Korean Job Discussion Forums

[seoulunitarian]

[Grimalkin]

Some interesting relies!

Captain Kirk's story about the Buddhists was intriguing. I often wonder how or why people like that can be so absolutely certain about something that you'd expect, could at best, be only guessed at.


I'm inclined to agree with twg than most religions are a form of denial because we find it hard to accept our own extinction.


I'm afraid I didn't really follow what Mithridates was saying either but I feel that our sense of identity is completely dependent on our memory and since our memory is based in organic material, once it decays (as in death) our identity goes with it.


For me the meaning of 'soul' (whether it exists or not) implies something that is essentially me/you. However that seems to be inextricably linked to a sense of identity. So I feel that once a sense of identity goes then there can be no more 'soul'.


(Sometimes I bamboozle my brain with the following conundrum:

If you had two identical twins lets say John and Peter. You swap their brains in a brain transplant. Which one is now John and which one is Peter?


And if they had souls where is Peter's soul and where is John's?


Anyone care to hazard an answer?)

[SPINOZA]

the brain and its incredibly complex biochemical workings is the best explanation for conscious phenomena in my view and it is most plausible to assume that when the body dies, so does conscious phenomena/what we perceive as the soul.

Also, as someone who once nearly died, I do not recall any evidence suggestive of the existence of souls. Being dragged back into life and consciousness is perhaps like having one's head dragged from the depths of an ocean of black glue.

I am not open to debate about the existence of souls or consciousness after death. I think there's simply no such thing and tend to view those who take the opposite view with pity.

[kimchi story]

I have a pretty safely agnostic Lacanian view on soul - it's another word for 'Other'. We identify who we are by paying special attention to the things we recognize as being what we are not - this is a necessary process of misrecognition if we are to continue living average lives that feel extraordinary simply because they are our own.

In my mind, the word soul defines something for us that is both recognizable and foreign (conciousness/transcendental spirit/a bit of both or either depending on who you are) - a component of ones self, yet one we don't necessarily recognize nor understand.

So if it's a question of whether or not the soul exists I believe it does. It is our dreams and our inspirations. Essentially it is the network of lies we use to keep us going.

If it's a question of whether or not the soul carries on after death I can only say I've never seen proof either way on that one.

By definition, to answer these questions once and for all is to find either psychosis or religion (to come to terms with ones most raw concious experience is to suffer a psychotic break and to come to terms with the existence of a transcendental soul is to find religion).

It is at that second question that reason must give way to faith.


That is not to say faith and praxil are the same...

[Qinella]

What is praxil?

[kimchi story]

Praxil, like Zoloft or Prozac - a mood altering drug for those times when we have trouble misrecognizing ourselves using the normal methods.

[Grimalkin]

So the choice is either insanity or religion?


Actually that was pretty interesting.


...by the way, what is 'Lacanian'?

[seoulunitarian]

[Grimalkin]

[captain kirk]

This is kind of a freaky story about 'soul'. Maybe you know the Lobsang Rampa books. They were out in Corgi (British) paperbacks in the 70's, 80's. They're kind of like Carlos Castenada. The story is about seeking in Tibetan Buddhism. It's hard to tell, as in Castenada, what's truth and what's fiction, almost science fiction. For example caves in tibet containing UFOs, monks in contact with aliens because the monks are so highly evolved and thus able to do so. Kind of interesting.

I've always been interested in this sort of stuff, buddhism, and was out treeplanting in Canada living out of a van, big, wide landscape every day in your face. The sort of vistas that inspired monks in the mountains to pray. Well I was into these Lobsang Rampa thrilling pulps and, before sleep one night, held a strong question I hoped would be answered in sleep, dreams, 'is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe?' (because asking questions of dreams was practiced by a character in the Rampa books).

The dream was like being somewhere else, actually, really, BEING THERE (sort of like 'soul travel', some dreams are like that, others are bad TV).
I don't know if you remember the end shot of the movie, 2001 A Space Odyssey but there's a big 'space baby' floating in orbit above the earth in the blackness of space in a placenta, 'the next human'. This was an earthview like that, stars glittering beyond sense of a being(s) around, I couldn't see, at home in space. I couldn't see the speakers, which were a male, and a female voice which said, together, 'the Universe is FULL of intelligent life'. While I got an impression, there were no more words spoken, that looking at the night sky from earth was like looking at the lights of different cities. Each star is a 'city world'. And we can't see the active traffic between worlds, but it goes on.

