My soul is not my brain

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I feel extremely disconnected from my brain and body. My body and my brain often do things that my soul would never do. It's painful watching my body and brain disobey my soul. I just wish I could feel whole. This is one of the reasons why I hate being considered autistic.

What is a soul? What makes you think you have one?

My soul is who I really am. It's hard to explain it in words. I don't consider my brain who I am. I just consider my brain a filter.

Would you consider your personality to be "you" ? What about your memories - are they part of you? What about consciousness itself - is that "you"?

We do have a mind and minds are great mysteries indeed. No one, to my knowledge, has been able to explain, exactly, why one person's mind can be so vastly different from another's. It's very fascinating and interesting!

It depends what part of my personality you're talking about. I don't really consider my stimming and need to spend time alone part of me, but someone else could consider that my personality.
I think my soul is social, self-sufficient and adventurous. Since my body lacks the energy to display those traits a lot of people wouldn't consider that part of my personality.

I think my "autism" or whatever mental condition I have is just an illness of my mind and body. I don't consider it part of me. When I act and feel neurotypical I feel like I'm in harmony with my soul. Whenever I act autistic I feel like I'm being dragged by my brain and body. It just doesn't feel right.

From the way I understand things, your brain has different chemicals in it.

When you experience the things you desire and you feel the need for adventure, it is because something in your life has triggered certain chemicals.

Anyway, that's my input.

When I really drill down on this, our experiences of I or self are neither the brain itself nor the energy that goes in and flows out. The brain stops ticking when the blood supply stops hence it in and of itself doesn't seem like it would intuitively have any consciousness-generating capability without the heart and blood - that just creates a cache 22. Similarly the energy itself in terms of brain chemicals and impulses vector in and vector out - ie. we're really not closed systems in any thermodynamic sense, the need for toilets highlights that also with food, and we need input for upkeep of our bodies and minds and it's far from being one-time input.

When I've had the opportunity to really drill down and focus on my consciousness, particularly when I was younger and could experiment by certain means, I suppose *cheat* with chemical aid, I could focus on the core essence of selfhood and notice that I'm a) not my brain and b) not the energy but rather the movement itself (otherwise in the second case I'd die several times a day and know no continuity). On one level I'd explain it as being like to computer software neither being computer hardware nor being naturally expressed in electricity in the raw - ie. it takes it's use to hold meaningful patterns such as would constitute data processes. That's part of why a couple years ago I had the location/state of self on my profile as "A beautiful vector living among many" - thinking of an EEG type wave, my consciousness as I experienced it on drill down occasions was an oscillation off of baseline and that oscillation itself seemed to come with very potent desires to self-manifest, self-express, and that only seems to get checked by the constant frustration as such that we meet in the external world which would cause budgetary breakdown or overwhelming of such raw motivation.

It was fascinating for me, after joining a mystic order or two, to see the suggestion made precisely to this extent - that there is a different element to consciousness than of matter, that matter and consciousness are both divine but of different qualities, different parameters or colors of the consciousness or meditation of the One Thing, No-Thing, or however one might put it. What we experience is, from that perspective, a resonance or reverberation in tandem where the brain really would behave more as a reducing valve than anything and what we can get out of ourselves or our bodies is different than what we can dream up precisely because we need working neural circuitry to manifest consciousness properly in the physical - a stroke that scrambles your language centers scrambles your ability to communicate in earnest. Similarly built up cholesterol in the brain brings senility.

I would debate next to nothing that modern medical research is finding, with the exception of perhaps any situation where they'd jump way beyond the experimental data's value to push ontology. Because science is the slow and sure method there are things we simply can't ask of it, at least at this point, if the means for answers or stable experiments aren't available or, on the other hand, if the data we're looking at crosses the objective/subjective line in such ways that we're forced to go from quantity to quality judgments without any sort of translation we can make sense of. I do think it will be helpful when we can at least have better verification that there's more to mind than the limits of the physical body but at the same time it's hard to tell when that will happen, how that will happen, or even whether God itself prefers to keep everything on razor's edge where everyone can debate atheism/theism and the like till their blue in the face with no resolution.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 16 Mar 2014, 6:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

People who get hit in the head can have radical personality changes. So personality is unlikely to be your soul. Unless the soul can be altered by a hammer blow. I'll leave that question to the theologians.

I agree with that to a certain degree. I don't think my need for adventure is related to chemicals in my brain at all. I've had those feelings for my whole life. What is triggered by chemicals is my feelings of laziness that prevent me from meeting those needs.

Neuroscience has not discovered any evidence that there is a part of the mind that exists outside of the body.

I am aware of neuroscience. I just think neuroscience is just one way of looking at things.

There have been many well-documented cases of brain damage dramatically altering a person's personality without a major effect on their cognitive abilities. What do you make of that?

I think their soul is still intact it's just that their brain(the filter/lens) has changed. When the brain changes a lot of the character traits of the soul appear to be different because the filter changes. Imagine that you're wearing rose tinted lenses. Everything will appear to change color, but the objects technically remain the same color.

What is this 'my' that has taken ownership of brain, body and soul?

What is observing the body and brain 'disobeying' the soul?

You are already whole, because nothing can ever be removed from that completeness and nothing can ever be detracted from it because it is always 'whole' or 'full' in and of itself.

ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पुर्णमुदच्यते
पूर्णश्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥

What the above says is:

Om, That is Full, This also is Full, From Fullness comes that Fullness,
Taking Fullness from Fullness, Fullness Indeed Remains.
Om Peace, Peace, Peace.

So, "your" soul is not "your" brain, because "you" are not "you".

There's no such thing as a soul!