Soul
Soul is a spiritual concept. It is a holder for all sorts of unanswered questions and fuzzy imaginings of how we are and is rooted in our denial of death.
There is only one soul. The soul will be the basest part of us. Our fundamental core. Every single human being alive today, and everyone in the future and all that have ever lived, have the same soul. Our soul is the continuation of the species, the process of the universe continuing the natural diversity and oneness which is named mankind. Our individuality and character — which each of us is — is bound to our physical being. Our soul is the continuation of this encapsulation through succeeding generations. This also describes base consciousness separate to the physical individuals, allowing it to be said that mankind has only one consciousness; just lots of different windows to look out from, with each window bestowing individuality. That individuality is our physical being molded from our biology and interaction with our environment.
We are part of the universe, and when we die the universe carries on. Our individuality is that physical part of the universe which we define as ourselves. Our immortal soul is the continuation of the universe. But don't try giving it a location or an existence of its own, as it is only our personal recognition of it which pertains to our physical individual selves. The individuality is only in the physical and doesn't carry on, and it is only our recognition of similarities within ourselves and any other that has lived, or even animal, that we can say is where our soul has been. Any lessons that we are to learn is just a story using these imaginings.
At the level of base consciousness there is no personality. We are all the same at this level, and it is this level at which it is considered the soul exists. If we could all be socially aware of this level of uniformity, there would be world peace. The individuality can be seen to be a product of the physical existence, and it is the experience of its unique sequence of events and happenings which mould it into being a person. No two people have ever occupied the same space and time, and it doesn't take much for the subtle sequence of differences to cascade into individuality, and for a unique personality to fall into place. Together with genetics the individual is born and lives only in the physical.
The moulding of the personality upon the soul is a retrospective mental application. The fuzzy early life experiences that give rise to the belief of a travelling soul, are too indistinct to use reliably, and the later life reasoning's have other biological mechanics to explain their invention. The human brain is getting all sorts of information which only a small part is acknowledged by our awareness. Our imagination of where and how this information has been come by, lead to all sorts of spiritual explanations, including reincarnation. But spiritual explanation is an oxymoron!
Our earlier lack of understanding of genetics is described in the soul and reincarnation. The embellishment of this recognition of biological continuity, mixed with psychic phenomena has created this nebulous hypothesis of soul migration. It is just another story. An explanation created by our minds.
The soul is the continuing organism of mankind. It is only our personal recognition of it which pertains to our physical individual selves. As a part of this organism each individual has access to it, in the present and the past and future as well. The organism has the directive of evolution which it enforces through the individuals. If past lives are true, then there must be future lives also, so why do we assume that the experiences come only from the past and not from the future too!
The collective unconscious is part of the organism made up of mankind's interconnectedness. At that base level, it allows each individual to be able to subconsciously communicate with another. The voice of the collective unconscious can be through any of its comprising individuals. The collective unconscious could be a synonym for the human soul, but in reality, it is the subconscious workings of our brains. With each of us having the same engine, it is not that surprising that they can all work together and do so without us knowing about it. The observation of the effects of this has led to all sorts of theories, categorized and named and left unexplained in the compartment of spirituality.
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Reincarnation is a mishmash of different concepts. There is evolution, genetic inheritance, epigenetics, societal indoctrination, and unbounded imagination all squished together into a box and guarded by the ego of the believer.
There is nothing wrong with the concept of reincarnation, as long as you realise that you are reincarnated into everyone else as well, and likewise we are re-incarnated from everyone that has ever been. On an individual basis, it is the characteristics that match ours, that we see as being where our personal soul has travelled.
From my personal experiences of the soul as an adult, I have found that it is the mind which is drawing parallels, and it does it to the future as much as it does it to the past. My experiences of it when a baby lean towards the accepted concept but are too fuzzy to be relied upon. Any consolidating of the memory can just as easily be creating it.
As it is that which is most desired that is most pursued, it is not unreasonable to assume that it is our thoughts, (what they are, how they are made etc), that will be most sought after for capture in the developing future of mankind and its purpose in the universal unfolding. Therefore, the future will likely develop the ability to harvest consciousness, and consequently also retrieve the past thoughts of people too. We may be being eavesdropped on at this very moment!