This was just an impression in a dream but it was very vivid and delivered up, hot and fast, like McDonald's Breakfast (welcomed to Korea ( soul food, hahaha)).

[Rteacher]

This picture illustrates the basic concept of the soul always staying the same while the body is always changing. Reincarnation is experienced even within a single lifetime. And, at the final change of this body (death) the spirit-soul continues to stay the same, transmigrating to (and animating with consciousness...) another body...



Anyone interested or just curious about the real nature of the soul according to Vedic spiritual science should check out these links:

http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=500
http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=525

[Qinella]

The basic question I have with souls relates to population. If the population of humans on the earth is constantly increasing, where do these souls come from? Is there a celestial storage bin that deals out souls when the birth rate exceeds the death rate?

If you believe evolution and common descent, the problem compounds, because we're talking about everything starting from archae or somesuch. Do unicellular, non-nucleic organisms have souls, too? What exactly is life?

These questions are impossible to answer, and thus it is impossible to answer them for humans, as well.

[seoulunitarian]

[Rteacher]

It's a very complex topic, but I'll try to convey some of my understanding (in my usual rambling way...)

In the personalist Vedic view, everything that exists is a manifestation, emanation or expansion of the various energies of the original person. Basically, there's spiritual energy - expanded as the spiritual world; material energy - expanded as the material world; and marginal energy - which consists of the infinitessimal, separated parts-and-parcels of God's spiritual energy...

Everything manifested, expanded or emanated is meant for the purpose of increasing the pleasure of the original person. All varieties of loving relationships exist in their pure form in the spiritual universes - which are three times the size of the virtually innumerable material universes (that hover like a dark cloud in the spiritual sky...)

When the individual souls (separated atomic particles ...) are situated in the spiritual world they are manifest in their original spiritual forms (with spiritual senses) and they assist variously in the neverending pleasure pastimes of the supreme energetic person...
http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=505

Whenever such individual living beings - due to causeless envy or whatver - desired to try to enjoy independently from the original person, such desire couldn't be accomodated in a perfectly harmonious spiritual atmosphere; thus arose the necessity for creating the material world, that functions like a prison-house for those who wanting to try to lord it over material nature ...

The material creation (and its twenty-four basic elements) are elaborately described in the Vedic literatures. Basically, the original person (adi purusa - Govinda or Krishna...) expands as MahaVishnu, who lies in mystic slumber in the Causal Ocean. Innumerable universes emanate and expand from his bodily pores as he exhales, and they contract and re-enter his transcendental body when he inhales (see pic below...)
http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=505

Another expansion of Vishnu enters each universe and creates the first being, Brahma; yet another Vishnu expansion enters into every atom of existence as all-cognizant eternal time and as the supersoul dwelling in the hearts of all living beings.
http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=509

The living beings who in their original home have perfect, full-sized spiritual forms are reduced to being infinitessimal spirit-souls one ten-thousandth the size of the tip of a hair. And, because we are marginal energy, in the material world we are subordinate to the laws of material nature which essentially make it a miserable place full of death, disease and suffering. The individual soul is trapped - like a jail sentence - to experience material happiness and distress in a particular body for a particular number of breaths - determined by the previous life's karma.
http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=506

The common ancester of all living beings in the material world is the first created being, Brahma. By a mystic meditation process, he divides himself into two forms which become the prototypical male and female forms. Other sons and daughters of Brahma also act as progenitors of mankind. By mystic power, the various life-forms are assumed and created according to the different desires of the individual souls to enjoy material nature (experiencing sex underwater as fish, having sex in the sky as birds, swinging sex from tree-branches as monkees, etc...)
http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=511

There is a spiritual evolution through 8,000,000 forms of life before one (again) attains one of the 400,000 different human forms of life. Individual souls in the most rudimentary forms of life are almost completely covered by ignorance and have very limited consciousness. Lower life-forms automatically transmigrate (by their desire...) to the species with the next most developed level of consciousness (eg: an ant desires to try to enjoy its next life as a flying ant...)

When the human form is reached there is the potential for full consciousness, philosophical inquiry, and religion . The highest aim of human life is to realize our true identity and original constitutional position in relation to the eternal supreme person who is the original source and maintainer of all other eternal persons...
http://www.krishna.com/main.php?id=464

Any progress made spiritually carries over to the next life. If absolutely no progress is made spiritually and one desires to remain mired in material darkness, then there is a great risk of falling back down to the evolutionary cycle of lower species before getting another relatively rare human birth...

[Troll_Bait]