6.2.1 Soul and Spirit
In many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions, the soul is the incorporeal essence of a living being. Soul or psyche is derived from “breathe” and it include the mental abilities of a living being: reason, character, feeling, consciousness, memory, perception, thinking, etc. The soul is incorporeal insofar as it is distinct from the human body. Similarly, the word spirit is derived from the Latin spiritus, meaning: “breath”, and it is used for referring to non-corporeal substance in contrast with the material body. The concepts of a person’s spirit and soul often overlap, as both contrast with body and both are believed to survive bodily death in some religions. The term may also refer to any incorporeal or immaterial being, such as demons or deities.
Greek philosophers, such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, understood that the soul must have a logical faculty, the exercise of which was the most divine of human actions. The word “alive” referred to the concept of being “ensouled”, so the soul is that which gives life to the body or animates the living organism.
Drawing on the words of his teacher Socrates, Plato considered the psyche to be the incorporeal and eternal essence of a person, which decides how we behave. Socrates says that even after death, the soul exists and is able to think, and he believed that as bodies die, the soul is continually reborn in subsequent bodies, and Plato believed this as well but he thought that only one part of the soul was immortal, the logos. The Platonic soul consists of three parts:
1.the logos; mind, nous, or reason, is located in the head, and regulates the other part. 2.the thymos; emotion, spiritedness, is located near the chest region and is related to anger. 3.the eros; appetitive, desire, is located in the stomach and is related to desires.
Aristotle defined the soul as the “first actuality” of a naturally organized body, and he argued against its separate existence from the physical body. It forms the primary activity, or full actualization, of a living thing, or the organization of the form and matter of a natural being which allows it to strive for its full actualization.
The various faculties of the soul, such as nutrition, movement, reason, and sensation, constitute the “second” actuality, or fulfillment, of the capacity to be alive. For example, someone who falls asleep, as opposed to someone who falls dead, can wake up and live their life, while the latter can no longer do so.
Avicenna elaborated upon the Aristotelian conceptions and developed his own doctrine on the nature of the soul, which was influential among the Scholastics. He clearly distinguished between the soul and the spirit, arguing that the immortality of the soul is a consequence of its nature, and not a purpose for it to fulfill. In his theory of “The Ten Intellects”, he viewed the human soul as the tenth and final intellect.
While he was imprisoned, Avicenna wrote his famous “Floating Man” thought experiment to demonstrate human self-awareness and the substantial nature of the soul. He told his readers to imagine themselves suspended in the air, isolated from all sensations, which includes no sensory contact with even their own bodies. He then argued that in this scenario one would still have self-consciousness. He thus concludes that the idea of the self is not logically dependent on any physical thing, and that the soul should not be seen in relative terms, but as a primary given, a substance. This argument was later refined and simplified by Rene Descartes in epistemic terms, when he stated: “I can abstract from the supposition of all external things, but not from the supposition of my own consciousness.”
Descartes argued that the “self” is something that we can prove its existence with epistemological certainty, thus: “I think, therefore I am”, and he explained further that this knowledge could lead to a proof of the certainty of the existence of God.
In his discussions of rational psychology, Kant identified the soul as the “I” in the strictest sense, and argued that the existence of inner experience can neither be proved nor disproved: “We cannot prove a priori the immateriality of the soul, but rather only so much: that all properties and actions of the soul cannot be recognized from materiality”.
The Quran, we find a sharp distinction between the immortal soul, as spirit, and the mortal soul, as psyche, where the spirit drives the psyche which comprises temporal desires and perceptions necessary for living.
Physicist Sean Carroll (b. 1966) argued that the idea of a soul is in opposition to Quantum Field Theory, because in order to exist “Not only is new physics required, but dramatically new physics. Within QFT, there can’t be a new collection of ‘spirit particles’ and ‘spirit forces’ that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments” Carroll (Carroll). However, we will see in section 8 that it is possible to define the soul in terms space-time structures in lower dimensions.
Some parapsychologists have attempted to establish, by scientific experiment, whether a soul separate from the brain exists, as is more commonly defined in religion rather than as a synonym of psyche or mind, but it appears that none of the attempts by parapsychologists have yet succeeded.
The science of Time is a noble science, that reveals the secret of Eternity. Only the Elites of Sages may ever come to know this secret. It is called the First Age, or the Age of ages, from which time is emerging.
