to a "who" etc. Just a language problem?I just can't imagine a personality without there being a perception of a discrete entity or person. I can't even imagine that YOU can imagine this. I guess I'm just a hopeless literalist.Perhaps some of it is just language. Jesus tells us to die to self, but what that means is to die to pride and selfishness, to love others AS self, making no distinction.But I never believed Bernadette Roberts when she talked about having no self and I still don't know what it is or why it matters.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-25-2006 10:49 AM