Are you more than your body?

[cpoxland]

Of course, I already expect which sort of answers I'll get, but still. Are you more than your body? By that I mean whether you consider yourself to have something that controls your decisions other than your brain (like a soul or so).

[spacedout]

That is all we are - just the body; no more, no less. The body comes from the earth and goes back to the earth. Like the song says, "We are nothing but dust in the wind."

[WoodlandStar]

Of course there is no evidence to prove or disprove the notion that ‘we are more than just our bodies’. No matter how you approach this type of question you have to do it based on assumptions. So when you ask the question all answers are simply assumptions and opinions. With that said, I am going to assume you are asking others what they believe and possibly ‘why’ (not what can be proved).

For myself, I do believe we are more than just our bodies. I guess the best word I can come up with is Spirit. That is (for me) something that exists both outside and inside of the 3rd dimension. The reason I believe this is that it is first of all ‘more comfortable’ when I look at my own personal existence. Is this a delusion on my part? Well, it may be, but it is a comfortable one and does not cause me any pain. This is not to say that people ‘don’t get into trouble’ with the concept. Religion has used this concept to enslave many, but any thinking person does not need a ‘spiritual broker’.

In a way you are asking a most profound existential question:

"Existentialism is a 20th century philosophy concerned with human existence, finding self, and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook without the help of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions."

[cpoxland]

To WoodlandStar:

I guess this thread will wander into religion more or less, but I have some questions. How do we get this spirit you were talking about? Is it created immediately after impregnation, or after birth? Finally, do you believe animals too have a spirit?

[WoodlandStar]

Originally Posted by cpoxland

To WoodlandStar:

I guess this thread will wander into religion more or less, but I have some questions. How do we get this spirit you were talking about? Is it created immediately after impregnation, or after birth? Finally, do you believe animals too have a spirit?

Hi Cpoxland!

Well you have asked some very tough questions, and I will try my best to answer. Remember these are only my beliefs and opinions: others will have very different ones. None of this is provable in a scientific sense and it is all based on what one chooses to believe.

In my own mind there is nothing to get because the Spirit is something that is infinite…you can’t get something you already have. You may not know you have it, but to me it has always existed. Now this is where I part company with religion. According to most religions, the Spirit was created by a god force. In other words, the Spirit of humans is not infinite since it has a beginning point. This is one of two assumptions you can make regarding your own existence. The second possible assumption is that you yourself are the god force and you chose to inhabit a 3 dimensional body. For myself I believe the second assumption which means that all of us (spirits) are infinite. Now where it gets really confusing is that I also believe that everything you see in the 3rd dimension is actually an extension of the spirit. There is only one spirit and that spirit chose to divide and experience. But the division is not only in human form, it is in everything (animals, rocks, even a plastic cigarette lighter). What I am saying to you is that even the smallest grain of sand is part of that one spirit. I see no separation between between spirit and 3rd dimensional existence. In a way you could say that my body has its own spirit, and each part of my body has its own spirit. It is all god stuff. Now you might ask, ‘if this is so then can each spirit regardless of origin, communicate with other spirits?’ My answer is yes it can and there is in fact some research with photons that suggest communication between photons. You can find much more about this at The Dancing Wu Li Masters . Gary Zukuv wrote extensively about this subject in his book The Dancing Wu Li Masters. It is easy to read and will start you on a course of discovery in Quantum Mechanics. (He also wrote Seat Of The Soul years later).

