What is the soul? Most people, if not everyone, believe in some kind of soul. It is the essence of a living being. Without the soul, we would not be able to reason, feel, and think. So, how do we define it? Let us go back a little further and ask ourselves; can we even define what the soul is? To a certain extent, yes, we can. Without going into too much detail, here is my definition of what the soul is, with the little understanding I have:
Soul: the spiritual part of any living being; an aspect of the psyche.
What is meant by the psyche? The psyche refers to the inner-self of a living being. I believe this can be split into other aspects, and one of them being the soul. The soul is the spiritual part, in my opinion, where it gives us the ability to reason, feel, and think, as mentioned above. Without the soul, the body becomes inanimate - this is where the concept of death makes an appearance. Extracting the soul may or may not result in death, which we commonly refer to as a corpse. There are two facts of life, and one of them is death - almost everyone can accept this as part of reality; death is inevitable.
Religion is not the only driving factor, to believe in a soul. It is widely known in the realm of philosophy, and mythological traditions. This is one of the areas that Science cannot fathom to understand, and as a result, we cannot create life. A lot of people are unable to conceive the reality of the soul. It is one of the biggest mysteries of the universe, and I do think there will never be a time when we will fully understand the true meaning of the soul. With that being said, the common and standard scientific methods, of the current time period, are not enough to even begin studying the soul. So, why do most people readily believe in a soul? The exception would be sceptical Atheists.
There is evidence to suggest that there is a soul. What evidence am I referring to? If we evaluate our daily moments, and what we experience, we can list a few otherworldly events that occur. Dreams, imagination, and memory are three such mental abilities that suggest there is evidence for a soul. We mentioned earlier about the mysteries regarding birth and death as well. The latter can be debatable, since we understand more about the complex processes within our bodies. Neuroscience has made significant progress, as technology peaks in the current century, but we fail to understand why people experience life differently. Why does everyone have a subjective experience? This may be a philosophical issue, and it has been given a lot of though, outside of the scientific concept. Great philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, have answered this question, to a lesser extent. The underlying point here is that most great philosophers believed in a soul, or at least some kind of divine energy for our human actions. Nonetheless, the fact is that more spiritual people view the soul as something more definitive than less spiritual people.
What did Kant say? He stated that everything we experience are nothing but representations in our mind. To my understanding, I think of the mind as another aspect of the psyche, the inner-self of any living being. I will dedicate another blog post to share my perspective on what I believe the mind is, or an overview of it. Science has introduced a lot of concepts, which we take as fact, but are they really facts? One well-known concept is time. Is it a reality? Or, have we been exposed to the extent where we believe it to be a reality. I think this is a topic of its own, and requires further cosmological research. But, an interesting thought that has always intrigued me are the concrete numbers associated with time. For example, 24 hours in a day - this is an established rule that applies to the entire world.
My final thought is that the soul is something that is immortal, incomprehensible, and exists outside of time. I do believe that there is an important distinction that needs to be made between the mind, and the soul. This is something I plan to discuss in a future blog post. If you have read till this far, I would like to thank you for taking the time out of your day to read my blog post. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, opinions, and/or thoughts regarding the soul.