Thats a great question Sven.  I used to think that well humans are the only ones with souls cause, well just cause. I always thought animals and other living forms acted purely on instinct. but from whos point of view? thats what led me to believe maybe everything has a soul, in some form or other. thats just what i believe.

HI Sven-

There seems to be some kind of difference between the physical, trasitory, part of us and the part that accumulates experiences. While most people like to lump the two together, my personal; view is that they are two different, and locally independent, manifestations of a more remote single cause that come in and out of phase, dependeing upon what stage of existence we enjoy.

One way to look at this is that the world is more or less spewed out of an initial beginning as a matrix of potentialities that occur in an undefined space as unordered options, existing between episodic moments in which everything presents itself and interacts, extending the nature of the space. Astro-Physics looks at this as a "Multiple Mini-Bang Model" instead of a single Big Bang.

The persuasive appearance of the physical world may not be as we initially presume it to be.  There are several viewpoints from which purely abstract potentialities appear to present the space of the everyday world, worldlines that span bounding moments of definition. The awareness that we call 'Me" (Tibetans called it the Knower) seems to attach to one of these worldlines in a manner that projects it into the sensible world as a living phenomenon.

This kind of thinking suggests that although the world appears solid, more or less eternal, abstract and material in nature, the fact is that we are simply assembling ideas together in such a way as to bring these phenomena into existence. That is, the ideas of reality cannot be discerned from a material distribution of states, since both present themselves by their properties, and our sensory system can see no deeper than the properties of the elements of the world with which we interact.

This kind of model is often called a multiply aspected theory, since it defines things in more than one way. It is also an idealism, since the "stuff" of the world reduces, ultimately, to what the Hindus decribe as "dreams flitting through the mind of God".  In this kind of model, the individual is a personality fragment of God projected into the world of images or "maya" to interpret it. Thus, everything is ultimately one with God. To ask about it as if it were an independent phenomonon is simply the wrong question, like, "Where do elephants prefer to fly?"  While we could speculate on airlines and zoological gardens, or jungles and plains, there is really no useful answer because the question carries implicit assumptions that are untrue.

One of the sayings that comes out of this kind of thought is "God dwells within you, as you."

dave

Great post Dave!

PUL,
Cosmic_Ambitions

Nice quotation.  -  I believe that early Egyptian belief also followed this line of thought.

d