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There is a memory from a very early age (possibly even pre-birth) of being in an endless blackness which seemed would never end. It was why my favourite colour when I was a child was black, and why I have never been afraid of death. I believe others have this memory and interpret it to being the passage way for reincarnation, and it does produce the feeling that I have of always having existed, but then as soon as you exist, it is as if you always have, and might be one of the reasons why a lot of people think it carries on after death. But because my memory might be one of peace acquired, as opposed to just peace, and the occasional awareness while within it that it might end while hoping that it wouldn't, leads me to the idea that it has all happened before. But I might have altered these memories by accessing them, and it makes me unsure.
The point is that no one else has any better understanding than this, because of the very nature of the recovery of the memory and its pitfalls. It is either adults repeating their societal indoctrination, or an adult's memories similarly polluted and compromised.
I do have an example of what I believe to be epigenetics though, which is revealed in my behaviour on my 1st day at my new primary school that we had just moved to when I was 6.
As we entered into the assembly room at the start of the day, instead of following everyone else to the back of the room where the children were gathering, I turned to the front where there were chairs for the teachers to sit, upon one of which I quite rightly, or so I believed, took my seat. One of the teachers sat next to me and politely engaged me in conversation, which I found agreeable and duly respectful, until I found myself being dragged by my ear from my seat and unceremoniously pushed off the teacher's area by the headmaster. I then found myself in a strange predicament, as I was being urged to join the other children and was made aware in no uncertain terms that I was not welcome in the teacher's area, but the other children from my perspective, were nothing to do with me. I was not one of them. So I stood to one side, confused and without a place of belonging. It is strikingly similar to my situation throughout my life, where I feel there is no community of which I feel a part, and undoubtedly a major reason for why I am reclusive.
My father was at the time of my birth a lecturer at a college, and had just taken a teaching post at a grammar school, all of which was unknown and unfathomable to a 6-year-old such as I. But I believe it was some subconscious influence from him (epigenetic?) which made me feel the way I did about my place in that school assembly. I had no developed ego at that age, no opinion of who I was, no concept of position in society. And yet there was no uncertainty in my expectation of position in that assembly. I was not a child, and I expected respect and the dignity which ashamedly seems to be universally forbidden to children. It seems it is only the ingrained social indoctrination that is adulthood that affords respect in society, which unfortunately relegates the children to all being second class citizens and treated as such.
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My experience of ego at infant school where I can remember being so afraid of this ego and insistent of dismissing it, could be due to a memory of reincarnation, or it could be a mix of memory and future projection formed in this life. It was an amorphous mentalisation at the time and could just as easily have been knowledge of the future seeping in, as of the past.
But by this age (4 or 5?), you have already gone through so much. You are only a child from the perspective of societally indoctrinated adults whose lives are 100% wrapped up in this social world, and who are entirely amnesiac of the journey of their pre-social selves, and have a diminutive opinion of its importance and their previous awareness in this period.
There is no help when you are a baby. You have to learn everything yourself; the adults can only put things in front of you. You never consider yourself to be a child, unless it is playing it as a trump card in the manipulation of adults. The adults all think themselves so superior, they fall for it every time.
I think a lot of assumption of reincarnation based upon early memory, is due to the underestimation of a child's capability to construct these thoughts. It is easy from an adult's perspective to assume that certain experiences are not attainable until later, and thereby allow their idea of reincarnation to supplant the memory of the child's experience.
I know that I have had the same experiences that other people have had who espouse those experiences as proof of reincarnation, but they are being overconfident and do not know as surely as they pretend. This experience we call life, is full of dreams and is at least 50% fiction. All the minds conceptualising is constructed fabrication. To be certain of anything is a showing of foolhardy over confidence. Maybe I shouldn't be so sure of that!
The accessing of the information, which is supposedly proving of reincarnation, can be achieved via means other than this travelling soul hypothesis. Access of information from the future for example, is probably the same mechanism at work as the accessing of information from previous lives. Clearly this is not the traditional soul of reincarnation at work here. The imagination of someone's life who has similar characteristics as yours, is indistinguishable from memory.
Your experience of your soul is the same as my experience of soul. It is the same experience; we are the same thing. Your soul is as much about me as it is you, it is only when viewed from your physical self that you consider it has individuality. Our very first experience of being, our First Self, is what we regard as our soul, and is the same in everyone. Our later physical experiences which rub off onto it and produces our individuality, is why we believe it is a personal soul; but this personality gets rubbed out when it starts again, and it always starts again pure and unaffected.
