The title will evoke two entirely different, independent, even incompatible, lines of thinking. One will be about the survivors, their feelings of loss, their struggles to cope, even their guilt. The other would be about the person who died. We know what happens to the body, but what happens to the personality that inhabits the body once the body is gone?
Take a few moments to think about one or the other of these lines of thinking. I will take the unusual step of leaving a few lines blank to encourage you to mull over your own thoughts.
.................
.................
.................
When the body dies, it changes. As Albert Einstein said, everything is energy, though that energy may be in the form of matter sometimes (e=mc2). In nature, in every part of the universe we know anything about, nothing ever disappears. The matter that was the body of the one who died is conserved, by nature, either as energy or as a part of something else that is matter.
We bury the dead body, a ritual dating back to ancient times when it was believed the whole body might be resurrected in a future life. Nobody today believes that a dead body will return to life as a whole person, with the same unique characteristics and personality as it had in its original life. Who would want the decayed mess anyway? When we bury a dead body, we put away that body as we turn it back to nature to deal with as it will.
Did the person, while living, have a distinct personality? Not characteristics and features. A toaster has those. Did the person have something that clearly distinguished him or her, other than characteristics and features? Toasters may look and behave alike, but not people.
If so, then that personality--called by some the soul or spirit--must continue to exist. The natural law of conservation dictates that nothing disappears. That personality must continue to exist after the physical body is put away. We don’t know how it began, we don’t know where it goes after the body breaks down, we only know that something unique to an individual exists while we know that person.
We know nothing about the nature of that conserved personality. But then, we know very little--most of us know nothing--about energy. What do you know, for example, about the nature of electricity, of magnetism, of heat, or light, even of gravity? It doesn’t mean that something doesn’t exist because we can’t see it or touch it. Energy exists. Spirit can exist too. Science, through its own laws, says that the personality of a person who once lived must continue, even as the body transforms into something else.
The spirit has no need to transform because it is neither matter nor energy, the only two kinds of existence we can even slightly understand. To be truthful, even science knows very little about these two states of energy, though it claims to have great knowledge.
Conservation is not just faith, it’s the law, a law of nature. We don’t know where that conserved personality or soul goes, where it continues to exist. But we don’t know what happens to the energy that results when matter changes its form to energy either.
Does that personality hang around in the form of memory? Science might say that is a fictitious and unnecessary construct. But then, science has no explanation--not even a clue--about what memory is. Memory, like the continuation of personality or soul of a person who once lived in a human body, may be another form of energy, or something entirely beyond what science understands today.
Not long ago science taught us that our body consisted only of our cells. Now we know that we are a symbiotic collection of cells of our body and maybe 20 times as many bacteria (mostly on our skin and in our gut) that we can’t live without and that can’t live without us. Science has trouble distinguishing between fact and beliefs that scientists masquerade as "theory" (believe it because we said it) or fact.
Let’s return to the other line of thought, what continues in the minds of people who knew the dead person before death.
A person commits suicide because they can’t cope with the pain (usually emotional pain) that has become the main focus of their life. That person did not receive what he or she needed in order to be able to cope while alive. Didn’t receive what they needed from the very people who will regret the passing of that person.
As I write this, "sweet miracle" Whitney Houston’s funeral has taken place. The cause of death has not been revealed. The outpouring of grief and emotion about her passing matches that after the death of almost anyone in history. Her body was found under water in a bathtub. Police do not suspect foul play. Her death was likely some form of suicide, perhaps accidental from an overdose of something.
No one wants to spoil the outpouring of good wishes and goodwill in memories about Whitney. Before she died, the media portrayed her as a broken singer and actor, destroyed by twenty years of cocaine abuse. Now she is an icon of beauty in many forms. "Maybe the best singer ever in history" one of the speakers at her funeral said.
Unspoken at that funeral was that Whitney Houston needed something more than people who knew her were giving. The very same people who sat in the church at her funeral. Of course they would feel guilt as well as great regret.
Are they guilty? Under the law, you are considered guilty if you break a law even if you didn't know the law existed. There is no law about tuning into the needs of others. We know little about suicide, most of us, so we would not know what a person needed before they decided to end it all.
