Historical Beliefs on the Soul

Many religions as does certain parts of philosophy believe the soul is the immortal part of a person. It's also believed that your thoughts can be synonymous with your spirit or soul.

Theology states that the soul lives on long after the body has passed. Some cultures even believe that inanimate objects also have a soul; animism. The belief of a soul has been a subject which has stirred debates among some the deepest thinkers for many centuries.

Parts of the Soul

Francis M. Cornford quotes Pindar in saying "the soul sleeps while the limbs are active, but when one is sleeping, the soul is active and reveals in many a dream." That would mean that the sub-conscious and the soul are connected. That's another story for another article. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all believed that the soul is "the essence of being."

Aristotle insisted that the soul had four distinct parts: the calculative part, the scientific part, the desiderative part and the vegetative part. The first two parts are of the rational part of the soul, and the latter two are from the irrational parts of the soul.

Sometimes the term soul and spirit can be interchangeable. Many religions state their faith on the soul and the afterlife as did the ancient Egyptians. Both the Egyptians and modern day religion have similar beliefs in the immortality of the soul.

The Weight of the Soul

Dr. Duncan Mac Dougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts stated that the soul was material and had mass. He figured at the time of death the deceased would show a measurable drop in weight. Mac Dougall constructed a special bed which was built upon a "very delicately balanced platform beam scales, which was sensitive to two-tenths of an ounce."

After weighing six terminally ill patients on the bed, and counting in the amount of perspiration and sweat of the patients, the scale was balanced when he heard an audible stroke hit against the lower limiting bar at the time exact time of his patients death.

The balancing bar dropped and never rebounded back. The exact loss of weight was three-fourths of an ounce; twenty one grams. All six patients showed this exact weight loss. There's also a movie of the same name which states this fact.

My Theory

Everyone has a theory on the soul so here is mine. Our soul is what connects us to God. Our soul is the "God part" of us. We were created by God for God. The Supreme Being is a spirit form who has always been.

However, being a spirit form God has no body and cannot experience life as we can (although the Bible states that he walked in the Garden of Eden). We were created to experience for God. This is what the soul is all about: spiritual experience.

The soul is a never-ending source of energy which displaces. After each incarnation the soul moves on to the next step of its spiritual evolution: the next dimension. The soul moves on unless we skipped what we were supposed to experience on this dimension, then we'll probably come back and start all over again.

As we pass from one life to the next we're reunited with our "higher self" the true part of our self. When we're in this true spirit form we're one with our soul and God. This is the reason why we're only able to access up to five percent of our minds in this life. The rest of our mind (or soul) is where all past life memories are stored. If we carried all of our memories over from one life to the next our minds would be simply overloaded.

What we remember from one existence to the next is stored in what scientist call "junk DNA." This is a part of the brain which scientists can't explain. This junk DNA stores past life memory (for the soul) to ensure that we'll only be concerned with this existence; not the next life, or the last.

If we knew exactly what we were going to do next (or what we did before) which partially explains Déjà vu, we'd rush through this existence and not experience what we were meant to experience. Each incarnation is for the development of the soul, and for God to experience through us.

Every lifetime on each dimension we experience different situations on many different levels of learning. Each dimension has its own lessons and experiences to be had. It's the job of the higher self and the soul to determine what we need "next" for our own spiritual growth.

When the ascension of the soul has completed, we then merge with the spirit of God. If I had to list a job description for the soul, I would say that the soul is the: library of the mind.

Sources of information: www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul