Soul

[da]

What's the word "soul" mean to you? What associations does it bring up? Is the word fraught with baggage... smelling partly of brimstone? Does it have deep connection for you? Is it ineffable and abstract? Is it like a Platonic ideal of a thing, not to be pinned down? Is it boring? Is it a handy fiction?

I'd love to have a conversation about that, to the extent we can in an online journal. Anonymous comments are fine. My hope is to have common referents to continue in another post.

I invite you to make your first comment here, that is to say without reading the previous comments before-hand. Of course feel free to read other comments too, and discuss with others, but after your first comment. :) Thanks!

[Edit to add:

I can say: the breadth of peoples' responses is pretty darn cool.

So, I suggested a dialogue. What now?

It would be one thing if we were in the same room, and could look at each other and be clear that we're going to treat this with the respect it deserved. In that situation, I would say we could just ask each other open, honest questions; questions that don't try to convince the other of our own understanding; but help the other person to articulate their truth for us. And take it from there.

We could try something like that. I'd participate. Why don't we try that?

It might go without saying, but I'll say it anyway: you're welcome to not reply to someone's question, or to reply telling them you won't reply (and that's final; challenges are not OK).

]

Comments

[heliopsis.livejournal.com]

I have begun to think that a soul is something we make. This is a not-completely-formed idea, but it has a lot of resonance for me. It goes something like this: we have sense experiences, which we organize into an understanding of the world. Part of that understanding is a set of models of other people's behaviour, and of our own behaviour; we call these models personalities, and pretty much everyone has one. Several, in fact, because each person who knows me will come up with a slightly different model. Some of us (most of us? all of us? I don't know), as we learn about our own personalities, yearn for something more or something different: we wish to be more compassionate, more aware of others, more connected to the world,… And since I believe that I am a set of beliefs about myself, it's kind of scary to cut away at those beliefs, to wish to make them different. Who am I, to make myself different? Could I make myself not want to be different? Etc. So we invent a thing that is deeper than the personality, an essence that is unchanging as we transform ourselves. Perhaps that unchanging thing is really a stable set of beliefs and behaviours; or perhaps that unchanging thing is an illusion we create for ourselves. But that's what I think the soul is: my soul is the unchanging part of myself from which I can reason about how i would like to change.

In this conception, a soul is strictly optional. You don't have to have one. And I don't suppose you have to want to change in order to build a soul, that's just a way I went about introducing the idea. I think just about everyone would like to have a soul, though, and I think most of us construct one.

Note that I'm not saying that souls aren't real. Far from it! Lots of things we construct out of ideas are vividly real. Personalities, for instance. Money is another: it's entirely make-believe, a mass hallucination, but you'd be a fool to pretend it wasn't real. It's hard to imagine that my soul, as a construction of my brain, could be eternal; I think that may be an illusion or a fond hope. But I'm willing to be surprised.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

Wow, thanks- that's a really meaty conception, that I will need to sit with.

Sounds like you're describing the Super-Ego, though without piles of Freudian baggage.

[dpolicar]

"Inside every jumbled pile of person there's a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of."

I am also reminded of a bit in Card's Worthing Saga which, now that I think about it, I've written about before.