According to philosophers, that which animates a living thing is the soul. For what would profit a man to gain this world and lose his soul, or what would profit a man to fear losing his soul when he has no soul to lose anyway?
It would of course be a waste of time if a study will be made on something simply imagined. The exercise will ultimately become a dissection of the pigment of imagination which would perhaps entertain a matured man to boredom like the geography of Wonderland or the topography of Neverland. Perhaps, the spirit world offers mankind a challenge. There are documented dreams which bespeaks of actual events and prophetic dreams that have performed spiritual significance. The dreams that have performed spiritual significance. The dream about Abraham Lincoln's death and the dreams interpreted by the Patriarch Joseph manifests experiential powers of the soul using the dream mode, or are these simply curious consequences of chance?
And yet, Jose Rizal was not even dreaming when he foresaw cable telephone when he wrote Por Telefono and Jules Verne was not even asleep when he saw the different technological advancements we have today such as the submarine and the cellphone. One can actually give his dreams too much credit. But the uncanny precision on how Morgan Robertson wrote about the Titanic's sinking would be enough to challenge the doubter. There is something about human consciousness that goes beyond creative imagination. There is something about human soul that goes beyond its function of animating the body.
But that is already assuming that there is indeed a human soul. But is there indeed a human soul? Any spiritual discussion would indeed be futile without considering the human soul. It is indeed the given in today's existing metaphysics.
According to ancient philosophers, and they have demonstrated this very well, that which animates a living thing is the soul. Indeed, there is an obvious difference between an animate and inanimate object, e.g. the presence or manifestation of life, and this is what is called the soul.
Such differentiation had opened a whole lot of fresh controversies including souls of vegetative objects and the nature of the souls inherent in beasts. Present findings in plant parapsychology seen to indicate that consciousness is present among plants as in the case of how they react to music and violent behavior. The same holds true when some experiments were done on some animals. Even the fact that some animals seem to manifest an understanding of some language forms and the capability to make use of tools have given a fresh insight into the faculties of souls inherent in animals.
But the controversy that these findings generated pale in comparison to headways made in the consideration of the human soul. It is because apparently, any belief in the creative process seems to indicate that flora and fauna are simply the given. Given in the sense that they exist for the deliberate use of the human being whose soul seems to be of a higher order than what the former ones possess; e.g. for them to reach a heavenly reward, which is not necessary for floral and faunal souls, they needed to be redeemed.
But if plant or animal souls are given or assumed to be in existence, how does one prove the existence of the human soul. At any rate, if the existence of the human soul can not be proven, or at least assumed, there is therefore no need for this article. More important than this is, one takes the teleological considerations of belief systems and the rationality of different religions. For what would profit a man to gain this world and lose his soul, and rather, what would profit a man to fear losing his soul when in fact he has no soul to lose anyway?
Dante Allighieri's great scheme of still trying to redeem the souls, e.g. purgation, even in the afterlife would only provide mankind with a great literary value which could only, at best, be entertaining.
But the random findings of Dr. Raymond Moody which involved near death experiences and testimonies of those who already have died in emergency situations tend to show that there is indeed an afterlife, and more than this, the cognitive survival of the consciousness even after physical death. The experiences of those who have died and later related what transpired after they have died show that there is a conscious existence that continue to experience commonalities even after death. These conscious existences occur outside the physical body which died evidently because, the conscious state which experienced the account observed the corpse or cadaver. There is no choice but to identify this conscious state with the soul, because the lifeless body is simply eliminated to have influenced the observation.
Earlier to the Moody account where the simple but significant experiments made by Benito Reyes who weighed dying individuals before and after death. He found the difference between the living and dead bodies highly suggestive of the existence of the soul. Would the existence of the soul have some weight in the study of the spirit world?
The universal appeal of the ghost hauntings seemed to have given the assumption that the soul indeed exists such that no empirical attempt to study the matter is no longer necessary.
And yet the subjectivity of these experiences easily casts a doubtful web of suspicion to said accounts. The spirit world as experienced continuous to challenge even the most sophisticated parapsychological readings undertaken by paranormal investigators. The scientific world is always ready with empirical explanations to whatever findings emerge. Yes, of course, the scientific mind will always attempt a rational explanation until an irrational stance is detected in such an attempt.
