Is there a soul. Does a person have a soul and where is it? Where does the soul go after death, and where do new souls come from?
The soul has always been considered an integral part of human nature. Various directions in science, philosophy, religion attributed to it all sorts of, and sometimes diametrically opposite properties. Whether this part exists or not is still a controversial issue.
Soul definitions
In psychology, the soul is a collection of various mental phenomena inherent in a person. In philosophy and religion, this term is understood as an immortal entity that has no material substance. It determines the beginning of life, thanks to it a person has a will, consciousness, feelings. All this is called the sides of the human soul. Usually it is opposed to the body.
The soul is also understood as an incorporeal being that remains after the death of the physical body of a person. According to some religious and ethical views, animals also have a soul.
Soul in the ordinary sense
The soul is a living part of a person's psychological space. It includes feelings, emotions, plans, desires, impulses, interests. As you know, sincere conversation is always warm. And to do something with the soul means to do it carefully, not to be lazy. Many girls like to talk about the peculiarities of their mental life. However, in many cases, if a young lady speaks of the soul, it can be assumed that in reality it is her body. For example, if she says that her soul "strives" for a young adorer, in fact it is about the influence of hormones. And if “the soul asks for sweets,” we are again talking about the body.
Philosophy opinion
Almost all sages of antiquity sought to express the basic, essential principle, which is characteristic of the entire living (and in some cases, inanimate) world, with the help of this concept. The question of what is the nature of the soul was decided by the philosophers of different schools, depending on their belonging to one of the directions - materialistic or idealistic.
For example, Democritus believed that the soul is an immaterial type of substance, containing in its composition extremely mobile atoms of fire. All the phenomena of inner, mental life, this philosopher sought to explain with the help of physical phenomena. For example, according to his opinion, the soul perceives the external world due to the fact that the atoms contained in it are set in motion by the atoms of the air.
Aristotle's view
A more complex concept of the soul was developed by Aristotle. One of his most famous treatises, On the Soul, was a kind of first special psychological study. For centuries, it remained the primary guide to psychology. And Aristotle today is rightfully considered one of the most influential founders of psychological science (as well as a number of other fields of knowledge).
The philosopher did not consider the soul to be just a substance. But, on the other hand, he did not seek to consider it in complete isolation from the material, like representatives of other contemporary teachings. He wrote that the soul is an entity, clothed in the form of a natural body, which has the possibility of physical life.
In Judaism
They believe in the existence of the soul and in Judaism. According to the Talmud, the soul is an entity independent of the physical body. This is the part of a person that has a direct connection with the Almighty. By its very nature, it is immaculate. Everything bad in people is due to the presence of a negative principle that exists along with the positive. The soul makes the body spiritualized. It is she who controls him. Just as the Almighty fills the surrounding world and remains invisible, the soul fills the physical body with itself.
The ideas about the afterlife of the Jews are somewhat similar to the Buddhist ones, as well as to the ancient beliefs of the Egyptians (from where these ideas may have been borrowed). According to these ideas, the human soul is eternal. And sinful souls come back to earth again and again to go through the circle of rebirth. This happens until complete perfection is achieved.
In Christianity
According to the Christian worldview, the soul is reality. Most of the various directions of Christianity interpret the soul as the highest intangible essence of man, the bearer of reason, emotions, and will. After the physical body dies, it continues to exist. And the further fate of the soul is determined by its actions during earthly life. Immortality is the most important property of the human soul in Christianity. Whether the soul goes to heaven or hell is determined by God's judgment. In addition, the Roman Catholic Church also has a doctrine of purgatory.
In Buddhism
One of the central ideas in many areas of Buddhism is Anatma-vada. This concept denies the absolute "I" or "Atman". Buddha denies the existence of an integral soul in man. People are made up of various elements - a material body, an immaterial mind, and also a formless consciousness. The Buddha compares human nature to a chariot consisting of wheels, axles, shafts, etc. Therefore, we can say that the concept of the soul in Buddhism is absent. When such a "chariot" disintegrates, a person ceases to exist.