It’s not that no one knows what every person needs in order to feel useful, needed, worthy and secure. But very few do know. As societies, we don’t pay attention to those who know the answers because knowing would only add responsibilities to our lives. It’s easier to regret later than to commit now.
As important as these lessons are, we don’t teach them to our children, in general. We don’t teach them to each other. Most of us don’t want to know about these lessons because we don’t want the responsibility of knowing what we would need to do to help someone else who is emotionally at risk. It’s all we can do to look after ourselves.
Yet we have needs too, needs that are not satisfied. If we knew what our loved ones needed, we would also know what we need ourselves. If we knew what we should know to help others, we would be less needy ourselves.
The lesson we all need to learn is to listen to others. That’s what every one of us needs. We need to listen to others and we need others to listen to us. Of course there is more to it than that. Listening means caring. The other thing we all need, that is a basic need of our species, is touch by others. Touching means caring.
Very few people would commit suicide if they sincerely believed that someone cared about them. Those who care must show their care or the message will not get through.
Now you have a beginning. Listen. Hug. Care. Show you care.
Don’t wait to attend the funeral.
Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers about what children need to develop socially and emotionally as well as intellectually and physically as they grow. What they need to avoid becoming statistics.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label soul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soul. Show all posts
Monday, February 27, 2012
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Can You Grasp Spirituality?
The further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves andthe fewer and fewer people one likes.
- Gale D. Webbe, clergyman and author (1909-2000)
It almost seems as if there is something missing from this quote, something additional that the person who captured the quote originally neglected to include.
But first let's consider the concept of spirituality. In this sense of the word, we generally agree that spirituality refers to the incorporeal, that which is not a material part of nature. Whether the supernatural part of spirituality could be pure energy or something entirely separate from our understanding of reality is debatable.
Mostly it's debatable because science tends to think of energy as something that may be harnessed to do work. Dark energy, a recently invented term to describe why the universe is apparently blowing apart faster than ever before, is accepted as energy because it's a force that is actually doing something. As God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to actually do anything (especially any kind of work), science disavows the supernatural as being pure energy.
Just because God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to do work does not mean that it doesn't exist, only that science cannot deal with it because it's beyond the realm and purview of science. Science works almost entirely within the proverbial "box" thinking. Anything that does not fall within the "walls" of the box does not exist and will not be considered seriously by science.
Spirituality, by its definition, includes something that is beyond matter and beyond the thinking box of science.
What does it mean, if a person has grown spiritually? It means something that people who insist upon living their lives within the box cannot understand. They can't even grasp the possibility or potential because--whether they realize it or not--they deny the possibility of existence beyond their box.
Imagine someone who has grown up living in one house. The person has never left that house, ever, in 35 years. All that person knows of the world is what he experiences in that house and what he sees out the windows. He comes to believe that what is inside the house is real, what he can see outside of the house may or may not be real (the way we think of movies), and what he may hear about what he cannot experience or see simply does not exist. It could not exist, he believes, because he has no way to comprehend existence beyond his experience and his senses.
Growing spiritually means experiencing beyond what box thinkers can conceive could be real. A person who has grown spiritually passes among people who have no grasp and who have had no inclination to understand or experience anything beyond the box walls of their lives. The spiritual person may love others in their life, recognizing them as part of the wholeness that is total existence. But he may find them hard to like because they are so simple, so limited, so ignorant.
A person who has grown so he or she has the ability to live in a spiritual existence will not dislike anyone. Yet they have no need to like others either. Does a grain of sand feel the need to like and be liked by other grains around it on a beach? The grain of sand, like the spiritual person, lives in a wholeness of everything, where sand, plants, animals, people and even the person himself is a component of the whole of existence.
We know that when plants and animals and people die, their bodies get recycled so the atoms that formed them become part of something else. We know that matter (stuff) can be changed into energy (such as by burning) and energy into matter (as proven by Einstein's famous equation). It's called the Law of Conservation. Nothing disappears, though it may change its form. What exists, continues to exist, whether as matter or as energy.
Box thinkers, non-spiritual people, believe the basic physics of this concept, but refuse to acknowledge its implications, its consequences for our lives and for all of existence through all of history. Is there nothing beyond matter and energy? If so, then there is nothing to you other than body cells and energy. That means nothing that is "you," no personality, no non-physical life, nothing that can form relationships with others. Could a cell of your body or potential energy within your gut form a relationship with other cells or other forms of energy within you or elsewhere? Most of us would say no, meaning that there is more to us than cells and energy.
