So, what's your soul doing?

"The soul desires to dwell within the body because, without the members of that body it can neither act nor feel."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Only those who have no idea what they are talking about could have the bald confidence required to comment on this quote. Unless, of course, some sense can be made of the soul other than that proposed by various religions.

We know for a fact what happens to our bodies after we die. They decompose and their components are recycled. Nothing--no particle, no atom, no mineral, no energy--is ever lost to nature. Any matter that changes its fundamental form becomes energy (or vice versa), which some believe is a different form of the same basic components of existence.

But what of our personalities? We develop skills, we accumulate knowledge, we develop personalities and specialized expert persona that go far beyond the fundamental parts of our corporeal selves.

Even those who don't believe in humans having a soul agree that we have personalities that go far beyond that of any other animal or plant in nature. Is all that lost when we die?

Setting aside the experiences of hypnotists who allegedly take their patients back to previous lives, it makes sense that something as developed and sophisticated as the personality (or soul, if you will) would not disappear when we die as that would defy every law of nature we know.

Does the soul require a body to act or feel, as da Vinci claimed? That's a debate for those who love philosophy that doesn't have to be restricted by reality.

If the laws of nature require that both energy and matter must be conserved (that is, cannot and will not ever be totally lost), then something that is created as personality (or soul) should follow the same laws. Natural laws mean nothing unless they apply to all situations with similar factors.

Thus we may conclude that you have a soul that dwells within your body while your body conducts it business here on Earth.

Now, what will you do with it? It doesn't make sense to abuse your body as that would shorten the ability of your soul to do whatever it's supposed to do here.

It also doesn't make sense to destroy other bodies because their souls must also be here for some purpose. If we destroy others, their souls will return (the proposed Law of Conservation of Souls) to fulfill a similar mission, only in some other body.

Perhaps instead of debating whether or not we have souls or what our purpose is on Earth, we should become more focussed on how we can help our souls to advance the cause for which they are in our bodies.

It doesn't make sense for souls to try to eliminate other souls. It couldn't happen.

We have souls for a reason. It's not likely for the propagation of more souls, as that would also defy the laws of nature--the total amount of matter and energy remains the same, so the total amount of souls must also be the same. Maybe our souls get thinner as we produce more bodies.

More likely our souls have a collective purpose. Some direction that is not immediately obvious to most of us.

Give some thought to what the purpose of the soul you have is. Before your body loses it.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems,' striving to make sense of the compoents of who we really are.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl