What is a soul?

[Sekto Springs]

This question has been asked thousands of times and thousands of times it has been answered--but differently.

This is known to be one of the simplest yet hardest-to-answer questions in the world, so I am asking it now. What is a soul? I'm sure alot of you will answer different ways, and alot of you will answer the same.

Replies...

[oddguy]

According to my religion and some belief of my own, this is what I think to be a soul.

Okay, as people we have to things:

• Body
• Spirit, or Soul. Same thing.

Our Body is what houses our spirit. Body would be our physical form and what goes along with that. Such as hunger, lust...things like that.

Our Soul is the center of Spirituality and conscience...things of that nature.

You know in the cartoons when you see the angel on one shoulder and the devil the other? It's like that.

I'll see what others say before I continue.

-oddguy

[Esus]

This is known to be one of the simplest yet hardest-to-answer questions in the world, so I am asking it now. What is a soul?

It depends completely on how yo define the word. Everyone defines certain words differently, thats fine.

According to Dictionary.com (note, this is american, not britsh, which may differ slightly:
The animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity.
The spiritual nature of humans, regarded as immortal, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state.
The disembodied spirit of a dead human.
A human: “the homes of some nine hundred souls” (Garrison Keillor).
The central or integral part; the vital core: “It saddens me that this network... may lose its soul, which is after all the quest for news” (Marvin Kalb).
A person considered as the perfect embodiment of an intangible quality; a personification: I am the very soul of discretion.
A person's emotional or moral nature: “An actor is... often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not” (Alec Guinness).
A sense of ethnic pride among Black people and especially African Americans, expressed in areas such as language, social customs, religion, and music.
A strong, deeply felt emotion conveyed by a speaker, a performer, or an artist.
Soul music.

[Joshy]

Soul is the stuff in your nose, thats why when you sneeze you have to say "bless you"to keep the soul from escaping.

[paramiteabe]

I pondered this question a lot and I came to the conclusion to the most basic and simplest scientific answer to what a soul is. A soul is basically and fundamentally you occupying a phisical body. You are the soul occupying your phisical body. When you die you no longer occupy your phisical body and you are simply peer energy that can't be seen or heard because you are on a different level of the electromagnetic spectrum. In the phisical sense we can only see a small piece of the electromagnetic spectrum and that is light and color and we can hear sound waves. But there is an infanitive amount of waves that cannot be detected by the natural human bodies senses like radio waves, and the list goes on and on. When we "our soul" is out of the body we are on a different frequency of energy wave legnths thus a liveing human being cannot detect us from his or her senses or see us because the Human only sees and hears a fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum and that is light and color and sound waves. So in finnish when our bodies die our life energy still persist on a different frequency of wave legnths that can't be detected by the liveing.

Heven the after life and God and Satin would be on different frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. That my friends is my scientific hypothisis based upon what I learned about Color theory in Visual design. I learned about the electromagnetic spectrum and it is quite fascinating.

[oddguy]

I always believed that.

Soul is the stuff in your nose, thats why when you sneeze you have to say "bless you"to keep the soul from escaping.

Old Wives Tale.

-oddguy

[Esus]

I pondered this question a lot and I came to the conclusion to the most basic and simplest scientific answer to what a soul is. A soul is basically and fundamentally you occupying a phisical body. You are the soul occupying your phisical body. When you die you no longer occupy your phisical body and you are simply peer energy that can't be seen or heard because you are on a different level of the electromagnetic spectrum. In the phisical sense we can only see a small piece of the electromagnetic spectrum and that is light and color and we can hear sound waves. But there is an infanitive amount of waves that cannot be detected by the natural human bodies senses like radio waves, and the list goes on and on. When we "our soul" is out of the body we are on a different frequency of energy wave legnths thus a liveing human being cannot detect us from his or her senses or see us because the Human only sees and hears a fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum and that is light and color and sound waves. So in finnish when our bodies die our life energy still persist on a different frequency of wave legnths that can't be detected by the liveing.

You seemed to repeat yourself loads of times there...

[dripik]

Interesting topic...

Well, I think that the Body is like a prison for Soul. The Soul has to serve the Body to survive (food etc.) and it can't brake free. I hope you understand what I'm talking about.

[Seargentbig]

Ok, this is a dificult one, but I think that my answer is somewhere between oddguy's and paramiteabe's.
I beleive that a persons concious... um... being is a soul. In other words, I beleive that my body's soul is the thing that is typing the words on this very post. I am the soul that inhabits my body, just like the thing that is reading this is yours. But there are alterations on the soul, like oddguy said (Hunger, greed, ect) and with those alterations, you get your mind. When a person dies, they are freed from the body, as well as the alterations, and then go to wherever.
That's my thoughts.

[Lucipher]

I think that dripik got it similar to my opinion,I think that the body is a house for the soul so it can exist in this world, this world may be a test for the soul so that when it dies and is set free it's fate will be decided depending on how it did in this world, sort of like heaven and hell.

[Hobo]

I don't believe that humans have souls I believe that, similar to what oddguy said, we are divided into two parts, the body, and the mind. The body only exists so the brain can be transported, communicate with other brains, I.e. other people, and survive by getting a flow of oxygen through the blood and so on.

So what we really are, our very conciousness's and so on, is just our brain. And the body is a 'house' for the mind which enables it to move, communicate, see, feel and do all the things that humans can.