What Is the
Soul?
The traditional
conceptualization of the soul, especially in the West, is one of a ghost
that looks like the person that it "inhabited." However, to
the spiritual scientist who is trying to make all of the facts fit together
this picture does not fit.
First of all, there is the problem of Consciousness. The scientific evidence
is mounting that says we are all one consciousness; that our conscious
awareness is us. That means that our body/brain is mostly a computer-controlled
machine, and the one Consciousness then "interfaces" with this
body/brain machine to control it and experience life. When interfacing
with the body/brain the one Consciousness experiences life as an individual
with other individuals. This picture alone would seem to be saying that
the soul would have to also be a part of the one Consciousness, and therefore
would not be in the body as traditionally believed. The one Consciousness
of course does not exist in any form and would be something that the three
dimensional body/brain could not conceptualize.
This picture is further reinforced by Neuroscientists from the University
of California at San Diego who have shown that we have a spot in the right
temporal lobe of our brain that appears to interface with the universe.
This spot is "dedicated machinery which gives us our spiritual nature."
Some are calling it the "the God Module."
Then there is the problem of reincarnation. The scientific evidence is
also becoming quite clear that reincarnation is very real and about as
close to a fact as it can get. The most conclusive evidence comes from
studies of small children by Ian Stevenson. He has found that a percentage
of children of four to seven years of age can remember in detail their
past lives. This information is so detailed that Stevenson is able to
find the actual birth and death records of their former lives. This would
seem to paint a picture of the soul as one more closely matching the traditional
view. That is until you ask, "if we move from body to body, which
body would our soul look like?"
Then there is the research on ghosts themselves. A large number of ghost
stories can be shown to be naturally occurring phenomena or psychic events
such as poltergeists. Every case study of poltergeists has shown that
the strong occurrence can be traced to an angry person who is unaware
that the havoc is emanating from them, and when they become aware of this
fact, the strange occurrences stop. Then there is the ghost sighting where
people see translucent humans walking around or otherwise engaging in
normal day- to-day activities. It turns out that the last half of the
previous sentence is the key here, "engaging in normal day to day
activities." The conclusion of most researchers is that ghosts are
not spirits or souls but some type of energy pattern, or memory pattern,
called an engram, of a real person that is trapped in some type of space-time
warp. They are like scenes from a movie that is played over and over.
Finally there are events where a person has a friend or relative die and
at the moment of death, the dying person appears to them saying goodbye.
These events have less evidence to explain them but are most likely just
an image in the person’s head that they are projecting out into
the room. Remember that according to Einstein’s theory of relativity,
space and time are an illusion.
Therefore, in reality the person whose brain/body has died is really already
with the loved one. In other words, the dying person's soul would just
have to cause awareness in the loved ones brain, and they would see them
as if they were in the room.
So how then can we put all of this together to discern what the soul looks
like? The answer comes, in my opinion, from a book called, "Love
Without End-Jesus Speaks" by Glenda Green. In this book Ms. Green
claims that Jesus appeared to her, in her art studio, one day and asked
her to paint his picture. He then posed for her for a number of months,
all the while answering her questions. Whether or not this really happened
cannot be proven scientifically; however, if the things that Ms. Green’s
Jesus said match the experimental evidence, this will lend credibility
to the story. Also, even more importantly, it may give us clues for solving
our mystery.
One of the things that Ms. Green’s Jesus said was that when we die
the "essences" of our body/brain leaves the body. In other words,
our feelings, memories and experiences are taken to be "stored"
in the "memory bank" of the one Consciousness. This makes good
sense to me. What this seems to be saying is that the individual soul
is really a collection, in one place, of all the memories and experiences
of all of the lives that we have lived. It is not a ghost as we think
of ghosts, and when it is reincarnated the new baby or brain/body interfaces
with a soul or set of "memory essences". There is even good
evidence to suggest that the new baby may be months old before the soul
interfaces with the new brain.
Thus, the soul is not a translucent ghost of a single life but a collection
of the essences of many lives lived, which are ultimately the billions
of lives lived by the one Consciousness. Clearly our soul has no form
and is something that our three-dimensional brain cannot conceptualize.