Tibetan performances
According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol), the human soul is reality. After death, she falls into a tunnel located inside a special silver thread. It connects man with God. A dark soul has a very thin thread. If a person has done evil for many incarnations, then the Higher powers deprive him of his connection with God. The divine spark is withdrawn from the sinner, and he no longer has a chance to renew his connection with the upper world. His spirit turns completely black.
If a light spirit has a strong thread that connects it with the Almighty, then a dark soul constantly becomes thinner. The silver thread, according to Bardo Todol, can be restored at the request of a person. If a person sincerely repents of bad deeds and strives to become better, his connection with the world above is strengthened.
Are there people without a soul?
In Orthodoxy, it is believed that a person is deprived of the spiritual principle when he finally chooses to sin. At the same time, as such, the death of the spirit does not exist - there is only eternal torment. The meaning of human life is to make the soul alive, to bring it closer to God.
According to Kabbalah, a person who develops the spiritual side of his life in the right way, corrects his desires, gradually begins to feel a new reality. When he strives for spirituality, a true comprehension of the meaning of things, the reasons for the events that happen to him are revealed to him. In other words, a person does not have a soul until he develops it in himself. This process is similar to growing a plant from a seed - this is how the Kabbalah adherents teach.
One way or another, people without a soul are those who do not live, but only exist. Their inner world is devoid of love. Such a person cannot be born. The process of formation of the "I" personality occurs during interaction with the world. In other words, a person loses himself gradually, as a result of the negative impact of external factors, as well as his own reaction to these factors. Therefore, about those people who, due to misfortune and suffering, have become callous, emotionless, and they say that they have no soul.
A kind soul: basic qualities
If it is quite simple to define a negative person, then what properties do people of the opposite kind have? As a rule, such personalities are also always visible. But in some cases the kind soul of a person is revealed only in the process of communication with him. Such people have the following qualities: conscientiousness, mercy, love, the ability to compassion, devotion. They have a heightened sense of justice. They are responsive and will never pass by someone else's misfortune. Also, a kind person will not lie. Another quality is hard work.
Experiments by American Scientists
Scientists from the United States decided to conduct experiments, the results of which would make it possible to judge the presence or absence of an immortal soul in a person. The experiments were simple. Various drawings were placed on the ceiling in the operating room. If, during dying, a person's consciousness really continues to function, then people should have seen what is depicted on them.
Scientists had little faith that the result of the experiments could be positive. And they were right. The results showed that the descriptions of what the patients saw at the time of clinical death were nothing more than a hallucination provoked by the dying of neurons.
Opinion of Professor of Neurology K. Nelson
These experiments led to the conclusion that the idea of the afterlife is still a myth. Earlier, professor of neurology K. Nelson, who conducted research at the University of Lexington in Kentucky, came to the conclusion that patients in a state of coma are unable to distinguish reality from visions and hallucinations. The researcher writes, "The feeling of being surrounded by white light is a consequence of eye activity during REM sleep." The scientist also emphasizes that very strong muscle relaxation leads the patient to the feeling that he is dead. In addition, coma contributes to the emergence of a feeling of being outside your own body.
Research by scientists from Britain
And other scientists, when asked whether a person has a soul, managed to get an affirmative answer. The large-scale experiment was carried out under the strict guidance of the resuscitator S. Parnia. Of the 2,060 patients who came to the attention of doctors, 330 managed to survive. More than 40% of these people reported that even after death they retained the ability to perceive the surrounding reality. 140 people said that while they were partly conscious. However, 39% of the respondents could not recall specific memories. Parnia claims: it is impossible to say unequivocally about what happens after death with consciousness. However, there is no doubt that it does not disappear anywhere.
For example, one of the patients (age 57) reported that he left the body and watched for three minutes as the doctors performed resuscitation procedures. He described in detail the actions of the doctors and what sounds were made by the special technique that was being manipulated.
