[S.T.D.]

SP, This is my opinion on the concept of soul, my understanding or misunderstanding, logic or the lack of thereof. If ever there were an entity invented for human wish-fulfillment, the soul is that entity. We beleive that one has lived before and will live again in another body after death and that the bodies one passes in and out of need not be human. One may have been a Doberman in a past life, and one may be a mite or a carrot in a future life. Like some tribes avoid eating certain animals because they beleive that the souls of their ancestors dwell in those animals. Why, even we beleive that our dead people reapear in the form of crows.

So how did this idea of soul and thereby life after death emerged?
Man generally loves life or fears death. But he is not ignorant of death. By physical experience and logical reasoning he would have established its inevitability. One cannot ignore death. The only way to ignore death would be to HOPE... hope for a life after death, a hope for immortality. But since physical immortality is impossible, his only recourse would be a hope of immortality of Soul. And man is not prepared to abandon this hope. And not only this, the concept of soul has a deep significance in religious beleifs all over the world, all through the history. But why?

To me, the concept of a non-substantial substance itself is a contradiction . Yet, billions of people have believed in a non-spatial percipient which can travel through space and perceive and interpret vibrations and energies in the air or any medium without any sense organs. The concept of soul has been there for centuries. Dualists consider the Soul to be an immaterial substance, capable of existence as a conscious, perceiving entity independent of any physical body. But dualist philosophers have long struggled with what is known as the mind-body problem. Descartes first raised this problem. What is it that makes it possible for two contraries (one spatially existing and the other not) to interact as our Souls seem to with our brains?

But, why would such a beleif start? The ancient people, the nomads, had the beleif in spirits, the ancestor of the ideas of Soul, which they encountered in their dreams. The ancient man saw ghosts of the dead apparently divorced from their bodies in dreams. He concluded that he too had seperable soul. The idea of Soul and thereby Immortality grew naturally out of this. Infact the word Ghost comes from the german whord "Geist" which means both Ghost and Soul. This is basically due to his ignorance of the fact that his mind can form images out of memories, a case mentioned above. The very fact that in sleep the savage saw himself running, hunting, walking, while later he was assured that his body hadn't stirred, convinced him that he had a seperable Soul.

Now to the questions. This concept of souls throws up so many paradoxes that it would be impossible for me to list them now. I will list a few.

The first simple question would be If someone is dead how will anyone (leave alone the dead person himself), know that the soul survived? How will anyone know that his spirit is wandering and enters a new body unless all of these inferences are a result of incompetency of human mind to comprehend extra-physical (mental) discrepancies like dream, delusion and insufficient analysis.

These days the talk is about cloning and genetic engineering. If an embryo is split into two does that split the soul also?

Anything that has a beginning has an end. If souls are indestructible, then earth would be crowded with souls. Imagine the number of people who have lived since earth was formed. If we say they attain mukti, where do they go?

If protozoans have soul, we must remember that they reproduce asexually. A nucleus of the protozoa simply splits into two organism. So how did one soul become two? at wat point of time did the new soul start to get associated with the second organism.

Compare the same with sexual reproduction in higher species. The process is long involving too many factors. Again, at what point of time the new soul emerges?

so wats the common logic behind the point at which the new soul is formed?

I can pile up more number of questions, but wats the use