Spiritual people live in two dimensions (or universes, if you will), one tangible and sentient, the other totally beyond the senses and understanding of box thinkers. Moreover, the latter is beyond the comprehension of themselves. Yet that lack of understanding, that intangibility, that failure to grasp is not frightening. It brings peace.
Spiritual people cannot help but love others, all others. They are not afraid of what they don't understand. After all, what they don't like or understand about the tangible world is only temporary, an existence in transition. What matters to them is real and does not change markedly. It's beyond understanding, outside the box.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to help their children understand the realities of the world and realities beyond their understanding, but still within their ability to experience.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
- Gale D. Webbe, clergyman and author (1909-2000)
It almost seems as if there is something missing from this quote, something additional that the person who captured the quote originally neglected to include.
But first let's consider the concept of spirituality. In this sense of the word, we generally agree that spirituality refers to the incorporeal, that which is not a material part of nature. Whether the supernatural part of spirituality could be pure energy or something entirely separate from our understanding of reality is debatable.
Mostly it's debatable because science tends to think of energy as something that may be harnessed to do work. Dark energy, a recently invented term to describe why the universe is apparently blowing apart faster than ever before, is accepted as energy because it's a force that is actually doing something. As God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to actually do anything (especially any kind of work), science disavows the supernatural as being pure energy.
Just because God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to do work does not mean that it doesn't exist, only that science cannot deal with it because it's beyond the realm and purview of science. Science works almost entirely within the proverbial "box" thinking. Anything that does not fall within the "walls" of the box does not exist and will not be considered seriously by science.
Spirituality, by its definition, includes something that is beyond matter and beyond the thinking box of science.
What does it mean, if a person has grown spiritually? It means something that people who insist upon living their lives within the box cannot understand. They can't even grasp the possibility or potential because--whether they realize it or not--they deny the possibility of existence beyond their box.
Imagine someone who has grown up living in one house. The person has never left that house, ever, in 35 years. All that person knows of the world is what he experiences in that house and what he sees out the windows. He comes to believe that what is inside the house is real, what he can see outside of the house may or may not be real (the way we think of movies), and what he may hear about what he cannot experience or see simply does not exist. It could not exist, he believes, because he has no way to comprehend existence beyond his experience and his senses.
Growing spiritually means experiencing beyond what box thinkers can conceive could be real. A person who has grown spiritually passes among people who have no grasp and who have had no inclination to understand or experience anything beyond the box walls of their lives. The spiritual person may love others in their life, recognizing them as part of the wholeness that is total existence. But he may find them hard to like because they are so simple, so limited, so ignorant.
A person who has grown so he or she has the ability to live in a spiritual existence will not dislike anyone. Yet they have no need to like others either. Does a grain of sand feel the need to like and be liked by other grains around it on a beach? The grain of sand, like the spiritual person, lives in a wholeness of everything, where sand, plants, animals, people and even the person himself is a component of the whole of existence.
We know that when plants and animals and people die, their bodies get recycled so the atoms that formed them become part of something else. We know that matter (stuff) can be changed into energy (such as by burning) and energy into matter (as proven by Einstein's famous equation). It's called the Law of Conservation. Nothing disappears, though it may change its form. What exists, continues to exist, whether as matter or as energy.
Box thinkers, non-spiritual people, believe the basic physics of this concept, but refuse to acknowledge its implications, its consequences for our lives and for all of existence through all of history. Is there nothing beyond matter and energy? If so, then there is nothing to you other than body cells and energy. That means nothing that is "you," no personality, no non-physical life, nothing that can form relationships with others. Could a cell of your body or potential energy within your gut form a relationship with other cells or other forms of energy within you or elsewhere? Most of us would say no, meaning that there is more to us than cells and energy.
Spiritual people live in two dimensions (or universes, if you will), one tangible and sentient, the other totally beyond the senses and understanding of box thinkers. Moreover, the latter is beyond the comprehension of themselves. Yet that lack of understanding, that intangibility, that failure to grasp is not frightening. It brings peace.