Parnia writes that consciousness in this case is present for another three minutes after the cardiac arrest, while usually it turns off after a maximum of half a minute. This is one of the most important pieces of evidence for the existence of the soul. The scientist emphasizes: after the physical body of a person ceases to function, in some unknown way, his consciousness is still functioning. A person retains the ability to perceive the world around him, which makes scientists believe in the immortality of the soul.
It is unlikely that in the near future people will be able to fully solve the mystery of the human spirit. However, this intrigue continues to excite scientists, religious leaders and ordinary people. Perhaps unknown forces will allow humanity to reveal the secret of the soul after he can achieve inner harmony and perfection.
Every believer at least once in his life thinks about what a human soul is. Why is it given to a person to think, sympathize, feel? Why can a person create?
What "part" of our body is "responsible" for these abilities? Is the soul a reality or a poetic symbol? Is it there or not?
Does a person have a soul
This question was seriously asked by medieval philosophers and materialistic scientists. For an Orthodox Christian, the answer is obvious. Of course have!
Only no one can say exactly what it looks like. Because the soul is an incorporeal part of human essence that distinguishes the human race from other creatures living on earth.
Human Soul - Definition
Description of the soul: created by God, the Creator of all that exists, an intelligent, free and immortal substance that is not part of the body, but only is in it for the duration of earthly life.
Theophan the Recluse presents the concept of the soul as the source of the phenomena that emanate from it. The saint says that the soul is not a manifestation of the will and strength of a certain being.
The soul is the main power of man, which gives him the ability to cognize Divine Love, to understand and behold the greatness of our Lord. It is wide and thin at the same time.
Interesting fact: in Greek, the etymology of the words "soul" and "breath" is similar; both are derived from the word breath.
The only danger for the disembodied, invisible to the eyes and eternally existing soul is the ignorance of the Lord. Grounded, devoid of the wings of Divine Grace, the soul dies, being "nominally" alive - it turns black. For it is said in the Scripture: "The soul that sinns, let it die" (Ezekiel 18:20).
What is the soul and spirit of a person
As the soul gives a person the ability to feel, so the spirit gives him the power to know God. The Holy Fathers call the spirit the highest, innermost “soul of the soul”. It is through the spirit that Divine grace, the power of Love, penetrates into the soul. The spirit knows everything about the soul, just as the brain knows everything about the body.
The human spirit strives to grow every second of its existence, to penetrate into unknown areas, to climb higher and higher up the ladder of understanding and spiritual growth. The power of the spirit attracts a person to the knowledge of the invisible, eternal, Divine, as opposed to simple earthly joys and tangible things, objects and concepts.
The spirit makes a person related to the Angels, as the body - to earthly creatures. People whose minds are completely focused on pressing problems and issues weaken their spirit, drown out its voice - but even so they cannot destroy it.
Does the soul exist scientifically
Scientists have long tried to ignore the question of whether the human soul exists. As it turned out relatively recently - only to confirm its existence and study its properties!
Today, the presence of a soul in a person is confirmed by the results of many studies. For example, a group of German psychologists and physicians, having collected material about the near-death experiences of about 1000 people of different confessions, gender, age, views of the world and life, confirmed the existence of life after death.
All the subjects, with the exception of some insignificant details, told the same thing: at the threshold of death, they felt themselves leaving their bodies and floating along a white tunnel to a warm and kind light.
When a person has a soul
The soul does not have an eternal incarnation. It originates at the moment of conception of a child, grows and develops along with his growing body.
After the birth of a baby, his soul gets to know the world, grows, develops, learns to create and ... destroy.
And then the soul makes a choice: to strive for the light, for God - or not. And he follows him for the rest of his life. After the death of the physical body, the soul does not pass into another, but appears to the Judgment of God, where it receives a reward and punishment in accordance with its deeds.
After all of the above, the soul goes to Heaven or Hell until the end of the history of this world.
