 Spiritual: December 20, 2023 Issue [#12325] |
This week: You and Your Soul Edited by: NaNoKit  
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What do you believe the soul to be? Is it something material, or immaterial?
This week's Spiritual Newsletter is all about the soul, and how to nourish it.
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I’ve always been the kind of person who asks questions. Ever since I was a small child I’ve wondered about… well, everything! What’s beyond the universe? And beyond that? Where does God come from? What, exactly, is a soul? It used to drive my family up the wall. My great-aunt especially – she thought it quite unbecoming for a child to ask such questions. I figure she just didn’t know the answers. To this day, I still don’t.
It turns out that a questioning mind is a perfect fit for Philosophy. Even with a postgraduate degree in the subject, though, I have yet to find a firm answer to the content of a soul. The more I study, the more I realise that I don’t know about the human being and the universe that we find ourselves in. There are different strands of belief about souls. Some figure it’s purely biological – a synonym for the mind, which passes as we pass. Others see it as immaterial and eternal, a spark of God.
What is it that we call our ‘I’, our ‘me’? The part of us that hopes and dreams, loves and hates, creates and destroys? Our ‘I’ can be our greatest supporter, and our most fearsome enemy. It drives us and hinders us. Writes history and shapes nations.
I am personally of the belief that it’s both material and immaterial – that it interacts with the brain, but is not entirely of the brain. Sometimes, when a person’s brain is damaged their personality changes. That would indicate that their ‘me’ is affected, and that it is therefore not completely unconnected. I live in hope, though, that there is something that lives on after our brain passes. I cannot imagine my ‘me’ no longer existing. There are those who find that a comforting thought – eternal nothingness – but I am most certainly not one of them. I live in hope of an afterlife – preferably a pleasant one.
Whilst there is much that I don’t know about the soul, I do believe that it is something we should nourish. We look after our teeth by cleaning them; look after our kidneys by drinking enough water. As it is with other parts of us, so it is with the soul – it requires care in order to function at its best.
We are each of us different and that means that our needs are different. I have noticed that there are some things I can do to feel better in myself, though, and better about myself. Many of us spend too much time watching the news and doomscrolling on social media, for example. The news tends to focus on the negative, rather than the positive, which leaves us with a sense that everything’s bad and people are horrible. It's important to stay informed, but a constant stream of negative input is definitely not good for us! There is plenty of good out there and, on the whole, people are pretty decent. That sense of doom gets worse when we isolate ourselves from others. I am all for the working from home trend – big fan – but outside of work we do need to connect with other people. We’re social beings. I feel sad when I’m at a restaurant, and I look around me, and even for a nice meal out a significant amount of diners are spending time gazing at their phones rather than connecting with who they’re with. There’s a time and a place for everything – please make space in your life for your loved ones.
There’s also this trend of instant gratification, and with it come short attention spans. When I was writing for an online publication I had strict word limits because people don’t want to take the time to read something more in-depth. I have friends who no longer watch movies without also looking at their phones. It’s good to take the time to do whatever it is that you’re doing. For me, being in nature helps. No phones, no screens, no noise – just me and nature. After a while of simply being you begin to notice what’s truly around you. Life that is easily overlooked if you lack the attention. A spider weaving a web; a squirrel running from branch to branch; a deer peeking at you from between the trees. It’s wonderful, and it shows what we’re missing out on if we deny ourselves time in the world, with our ‘me’. It is these joyful encounters that nourish my soul.
What nourishes yours? I hope that you’ll get to do plenty of it in 2024. Happy holidays!
NaNoKit
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