I posted and printed yesterday’s entry and while reading it over, noticed the need for some addendums, which I will make here, but referring to yesterday’s writings.
Addendum 1 for Human Destiny:
I had meant to address the idea that humans have a soul and a spirit as that is conceived in most traditions. We also know the expression ‘body and soul’, ‘mind, body and soul’ or ‘being overcome by the spirit’.
Though ‘mind’ is well accepted as a concept with some reality attached to it, but what exactly constitutes mind is not that easy to describe. A person can loose his or her mind, we say, meaning that the person is not behaving in a reasonable - think customary - manner. ‘I lost my mind’, means that I did not know what to do at that juncture. Such a state is temporary, but may need some caring attention for proper recovery.
When referring to soul and spirit, things become more undefined and that is in part the functionality of such concepts. It keeps the door open to new possibilities that would be precluded in a ‘two plus two makes four’ type definition.
When I ask people what they mean by spirit or a spiritual experience, I often get a description of feelings that are experienced. Say about a spot of natural beauty, a moving song or performance. Mostly it is described as a beneficial and unusual experience, one that makes the person experience a connection with existence in a general sense; a being at one with something that is not you.
In this latter description we can detect the expansion of one’s conscious awareness in that something new has become available in our range of conscious experience. For example, the experience of the mystic, who feels connected to the ‘All’, could fall under such a description.
We could say then that the spiritual experience is one in which the human has an experience of being aware and of feeling connected to something that is beyond the daily experience of reality.
This does remain a human experience and does not clarify what ‘the spirit’ of a human might be. While thinking about that this morning I recalled the history of the debate in the early Christian church about the nature and person of Jesus. The Orthodox formula became more or less like this: “Jesus is of two natures divine and human united in one person“.
Jesus is of two natures divine and human united in one person.
Maybe we can say that two thousand years ago we had a foreshadowing in this debate, of the nature of the modern human being, that is one in person, but being of human and spirit in nature.
On this earth we are here for this human type of experience that is not possible in the other reality. This remarks takes me to a wholly different framework, which I will not pursue that here, but I can say that it is founded on the concept of continuity of existence in the various realms.
Returning to the question whether humans have a spirit and a soul, I will describe my own notions about this. There is a connection between me as a human, being bodily in this world to a non biological, but still physical state that I can call spirit.
Connected yes, but not able to act in this world of matter without going through the body, which is able to censor it. Similarly from the body here on earth I cannot act in the world of non-matter, although mutual influencing can occur under certain conditions.
Examples of this are found in the well documented literature about extrasensory perception, see Dean Radin’s ‘The Conscious Universe’ among others.
The question about what the soul might then be in this scheme of things I answer as follows. The soul is like the fruit that forms from the bodily experience of the person in this world of matter. This soul is then the result of the totality of the human experience in the body, including that of mind and conscious awareness.
On the death of the body this soul passes on to the non-matter world of the spirit type existence, which is not bound by place and time. What happens after that I do not know, but I infer that the soul experience will become assimilated and contribute to a following incarnation on earth or may be some where else.
Above I mentioned the continuity of existence as the foundation of this framework of belief that I have come to hold as most plausible. Existence is continuous, while processes such as our universe are contained within it, having beginnings and endings, which existence does not. In order for such an existence to have meaning it is Existence Divine, a mystery knowable but not comprehendible. <11:05am. 11:22am >
I thought I was done, but there is more. While making coffee for my break various soul related notions surfaced from some time ago and this seems to be an appropriate time and place to combine and express them.
What then could this soul be? The answer to this question combines several known and documented facts. First is an experiment conducted in the 1970-ties in a hospital in Austria. There the body was weighed during the dying process and upon the event of death, the body lost a few ounces - I think it was seven - in weight. I read it in one of my books, but have been unable to locate the reference.
Secondly, documented observations have been made in Sweden - now several decades ago - of a blue substance alighting from the body upon death of the person. My friend Herman has witnessed such an event as well and tells me that photographs were taken, which are held by the family I gather. These photo images show a whitish little cloud ascending and exiting the room through a closed door.
What could this be I asked myself some time ago. Over time I started thinking about the fact that some observers saw a white 'cloud', where others saw a blue one. This I thought, might be due to the fact that the ‘soul’ cloud substance itself ‘neutral’ reacts with substance present in the air of the room, such as water vapour.
This idea let me to the notion of ‘plasma’ which is a known state in modern physics that matter can take. As a matter of fact we have TV and computer screens that deploy plasma to show us what going on in the latest reality show.
Then I came across a modern article on ‘ball lighting’. This is lightning that floats around in the air, can come through a closed window or through material object. I read about this in the nineteen sixties in the Star weekend supplement, but no one at that time knew what this was about.
However, the modern article, circa last year 2013 I’d say, explained that ball lightning was a form of plasma, self contained as a ball; not square or other form. On an aside: This is important because a ball is an equal potential surface, like the earth and planets and would fly apart if not ball shaped.
So, combining this new information with the observed ‘soul clouds’ I figured that my notion of the soul being a plasma interacting with the air molecules in the room was a definite maybe. But, what about all the information that this departing plasma would hold, no less than a whole life time of experiences?
Here the quantum computer article that I read not to long ago, opened the door to the possibility that much information might be stored in a relatively small structure. The departing ‘soul’ would physically be a plasma that floats through the air holding the stored lifetime experience of the person who’s body has let it go.
This is a model and certainly not proof, but it is a model that can be tested and as such fits into the realm of modern scientific investigations. A thought experiment, waiting for it to be confirmed or dismissed by further experimental evidence.
And here I rest!.<11:57am.
