Posts by casualtiger2

Feels like you guys wandered into the wrong neighborhood. 👎
Religion is the first door on the right. 😈

mramesa said:What’s the point of these definitions for spirit, soul, or God? Aren't they just labels people slap onto their own unique experiences? You can't really define an experience.

I think it’d be smarter if people just shared their actual experiences regarding this stuff.

Besides—if we actually knew what a soul, a spirit, or God was, would we even be human anymore? I’d call them higher beings. 🙂

It’s standard practice to use words in conversation. Words are just labels for concepts, and those concepts usually refer to something real that exists out there.
If we're talking about a ball, everyone might picture a different kind of ball since we haven't been specific—but we're all starting from the premise that everyone has encountered a ball at least once in their life (even someone blind can have a concept of a ball without ever seeing one). The assumption is that there's at least one ball in this world, or that we can describe it well enough so that almost anyone 🙂 who hears the description can visualize it correctly (in terms of its basic geometric properties).

Sure, different people might experience soul, spirit, and God differently. It's also likely that these experiences are impossible to cram into words or pin down with a precise definition. Still, I think trying is worth the effort for a few reasons.

No matter how much people trash-talk logic and reason, they remain some of our most powerful cognitive tools—some might even say our only ones (for now). Why shouldn't atheists, for example, have the right to ask spiritual practitioners for a clearer explanation—something better than the usual "you just wouldn't understand"—about what they actually do? After all, spirituality implies someone is actually dealing with the spirit.
The problem, obviously, is when the spiritual practitioners themselves aren't clear—either intellectually or experientially—on what these terms mean or contain. When that happens, it can look like the terms have zero substance, or like you could just shove anything into that definition!

All the different answers here could mean totally different things—from these terms having no real content at all, to everyone describing a different "ball" they've seen, to everyone describing the exact same "ball" but in a different way.
Most of the replies here seem to rely on textbook descriptions—at best, secondhand experiences—like me giving a theosophical one, or someone else giving a religious one...
I agree it would be great if people shared their direct experiences with these concepts, but does anyone actually have them?
Or, to put it another way, are there any higher beings among us? 😁

Wikipedia:

Seele (d)

Soul (e)

Funny enough, there's way more written about the "soul" than the "spirit"—looks like soul gets about 3x the coverage spirit. Also—oddly enough—there's significantly more info on "spirit" when you look at the German side of things compared to the English one (Geist pulls in about double the hits of spirit)
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Karen Sanchez19 said:I actually am exactly what you claim—everything you say I think, everything you say I feel, and everything you say I say.😁

Lame Deer said:"I AM" is absolute—you cloudy-eyed chief. 🙂

What’s left for a prosvetiti majstor to actually do in this illusory world once they’ve finally "gotten it"—once the whole "experience" has already gone down?
This big istina?

How are we actually supposed to know what the Absolute is—or even what this world is made of? For that matter, what even are the soul and the spirit?

blue bird said:Latin spiritus = breath
Latin anima = that which animates or gives life
Maybe the solution to this puzzle—spirit vs. soul—lies in the etymology.

'Moreover, if we check in the English and Latin bibles to see which words are translated as 'soul', etc., in the King James Version, we will find many whose literal meaning is 'breath' or 'wind'. For example, the Hebrew word neshamah (literally meaning 'breath') is twice rendered as 'spirit', once as 'soul'. The Hebrew-Aramaic word ruach (lit., 'wind') is rendered 240 times as 'spirit', six times as 'mind.' The word nephesh (lit., 'breath') is rendered 'soul' 428 times) 'mind' 15 times, 'ghost' twice, and 'life' 119 times. Turning to the English Bible, we find pneuma (lit., 'breath') rendered as 'ghost' 91 times (including the rendering 'Holy Ghost'), 292 times as 'spirit'. The reader will recognize the same root in the word pneumonia, a word referring to a disease of the organs of breath.'

The fact that nearly all words now meaning 'soul', 'spirit', 'life', etc., trace their origins to words meaning 'breath' or 'wind' leads me to conclude that the derived meanings were an outgrowth of the inability of primitive people to solve a basic biological puzzle, namely, what constitutes the difference between a live body and a dead one?''

by Frank R. Zindler
The Probing Mind, February 1985

So, basically, this whole 'soul' and 'spirit' thing is just a cocktail of nitrogen and oxygen....

Interesting take. I bet there are plenty of other comparisons out there. The first thing that popped into my head was
atman — breathing; spirit — aspiration; breath...
Still, when I first started asking these questions, I was looking for the hard facts—what actually *is* a soul, what is a spirit, and where’s the line between them? Based on these answers, it seems nobody really knows for sure.
It looks like we still don't have a definitive answer for what the soul or spirit actually are.

Anyway, let me toss in another "definition"—this one is more theosophical—just to keep the collection diverse. 🙂
The soul is the center of consciousness on a higher mental plane (the causal plane, the realm of abstract thought) through which the human spirit (the atmic plane, the realm of divine will) expresses itself.
Under this definition, the soul would be something "lesser" than the spirit—something more "dense" (though most people here seem to mean things like atman or jiva when they say 'soul').
That actually lines up somewhat with how we use the terms colloquially—where being "soulful" usually means being driven by emotions (often sentimental) or messy thoughts, while "spirituality" implies something much more elevated.
We say Holy Spirit, not Holy Soul.

In contrast, in German, Geist (spirit) usually refers to the intellectual or philosophical level, whereas Seele (soul) refers to some kind of life fluid (which could be anything from etheric or emotional to purely mental or atmic).

What people often complain about regarding Germans—in a very broad sense—is that they lack "soul." To me, it feels like that stems from the fact that Germans tend to be more centered on the mental plane, while Americans [referring to the cultural group mentioned] are more emotion-centered. So, when Germans don't provide the "emotional nourishment" we're used to, we call them cold or soulless. Meanwhile, those same Germans go down south and immediately get overwhelmed by how "clingy" and intense everything is.

PS
While digging through the archives, I stumbled upon a thread where this was discussed quite a bit:
Do animals have souls? By the definition I gave earlier, animals don't have a soul (meaning a fully developed, permanent individuality that reincarnates)—but that doesn't mean you should mistreat them or eat them. They have complex feelings and even rudimentary forms of thought, but they possess a "group soul" (and the higher the animal, the fewer individuals share that group soul before reaching true individuation).

PSS
It actually makes sense to me that the soul—and even what we call the spirit—is still essentially material (= subtle matter), no matter how fine that matter (or rather, that vibration) might be. Only something completely unmanifested could really be called non-material.

hiddentiger80 said:The book "destiny of the soul" breaks everything down brilliantly—though, fair warning, it’s a pretty heavy lift if you don't already know your stuff.

Alright then, give me the SparkNotes version—what's the book actually about?
I’ve gotta be honest, I’m totally lost on what nimblesurfer4 and Jamie Newman4 were getting at. 😕

It feels like people around here use these two terms interchangeably.
You see this distinction in other languages too—like soul-spirit or Seele-Geist...
So, are the soul and the spirit actually the same thing?
If they aren't, where does the line get drawn?