Soul Versus Spirit

In a certain sense, the historical pathology of human beings can be described as a "split" which causes us to relate to the world into separated and oppositional categories. Mind vs. Matter, Left vs. Right, "what is" vs. "how is it?", and "soul versus spirit".

By soul I mean reflection - or the capacity to reflect on something. By spirit I mean the forces of life that flow through us.

It is in the nature of dualism to describe one of these modalities as "bad", and in the "left hand path" traditions world over, the spirit is afforded a power which, if the soul were thinking more coherently, it would realize the spirit couldn't possibly have.

Logos

The soul is like the Logos, or the capacity to reason. Reasoning is fundamentally about "what matters", and what matters is always a matter of cause and effect - or the recognition and attunement to change and difference. Your right brain is geometrodynamically structured to attune to change in the world, and so, you have no choice but to know within you "what is the cause of the way you are" - because the right brain, recording and registering our experience of being in the world, always harbors and contains the core representations of threat and fear and suffering which dialectically stands behind all the back and forths of your motivations.

I have described how the mindbrain forms as through a dissociation (out of reflexive habit) of a subtle threat, and an idealization (due to what were afforded in this world) of what we implicitly know to be a source of "safety" (within this developmental context).

The logos knows - or can know - if it simply applies its reasoning to how the world works. It is a "wedding" between your attentional processes and the "thing to be represented". Everything that "is" will "inform" you, and instantaneously your brainmind represents it in a unimodal manner which has an enormously complex evolutionary history that evolved in an exquisitely complicated way into the person that you are right now.

The World Informs

The world informs you. Is the logos a mere feeling? Or is it a function of something else? In a very real sense, the logos may be an internal 'cursor' that leads back to the primal cause: love.

Love is, or typically is, what the genetic systems of the human brain expect to be organized by, and to experience upon birth, and to "feel" itself known by.

When I say "recognition dynamics", I mean this primal care for the Other that exists upon birth, and is called "recognition" because the feeling state itself motivates the caregiver to "search for" the individuality, or the motivational needs, of the Other.

This 'original spirit' is, if one reasons properly, at the top of the hierachy of 'spirits' which organize how we work. Thus, baby is conceived. At this point forward a mother can be focused on the meaning of the relation with the being inside of her.

But if not, and the mother or her boyfriend is psychotic, and have some demented interest to "prevent that", then the buck just kicks back to the parents, to their suffering, to their absence, which makes the child a mathematical subset of the parents disturbed effort to prevent 'attachment' from forming. The spirit of evil and hatred is and will always be existing in dynamical relation to love - to not being loved, to not being born to healthy people, and to be damaged, and sick. Logic in such a brain is being "morphed" to suit the dynamics of a runaway attractor (the so-called "spirit"), which is really just the normal human need to experience enlivenment - the raison d'etre of life.

Yet a person who subscribes to "spirit" and denies "soul" - or rationality - is truly mistaking what exactly they are. We feel feelings, but we are very much a function of the dyadic tension between two selves. I think or know myself as an I only because my brainmind evolved to understand another self. Before "I" come into being as an "Other" to myself, I am already making use, or building off from, an actual dialectical history in which a real Other person helped construct my identity into being. There is thus nothing more intellectually and logically obscene than to think the "I" is bigger than the "We", when the former is bootstrapped by the latter, and derives all its beloved qualities through the mediation of the latter.

That is, you need others to recognize you in order to feel good. You are constantly needing others to "acknowledge my capacities". We can't change this, and it would be absurd and awful to succum into a mode where you are violating reality as if your reality couldn't be explained logically, nd thus improved upon in a logical way - by studious and attuned reasoning.

Spirits Will Hurt You

Spirits are epiphenomena. When I say this, I mean they follow two points, akin to two tennis players moving their positions in order to "meet the other" in the form of the ball. The spirit is the ball, but the ball, of course, is completely a function of the body's position and angle of the tennis player who hits the ball to the other side. The ball is effectively carrying the dynamics of one part towards another part.

If you reason from "the spiritual', or from the position of nihilistic feelings which drive you towards a philosophy of "living in the now", forgoing concern for morality and justification, then you shouldn't allow yourself to contemplate any afterlife but hell - since hell is what the logos will be when you imagined that you could live a life that ignored how things actually worked. The spirits merely express your symmetry dynamics; so every other - every human, and perhaps, being, that was harmed by your action, will be juxtaposed side-by-side with your intentional state and the mentality it operated from. There are 'rationales' existing in the head whilst the person acts - since we need to assert confidently if were going to experience ourselves in an enlivening way; we need to 'rationalize' to think clearly.

Furthermore, if you see things from the 'side' of asymmetry (and we all do to a certain extent; this being a good definition of post-traumatic-stress disorders) the above conversation will seem grotesque and might compel you to "double down" hopelessly hoping in the impossible. The lesson to be learned - for both good and bad - is that perception is illusory - in that, reality can seem "this way", but this is just the spirit persuading us of its "truth", when we would be far better off reasoning on cause and effect in human actions, and assume, or accept, that because we suffered interpersonal trauma through our lives, that our nervous systems will always struggle in the metabolization of an image of the "infinite" that isn't tinged with feelings of the 'tragic', of 'despair'. We allow ourselves to become hypnotized by the emergent image, rather than use our reason and recognize where our bodies - and our minds - would be happiest. If we organized ourselves according to a high level symmetry, the laws of physics mean that the system will be "more relaxed" - and this can only seem scary to a hyper-vigilant traumatized mind which is too fearful to be relaxed - to relax into a feeling of connectedness. This traumatic reaction is there in agoraphobics who were socially shamed in the past, as much as "mystics" who, having a traumatic history, "destroyed" their individual sense of I by prematurely exposing themselves to a...

that was bound to depersonalize and derealize them.