Spiritual people cannot help but love others, all others. They are not afraid of what they don't understand. After all, what they don't like or understand about the tangible world is only temporary, an existence in transition. What matters to them is real and does not change markedly. It's beyond understanding, outside the box.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to help their children understand the realities of the world and realities beyond their understanding, but still within their ability to experience.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
How Science Lets Us Down
The purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone they become no more than beasts.
- Saint Sophia, 2nd century Rome, whose daughters Faith (Pistis), Hope (Elpis) and Love (Agape) were slaughtered in front of their mother for their devotion to their God
The Roman emperor Hadrian had Sophia's daughters slashed, stretched and eventually beheaded and burned to get them to renounce their beliefs, all in front of their mother. As he could think of no worse punishment to Sophia that to live out the rest of her life knowing that her only children had died horrifying deaths, he spared her. She gathered the bodies of her children, buried them and died three days later.
Were they all martyrs? Were they all stupid to die before their times instead of saying the words Hadrian wanted (albeit blasphemous words because he wanted them to acknowledge him as their god)?
In the 21st century we have come to respect science more than at any time in the past. Science originally was the means by which humans could better understand the works of God. Yet science gained such power and authority over its respective cultures that it now sees itself as a kind of god.
Nothing that cannot be manipulated by humans or that cannot be rationalized as originating according to natural order exists, according to the materialist view. There can be no God because no one can describe God, no one can prove the existence of God, no one can manipulate God.
Furthermore, the gods of the popular religions of today can be shown to be human inventions or hand-me-downs from earlier pagan religions.
Yet materialists cannot explain dreams in terms that do not make dreamers seem insane at night. They cannot explain visions that people have, or vision quests that change people's lives.
They cannot explain ESP (extra-sensory perception). They cannot explain how patients who are legally dead on an operating table can have out of body experiences where they can later describe exactly what was going on in the operating theatre until surgeons restarted their hearts, brains and other organs.
Materialists cannot explain self or mind other than in ways that make us seem like advanced forms of dogs or dolphins.
In short, if materialists can't grasp their minds around a concept in such a way that they can explain it in human terms, they deny it exists. They expect our reality to be limited by the perimeters of their minds. Or I should say brains because they don't believe in the mind as being separate from the brain.
How does that fit with quantum physics where a particle can be in two places at once, where in fact if you look for it in one of those places it will automatically be in the other? How do they explain that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points only on a global scale, not on a universal scale where time and space bend, can even fold back on each other?
Multiple dimensions, they say. We can only detect four dimensions, but string theory stipulates that all this mysterious stuff makes sense if we accept that reality has eleven dimensions.
Science asks us to believe that some day it will show that all the mysteries of physics, of space larger than we can imagine and space smaller than we can imagine, will be explained and proven as truths. It's called Promissory Science. Science promises that it will prove these mysteries some day.
At the same time science denies that God or any of the other mysteries it cannot explain, phenomena and experiences that you and I may have many times in our lives, will ever be explained because they don't really exist. Science says we should believe its promises, not the promises of non-scientists.
How does science say we invent these things? It's all in our minds.
Oh, wait! They don't believe in the mind. It's all in our brains.
But apes, dolphins, wolves and many other animals have brains similar to our own, some even larger than ours, yet they don't seem to have supernatural experiences. If a brain can create fantasies, should a sophisticated brain such as that of a dolphin or a chimpanzee not be able to do the same?
So far, only humans have been shown to have extrasensory experiences. These can easily be explained by the coexistence of both brain and mind. But materialist scientists can't grasp the concept of mind because it's too difficult to study. It denies the mind exists, in many cases.
Are they not, despite their protests, what Saint Sophia called "no more than beasts?"
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are well balanced socially and emotionally as well as intellectually and physically.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Saint Sophia, 2nd century Rome, whose daughters Faith (Pistis), Hope (Elpis) and Love (Agape) were slaughtered in front of their mother for their devotion to their God
The Roman emperor Hadrian had Sophia's daughters slashed, stretched and eventually beheaded and burned to get them to renounce their beliefs, all in front of their mother. As he could think of no worse punishment to Sophia that to live out the rest of her life knowing that her only children had died horrifying deaths, he spared her. She gathered the bodies of her children, buried them and died three days later.
