When I was younger, I decided that a soul was some quality of the flesh, that my body both was and contained what I deemed my "soul." If I possessed such a thing, I reasoned, it seemed unlikely that it would be any less than everything I was, my body naturally being at least a part of my self.
On the foundation of this definition, I began to explore its implications for what people said of souls: that they were our eternal aspect, that I'd live on in such a state after my body died, etc. While most of the explanations I heard were vague and decidedly fluffy, science had already pretty well laid out what would happen to my body when I died: I would turn to dust if left on my own, but more likely go to nourishing other living creatures long before then, being decomposed by them in the process. What those creatures, bacteria and worms and bugs mostly, consumed of my flesh would provide them with energy for living while becoming a permanent element of their own varied compositions. This was a cyclical process, I saw, for those living creatures I contributed to with my death would themselves one day die and be consumed in their turn, starting the process all over.
Even back then, I wasn't satisfied with the offhanded dismissal such a process got. Perhaps in response to this, I dreamt up my own terminology to try and salvage some of the wonder I saw so clearly: living things became "life-structures," death became their "collapse," and the vast interplay of the living which was the stage for these a "life pool." My death, then, would be the time when all the organisms composing my body ceased to work collectively toward my continued existence; those constituent organisms, the substance of which was the only thing I could bring myself to call "life," would then merge back into the life pool to contribute to other life-structures' existence.
To this was added an idea from Chaos Theory, namely that of the accumulation of minute(as in very small, not 60 seconds) influences. What I took from this was that everything that happened to anything left some imprint, however small, on its subject; the sun shines on a rock for an hour, and that rock is forever different than it would have been had it not undergone said exposure; everything that happens has an effect on what it happens to, I guess. And if this is true of simple, unthinking things like rocks, how much more relevant to dynamic, melodramatic rocks like us. Our experiences, then, left an imprint, changed us in some way, and that change was carried on to whatever consumed us at our deaths, etc. This, I decided, was the purpose of life, to change through experience of the world and so contribute to the dynamic character of the life pool. I didn't have any clue what the purpose of that was, mind you; it's just the process as I saw it at work.
Maybe it's just me, but even back then this seemed so much cooler than going to an afterlife where you just sat around being happy all the time.
Recently, between studying Tool lyrics and a fascinating book on brain dichotomy, I've been developing what I think of as a religious outlook: a sense for the spiritual, or other side of matter; ideas of what life means and is for, and what happens when it ends; a sometimes overwhelming feeling of wonder. I decided that we're all the same being, manifesting as individuals for the sake of experience unavailable to us in our unified form, and that such experience contributes to the character of our unified self when we return to that state.
I say recently, but I've been months mulling these ideas over; I'm sure I listened to the album Lateralus at least a hundred times over the course of the summer. All the while, I felt I was discovering something new; not part of reality or at all resolved with it, but something else, something perhaps connected to reality through us as conscious beings; as personalities influencing material bodies, ideas made flesh as it were, we're the closest thing to a marriage of the real and unreal as I can imagine.
It wasn't until now that I realized why this idea, of interconnectedness and a single consciousness and such, rang so true for me even though I had long since discarded all that religious tomfoolery in favor of a purely rational outlook on the world. It's a new perspective, a new degree of wonder and understanding, given to an old idea. It's us as aspects of a unified whole, and that whole as a dynamic living consciousness best described as Life. Of course the world isn't just something around us, but neither is it just something we're a part of; it's us. Like, you know: Us. Consciousness is important, remarkable and valuable in this scheme; it's how we've been able to accelerate the evolutionary process beyond anything nature ever did unconsciously. We are a new step, one that takes the process of steps into its own hands and makes a conscious effort out of the automatic imperative that defines life: Growth. Advancement. Becoming.
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