Lately, one thing that has caught my attention, is the difficulty people have to separate soul (or spirit) from body as a concept.
According to most religions around the planet, we are eternal spirits that are part of the universe, the whole. Then we, as spirits, come to occupy a physical body to have the opportunity to experience physical life. Traveling life like sailing the oceans, the body is said to be the vessel we are given to do the journey of life, before we have to leave when the physical body dies, to then return to the universe to become once again part of the whole.
It could be true, it could be not. Some people believe it is, based mostly on faith rather than fact, as it has been impossible so far to scientifically demonstrate the existence of life after life. And for this same reason some others believe it is not true, and we are not souls, but just a creation of our own brains, and so after our bodies die, we simply “dissipate”.
Both groups have enough reasons and arguments to support their beliefs, but none of them have scientific proof to back up their claims, so for now we have to rely in just possibilities, and our own set of concepts and beliefs, to reach a conclusion.
Still, since the big majority of people congregate around the concept that we are in fact souls occupying a physical body, we can observe and analyze what this concept really means.
The spirit (or soul) would be an ethereal form of energy that power up the human brain, activating with this the physical body. When the body dies, the brain cannot longer hold the spirit, and so it goes back to the universe. The same can happen when someone is in coma and the body kept alive by machines. In that situation the spirit no longer is in the brain, so no longer can energize the body, and the instruments read no presence of the spirit when there are no readings of brain activity.
Theories of course; but then assuming this is true, we should consider ourselves entities completely separated from the bodies we have, and so when a loved one dies, we shouldn’t consider he/she died, but instead assume it was just the body what died, and the spirit (the loved on) is still “alive” and now becoming part of the universe once again. So sadness for the death shouldn’t exist, and only the sadness of not being able to see that loved one again should exist. Yet most people experience the loss of a loved one more as an end of existence, rather than as the end of a physical body, and with it, the temporary passage of a spirit through physical life.
People believe in eternal souls and physical life as a temporary stage, yet at the moment of confronting the situation, their reactions reflect more a belief of considering the physical life of the body as the spirit of the loved one, assuming with this a person is his/her body, which is the belief of those who disregard the existence of souls and eternal life. They believe against the other group, yet react as if they had the beliefs of that group!
This makes me think people cannot hold the concept of a separated soul and physical body and only accept it in the surface, more as a learned set of phrases and words coming from their respective religions, rather than a changing knowledge to be acquired and used.
Raul
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