Were they all martyrs? Were they all stupid to die before their times instead of saying the words Hadrian wanted (albeit blasphemous words because he wanted them to acknowledge him as their god)?
In the 21st century we have come to respect science more than at any time in the past. Science originally was the means by which humans could better understand the works of God. Yet science gained such power and authority over its respective cultures that it now sees itself as a kind of god.
Nothing that cannot be manipulated by humans or that cannot be rationalized as originating according to natural order exists, according to the materialist view. There can be no God because no one can describe God, no one can prove the existence of God, no one can manipulate God.
Furthermore, the gods of the popular religions of today can be shown to be human inventions or hand-me-downs from earlier pagan religions.
Yet materialists cannot explain dreams in terms that do not make dreamers seem insane at night. They cannot explain visions that people have, or vision quests that change people's lives.
They cannot explain ESP (extra-sensory perception). They cannot explain how patients who are legally dead on an operating table can have out of body experiences where they can later describe exactly what was going on in the operating theatre until surgeons restarted their hearts, brains and other organs.
Materialists cannot explain self or mind other than in ways that make us seem like advanced forms of dogs or dolphins.
In short, if materialists can't grasp their minds around a concept in such a way that they can explain it in human terms, they deny it exists. They expect our reality to be limited by the perimeters of their minds. Or I should say brains because they don't believe in the mind as being separate from the brain.
How does that fit with quantum physics where a particle can be in two places at once, where in fact if you look for it in one of those places it will automatically be in the other? How do they explain that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points only on a global scale, not on a universal scale where time and space bend, can even fold back on each other?
Multiple dimensions, they say. We can only detect four dimensions, but string theory stipulates that all this mysterious stuff makes sense if we accept that reality has eleven dimensions.
Science asks us to believe that some day it will show that all the mysteries of physics, of space larger than we can imagine and space smaller than we can imagine, will be explained and proven as truths. It's called Promissory Science. Science promises that it will prove these mysteries some day.
At the same time science denies that God or any of the other mysteries it cannot explain, phenomena and experiences that you and I may have many times in our lives, will ever be explained because they don't really exist. Science says we should believe its promises, not the promises of non-scientists.
How does science say we invent these things? It's all in our minds.
Oh, wait! They don't believe in the mind. It's all in our brains.
But apes, dolphins, wolves and many other animals have brains similar to our own, some even larger than ours, yet they don't seem to have supernatural experiences. If a brain can create fantasies, should a sophisticated brain such as that of a dolphin or a chimpanzee not be able to do the same?
So far, only humans have been shown to have extrasensory experiences. These can easily be explained by the coexistence of both brain and mind. But materialist scientists can't grasp the concept of mind because it's too difficult to study. It denies the mind exists, in many cases.
Are they not, despite their protests, what Saint Sophia called "no more than beasts?"
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who are well balanced socially and emotionally as well as intellectually and physically.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Attacking The Hypocrisy Of Science
There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Misérables
It's impossible at this time to know what Victor Hugo meant by "the human soul." As many different concepts exist for it, it would be nearly impossible to find a consensus among any group of people no matter how small.
Let's put this quote into perspective. It's extremely difficult for anyone to have a workable grasp of the immensity that is the great ocean that comprises most of the surface of our planet. As a frontier of science, the ocean is still relatively unexplored territory. New (previously unknown) species of ocean dwellers are discovered through research every week, almost at the rate of one per day.
The quantity of water and life in the great ocean are beyond the comprehension of most people, if not all of us. At the bottom of the ocean lies more than three times as much land as humans have ever walked in all of history.
What is the sky? If you take a photo of it, or many photos to comprise a panoramic view of the sky, then assemble them into a contiguous whole, would that be enough to explain the sky? Of course not. The blue of the sky is merely a blue shift of white light coming from the sun. Beyond that are galaxies we can see at night, plus billions more galaxies we can't see, then maybe other universes beyond that.
That's not even considering other dimensions that may exist all around us, features of reality we can't sense but some people feel or experience from time to time. As the concepts of multiple universes and dimensions of space-time other than the one we perceive enter science through theories such as the string theories of physics, science is forced to accept that there may be existence beyond what they can detect with their equipment, that is little more than supersensitive versions of our own five senses.