I suspect the real issue for you is how to directly experience your Spirit? This sort of gets down to the question of ‘Am I my brain?’. No you are not. Your brain is a wonderful switching devise that processes information, but without a unique Spirit of human consciousness it is pretty pointless. If you doubt this assertion try communicating with someone lying dead in a morgue. The brain is there…but no longer functioning as a switching devise. The brain is a marvelous organ, but after a shelf life of 80 years, on average, it runs out of juice (spirit) and goes ‘dead’. With a fully charged brain, you can poke it in certain areas and stimulate memory or senses. But the fact is that you cannot demonstrate where the memory or sensation originates. Some scientists like to use electrical stimulation of the brain as evidence that memory etc. comes directly from the brain. However, they have yet to show anything under a microscope of brain tissue that is more than just neurons. In a way they are much like primitive people who first encounter a radio. If you manage to find a primitive tribe (such as down in South America) that never had contact with modern technology and you placed a working radio in front of them. They are likely to assume that the sound from the radio exists within the radio itself: because they simply do not understand ‘radio waves’. Our scientists often seem to make the same assumptions as primitive people.

The direct knowledge of your spirit can come about in many ways, such as through drumming, or in your dream state, or simply as you are doing now: pondering the question. It is your spirit doing the pondering not your brain. And of course there are many gurus who want to teach you the ‘right’ way. Well there is no right way. Now, for a warning: on the net you will encounter many people who claim to have expertise with these issues. Most of them are simply con artists not too different than those people who claim to be spiritual brokers such as priests, ministers, etc. Do not get caught up in one belief system. Most of the new age material on the net is there to make money, and not produce enlightenment. They sell ‘spiritual products’ and are on the net for business purposes only.

There is a very interesting passage in the christian bible from the man Jesus ( Mathew 17:20 ): "… I tell you with certainty, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” He was telling his disciples that they can Create Their Own Reality! If you want to read a bit more about creating your own reality read “Seth Speaks” by Jane Roberts.

I hope I have addressed your questions. These are not easy topics to lay out in a few paragraphs.

You’re As Dead As You’re Going To Get

Nevyn

[Oxidus]

Well, there's our current dimension, 1D 2D 3D; there could logically be a fourth or more. The way I see it is, we have consciousness and free will just as animals do. The only difference is that we're smarter, that's just evolution though right? Luck of the dice really. If we have souls or something that ties our bodies to another existence, then I would assume animals do as well...Possibly other things like trees and insects as well.

I believe we have souls, or something similar to it. There's just too much we don't know and too much strange things in this world to rule it out. Dreaming, compassion, gut feelings, love...etc. What explains our need for interaction, whether with nature, animals, or each other? What explains the feeling you get from meditation or dreaming. Our brains are complex, but we can't blame it all on our brains can we? Animals feel compassion, need to be affectionate, and have free will yet they can't even formulate a logical argument. My dog used to have bad dreams sometimes, often whining and twitching in her sleep, think about that....Animals have nightmares, and dreams just as we do? What do they see?

I once heard someone say on a radio show, "imagine trying to explain sight (vision) to a species that didn't have eyes"...The idea that we have these organs that somehow allow us to see things, how would describe even a cube to them?

There must be something more. The idea that our entire existence is processed and experienced through our brain is just bizarre. Lets say for arguments sake that there are billions of other species in the universe, all living lightyears away from eachother...Would they all have brains? Would they all have bodies? For all we know, there could be an entire world spinning around us yet we just don't have the proper organs to experience it. Maybe we're just half-breeds, genetic mutations that experience only a fragment of what life is really about. We only experience what our senses can detect, and our brain can process with logic.

[Starman]

Originally Posted by cpoxland

Of course, I already expect which sort of answers I'll get, but still. Are you more than your body? By that I mean whether you consider yourself to have something that controls your decisions other than your brain (like a soul or so).

I write software for a career. When my software gets loaded into the memory of a computer system, it can do magical things that the computer could never do by itself. What is actually doing the computations is not the computer hardware, and not the software either. What does the work is essentially non-material: the abstract concepts that are expressed by the software. The software itself is just symbols, incapable of doing anything of themselves. But they encode abstract concepts, and the computer simply decodes and runs the encoding to express the abstractions.

In a similar kind of way, you can think of your body as the computer, and the content of your mind as the software. Your brain is just another part of the hardware, maybe the CPU. But in your memory is encoded abstract ideas that your brain is designed to decode and execute.

You can say that this abstraction is what is commonly known as "spirit."