What is a restless soul
Such words have become part of our vocabulary. Restless soul - what does it mean? The soul, which is doomed to eternal existence without prayerful intercession, the soul is troubled, suffers from confusion.
These are the souls of people who have died and did not have time for various reasons to receive the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. Restless souls poke at the closed doors and shutters of heavenly dwellings, there is no place for them there, they are like homeless people, without a roof and shelter.
What is the soul of a person
The Holy Fathers assure that the human soul consists of three forces: reason, feelings and will. The mind, that is, the part responsible for cognition, thinking and expressing in words one's opinion on various issues is the main part of the soul.
The "mission" of the mind, which it successfully copes with in an unclouded state, is to distinguish good from evil, to cognize the world - and to indicate to the strength of desire (will) in which direction to act, whom to consider friends, whose opinion to listen to.
Emotions are the most difficult to control part of the soul, which is only concerned with spoiling the "relationship" between will and reason, making it difficult for spiritual growth. This is why it is so important to monitor your emotions, to keep them under control.
Conclusion
Man is a being, one in his duality. Its two halves, body and soul, although they are essentially autonomous formations, are merged together by the will of God.
Unlike other God's creations, man is an illustration of the law of balance, which supports the visible, tangible material world.
Daughter's indifference to an old sick mother ... there is no soul there. There is probably no more bastard act when children refuse to take care of sick, old parents. My ex-sister and her family, for whom my mother did everything in her life and was shaking for her daughter, refused altogether - because her health can be damaged, she can get sick and in general the apartment is not hers, which she took earlier does not count, but since she she did not register her daughter there, let the one who is registered, the son, take care of. I was not going to attract her, it's the same "" elite "" "who live, where the entire" "elite" of the city, and outside, as they say, everything is redneck. For 3 years while I was caring for my mother, she had 5 strokes, gangrene of the legs, which had to be washed all the time with a solution of peroxide and treated, bandaged, even later putting on a respirator, you could smell rot, fingers were black and one was already falling off. But this is one thing. , diapers were changed 10 times a day so that there were no bedsores, but after that it was necessary to wash and wipe dry so that there were no bedsores, they appeared 2.4 months later, when they were taken to the hospital for 12 days with a stroke, although from the morning until the evenings with my wife were there and turned over, but a catheter was inserted and this is the result, before that they massaged it on the tailbone, then both the feet and sides and on the back went, just have time to process. Naturally, the daughter appeared to visit her mother - the first time after 7 months, 2 after 6, then more often after 3, then according to the schedule of weeks after 2, and when the mother did not speak and did not understand, she came to the mark almost every day for 5-10 minutes, stood and left . In the house, everyone asked, "what did your sister tick about the mark?" At one time, when my mother was in health, but did not walk well, my son-in-law also visited, asked to sign a power of attorney to the dacha, since it is difficult for mom to pay taxes and you never know, then he just confronted the fact that they had sold the dacha - this is another ... how worried she was, because she and her father erected all this ... it was not possible to describe everything, it was very hard for my mother, she defended her daughter all her life, and in old age she refused her - no help for caring, even when mine died Mom, but she died in my arms, it was said when we were going to bury, so that they would be told and refused to go to the commemoration. Here is mommy and your beloved daughter, and the daughter-in-law, whom all her life spread rot, helped me, lifted and washed, earned a compressor fracture of the vertebra and 2 hernias between the vertebral bodies, I'm not talking about myself, a lot of things, I slept for 2-4 hours a day, I'm used to it, now the pills don't work well, I’m grateful to God that he gave me the opportunity to take care of my mother, she’s my dear and helped, gave me the opportunity to endure. ..there were cases when I had to write a reply to take me to the hospital, my wife at that time left to help my daughter in St. ka and you climbed, a miracle, this is only the help of the Lord, Okay, everything goes away, my mother is already there, at God’s, how everyone showed their insides, if my mother was still in her health said - “” “don’t even communicate with this family, they are evil , the envious are just non-people "" And they have something to envy us - we love each other with our little wife, and they never had this in their family, as their daughter has, only money. I am grateful to my relatives - my wife, daughter and to my wife's parents, for me they are mine too. Forgive me, but there is nothing to say about the former in justification, even if the father told me;
Various spiritual teachings proceed from the fact that a person has an immortal essence - a soul. When our body dies, the soul goes to the afterlife or passes into the next physical incarnation. This is confirmed by the stories of people who have experienced clinical death. I wonder if there are some purely scientific facts that support this theory?