Scientists exploring other galaxies with their telescopes and spacecraft tell us that planets far beyond ours may hold life. They don't want us to accept anything we may perceive as real if they can't prove its existence themselves, but they are quite prepared to propose that whole planets of life--some maybe with non-DNA-based life--probably exist beyond our present ability to detect. They use statistics as evidence, as if anyone with any sense of experience with the false and deceptive use of statistics would grant that any credibility.
Many scientists deny the existence of the human soul. They claim it's a figment of our brains, if it exists at all. They can even show what happens in our brains when what we call a soul is active. But, they believe, it's nothing more than our imaginations at work. Yet they want us to believe in other civilizations light years away and other dimensions of existence for which they have no evidence more than a vague theory with no proof in the works.
The trouble with our concept of the human soul is that far too many people have used their own versions of fictional concepts they made up to bilk many of us out of our money. Frauds and charlatans have existed almost as long as our species has. Many of them have purported to have knowledge of the human soul that the rest of us don't have. They don't, but we and our ancestors have paid good money to hear their stories anyway.
That doesn't mean that the human soul doesn't exist. Or, for that matter, that God doesn't exist. We all know that there are as many differing concepts of God as there are religions on the planet. That includes societies such as what we call the Roman Empire, that appointed their own Caesars as gods--they worshipped their emperor as a god.
That doesn't mean that God or the human soul doesn't exist. It means that most of us haven't the ability to detect them. We may pray to God, hoping that he exists, having been threatened with eternal damnation in Hell if we don't fall on our knees before the God that someone else tells us is the real God. But we can't be certain that the God we praise is real, any more than we can prove that unknown civilizations light years away are real, or different dimensions are real.
Or even that thought is real. Science can prove that something happens in various parts of the brain as we think and that different parts "light up" on their scopes as we do different kinds of thinking. But science has only proven that something has happened in the brain when we think. It has absolutely no concept of what thought is, at least nothing I consider workable.
The very scientists who are thinking about how to explain to us that things they can't prove don't exist can't prove that thought exists. By rights we should be able to claim that their thoughts are nothing more than activity of their imaginations.
So, what is the human soul? Nothing more or less than a part of God that is on loan to us while we inhabit these bodies of ours. We are all part of one great whole.
When our body dies, it gets recycled. Not an atom is lost when our body decomposes. It all becomes either part of other things composed of atoms (matter) or it becomes some form of energy. Just ask Einstein who explained it with his famous equation, e = mc2 No matter or energy are ever lost when a transfer or transformation happens. It's all part of a great whole.
Science can't explain energy either. They know energy exists because they have experienced it. So what can science offer to those of us who have experienced something beyond what even they can't comprehend?
Perhaps science should do what it tells us to do with thoughts about subjects we can't explain: shut up.
The human soul cannot be explained by science, so science should not have any right to make definitive pronouncements about it. Since the human soul is merely part of the greater whole we call God, it follows that science should have no say about God either. Science has no right to tell us that something we believe doesn't exist while it blithely accepts theories that propose the existence of things they can't prove; that would be hypocrisy.
I feel God within me. I can't explain that. I don't even have an interest in attempting to explain it or to prove it to anyone, let alone a doubter.
The doubters always make more noise than the believers who know they are right, who know what they feel within them. That doesn't make them right or those with greater perception and higher levels of consciousness wrong.
It only shows their ignorance and inability to tolerate thoughts that go beyond what they can comprehend. They are bigots with white coats.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children truths before the charlatans get at them. or to make corrections if they have.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Misérables
It's impossible at this time to know what Victor Hugo meant by "the human soul." As many different concepts exist for it, it would be nearly impossible to find a consensus among any group of people no matter how small.
Let's put this quote into perspective. It's extremely difficult for anyone to have a workable grasp of the immensity that is the great ocean that comprises most of the surface of our planet. As a frontier of science, the ocean is still relatively unexplored territory. New (previously unknown) species of ocean dwellers are discovered through research every week, almost at the rate of one per day.
The quantity of water and life in the great ocean are beyond the comprehension of most people, if not all of us. At the bottom of the ocean lies more than three times as much land as humans have ever walked in all of history.