Instead of the coherency and creativity of love, they exist - all the while confirming the "truth of the spirit" (i.e they cant overcome dissociation/idealization) - in a hyper-tensional state with reality, needlessly imposing their developmental deficiencies on others while supporting their mental coherency through a narrative that asserts themselves to be the "eternal" - the faceless one - merely "wearing a mask".

It is only because of a profound insecurity of connection with the caregiver, held back by developmental traumas that induce a sort of autistic "obstruction in affect", which makes them believe as they believe.

It is the falsity of a hyper-ideal of masculinity, which pretends - lies - about how it works, and why it works the way it does.

I also believe a cause of mental illness is that " a natural born state of love" is not felt in the human soul. (in other words, love does not exist in that persons soul at birth)
What are your thoughts on that.

a reply to: Astrocyte

A "soul" is not the same like awareness. And far from logos. A soul and spirit are not that far from eachother just their adress is different one is outside the body the other inside.

The layers of consciousness are:
Subconsciosness (the soul connected to all experience it ever had)
The ego (awareness)
Higher-consciousness (the soul connected to all consciousness out there)

From that you can see that the soul is more a function than an object. A spirit is a bodyless consciousness entity. One who "stayed behind" as agent of ... whatever function its soul originally had.

a reply to: Peeple


You're not thinking in material terms; you're thinking outside the logic of development, of change, of process.

You were a zygote once. That zygote was a chemical entity that followed all the equations described by biophysicists that describe how a cell is able to grow, where its energy is coming from, and how its molecular elements evolve.

Furthermore, I have the Jewish tradition (kabbalah) in mind when thinking about "soul", which is Neshama, and I sought to justapose the quality of reflection and difference with the 'unitary' quality of spirit, which is 'ruach'.

I don't need to follow your particular lexicon in order to convey what I mean. For example, I am impressed at how people let themselves become distracted with "what is" assertions than with "how is it happening inquiries."

My distinction also follows the neurosciences i.e. how your material brain actually works, and so lateralizes "feeling/images" with the right brain, and "syllogism, difference" in the left brain. These two concepts basically recapitulate the 'spirit' 'soul' difference.

May you have learned a different meaning association with the word "soul"? It appears so. Is it relevant to my thread? Not really.

What about Socrates an his said new gods that got him accused of blasphemy, ever wonder what they looked like? Plato said they were good, but they lacked the liveliness, or allure of his believes.

He did believe that the stories of his pantheon and their misdeeds, even though they would widely accepted as being socially wrong were not considered evil by definition.

In Gnostics, the one true God other then the ignorant off spring of Sophia could be called Logos.

A cigar is a cigar, even though I know not how your Jewish worketh.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Sorry I didn't know you're so happy with your bias you don't want to learn something true and new for you. I thought you were genuinely trying to figure "it" out. My bad.
I'll stop reading your threads now, you're so wrong so often and at the same time so full of yourself. It smells.
Maybe one day you'll wake up and see how your arrogance gets in the way of ... well everything I guess...
If you find a second (when your head comes out of your ass to catch a breath & you can think straight) maybe you'll see how smart and awesome my "the soul is a function not an object" comment really is. And how very much on topic.


Just as fyi, why I think it's stupid for a materialist like you trying to figure out "soul and spirit":
1. proto-consciousness read a bit about it
2. consciousness and awareness are not the same thing
(in parts you could get that thinking about the double slit experiment)
3. the difference between subjective reality and objective reality in terms of "soul experience" is loaded with paranoia and schizophrenic
(you people talk about empirical evidence how many experiences more do you need to make subjective research of the soul which is going on for thousands of years a proven fact? Yet you take a pseudo science only a little over 100 years old and with a history of one huge mistake following another as gospel. That is truly crazy)

Tell your peers and yourself it's finally time to get your # together. Consciousness is not material, materialism won't provide any answers. Take the "anecdotes" people are telling a little more serious and get the # over yourself.
Or at least admit that you're only researching awareness and stop talking about stuff you so obviously don't understand and are afraid of.

Sorry I got a bit into a rant here. But psychology could be so awesome and it gets destroyed by people like you.


What could be a hint to yourself that you got a bit next to the rails: what do you do with the kabbalah? It's "spiritual magic" designed to meet god. Do you believe in god? Do you believe in magic? I don't think so.
Just because you know a few hebrew words you think you come across as expert but in reality you're just showing you're 100% incoherent.
Poor guy, is your soul looking for salvation is that why you re-search your way through kabbalah? That won't work honey. Spirituality and materialism as you do it are irreconcilable unless you already carry a big bag of schizophrenia.



You're making me so angry, just because you might be seriously lost and confused:
Neshamah means "breath", it's the third level of the soul seeking communion with god, the clearly focused intellectual state of mind.
Ruach means "wind", it's the second level, emotions arousing when contemplating god.
Just stop bull#ting people, there might be a idiot somewhere who really thinks you know what you're talking about which you sooooooo glaringly obvious don't.

Ah another thread attempting to create a "theory of everything"

As usual you start from the premise that childhood trauma is prevalent and the ills will be cured by your reading through a 1000 books.

Soul, spirit, kabbalah....

Until you come to an understanding that psychology has at its beginnings a religious like adherence in bluffing and word playing in attempting to heal you're doomed to be forever searching for a cure.

The funniest but sad truth is that you are never truly open to discussion as shown by your lack of engaging with posters in your threads.