Does consciousness live outside the brain?
It is generally accepted that the process of thinking is carried out in our brain. In this case, death or damage to the brain should lead to the destruction of consciousness, and hence to the death of the soul. But at the same time, there are many facts that cast doubt on this statement.
The first hypothesis that the brain is only a "receiver" for thoughts was expressed by the Nobel laureate John Eccles. The famous Russian neurophysiologist Natalya Bekhtereva believed that the generally accepted theory of the brain was unable to explain how, for example, the creative process takes place. Studies carried out at the St. Petersburg Institute of the Brain have shown that this organ is capable of generating only thoughts concerning the simplest and habitual actions that we perform every day ... In addition, there are facts when a tomograph recorded brain activity in patients who were in a state of coma or hypnotic trance.
Shocking examples
Back in the 1920s, biologist Carl Lashley discovered that conditioned reflexes in rats do not disappear after removing various parts of the brain. There are many cases when people with damaged brains retained their mental abilities in full.
So, the American Carlos Rodriguez lives without the frontal lobes of the brain, that is, he lacks as much as 60 percent of this organ. Dr. Robinson of the Paris Academy of Sciences described a case in which a man died at about the age of 60 and died a month after sustaining a head injury. An autopsy revealed that instead of a brain, he had only a thin shell of medulla ... Despite this, up to the injury, the man led a completely normal life.
The German scientist Hoofland faced a similar episode. In the skull of a patient who died shortly after he was paralyzed, instead of the brain, 300 grams of fluid floated. However, before the paralysis, the patient was functioning quite normally ...
In 1976, at the age of 55, the famous Dutch watchmaker Jan Gerling passed away. His skull was also filled with fluid instead of brain ...
One of the last such cases was recorded in Sheffield (Scotland). X-rays revealed that a student whose IQ was 126, which is above average, had no brain at all ... Even if we assume that healthy parts of the brain are able to take over the functions of damaged ones, how can the brain replace the water inside the cranium? Or even emptiness?
Rather, one can believe that there is a certain immaterial entity that includes consciousness, which temporarily "populates" in us. And the body is just a shell within which the soul functions.
Phantom effect
People who have amputated limbs often feel so-called phantom pains - a missing arm or leg aches or itches, so sometimes it causes unbearable suffering ... It seems that the "aura" of the missing body parts remains, and it causes similar sensations.
There is a famous photograph showing a tree that has lost part of its trunk and crown after a lightning strike. But in the photo taken with special radiation, the tree looks whole: the missing branches, trunk and even foliage are clearly visible. Because the "aura" of the tree, its "soul", has been preserved ...
Receiver for the soul
But why does the soul need a body? According to most religions, the soul does not appear from the very moment of conception, but later, when the brain develops in the embryo. "The human brain in this case is a kind of receiver that receives information from the personality-consciousness-soul," says Ruslan Madatov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, lecturer at the Department of Religious Studies at one of the Prague universities. Any biologist familiar with physical electrical circuits will tell you that. " Probably, a "reverse" process can also occur when, with the help of the brain, we emit information into the surrounding space. This can explain such "parascientific" phenomena as telepathy or clairvoyance.
All this means that it is possible to influence the brain from the outside, activating its cells, for example, for therapeutic purposes using the method of electromagnetic stimulation. Although it is still far from understanding the mechanism of interaction between the soul and the body. And is official science capable of explaining this today?