What is the sky? If you take a photo of it, or many photos to comprise a panoramic view of the sky, then assemble them into a contiguous whole, would that be enough to explain the sky? Of course not. The blue of the sky is merely a blue shift of white light coming from the sun. Beyond that are galaxies we can see at night, plus billions more galaxies we can't see, then maybe other universes beyond that.
That's not even considering other dimensions that may exist all around us, features of reality we can't sense but some people feel or experience from time to time. As the concepts of multiple universes and dimensions of space-time other than the one we perceive enter science through theories such as the string theories of physics, science is forced to accept that there may be existence beyond what they can detect with their equipment, that is little more than supersensitive versions of our own five senses.
Scientists exploring other galaxies with their telescopes and spacecraft tell us that planets far beyond ours may hold life. They don't want us to accept anything we may perceive as real if they can't prove its existence themselves, but they are quite prepared to propose that whole planets of life--some maybe with non-DNA-based life--probably exist beyond our present ability to detect. They use statistics as evidence, as if anyone with any sense of experience with the false and deceptive use of statistics would grant that any credibility.
Many scientists deny the existence of the human soul. They claim it's a figment of our brains, if it exists at all. They can even show what happens in our brains when what we call a soul is active. But, they believe, it's nothing more than our imaginations at work. Yet they want us to believe in other civilizations light years away and other dimensions of existence for which they have no evidence more than a vague theory with no proof in the works.
The trouble with our concept of the human soul is that far too many people have used their own versions of fictional concepts they made up to bilk many of us out of our money. Frauds and charlatans have existed almost as long as our species has. Many of them have purported to have knowledge of the human soul that the rest of us don't have. They don't, but we and our ancestors have paid good money to hear their stories anyway.
That doesn't mean that the human soul doesn't exist. Or, for that matter, that God doesn't exist. We all know that there are as many differing concepts of God as there are religions on the planet. That includes societies such as what we call the Roman Empire, that appointed their own Caesars as gods--they worshipped their emperor as a god.
That doesn't mean that God or the human soul doesn't exist. It means that most of us haven't the ability to detect them. We may pray to God, hoping that he exists, having been threatened with eternal damnation in Hell if we don't fall on our knees before the God that someone else tells us is the real God. But we can't be certain that the God we praise is real, any more than we can prove that unknown civilizations light years away are real, or different dimensions are real.
Or even that thought is real. Science can prove that something happens in various parts of the brain as we think and that different parts "light up" on their scopes as we do different kinds of thinking. But science has only proven that something has happened in the brain when we think. It has absolutely no concept of what thought is, at least nothing I consider workable.
The very scientists who are thinking about how to explain to us that things they can't prove don't exist can't prove that thought exists. By rights we should be able to claim that their thoughts are nothing more than activity of their imaginations.
So, what is the human soul? Nothing more or less than a part of God that is on loan to us while we inhabit these bodies of ours. We are all part of one great whole.
When our body dies, it gets recycled. Not an atom is lost when our body decomposes. It all becomes either part of other things composed of atoms (matter) or it becomes some form of energy. Just ask Einstein who explained it with his famous equation, e = mc2 No matter or energy are ever lost when a transfer or transformation happens. It's all part of a great whole.
Science can't explain energy either. They know energy exists because they have experienced it. So what can science offer to those of us who have experienced something beyond what even they can't comprehend?
Perhaps science should do what it tells us to do with thoughts about subjects we can't explain: shut up.
The human soul cannot be explained by science, so science should not have any right to make definitive pronouncements about it. Since the human soul is merely part of the greater whole we call God, it follows that science should have no say about God either. Science has no right to tell us that something we believe doesn't exist while it blithely accepts theories that propose the existence of things they can't prove; that would be hypocrisy.
I feel God within me. I can't explain that. I don't even have an interest in attempting to explain it or to prove it to anyone, let alone a doubter.
The doubters always make more noise than the believers who know they are right, who know what they feel within them. That doesn't make them right or those with greater perception and higher levels of consciousness wrong.
It only shows their ignorance and inability to tolerate thoughts that go beyond what they can comprehend. They are bigots with white coats.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children truths before the charlatans get at them. or to make corrections if they have.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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