The Human Soul & The Human Spirit
 

I'm just curious what people think about the Soul, the Spirit, and any interconnectivity it has with eachother and even the mind. Religious or not, it doesn't matter. I merely just want to hear all your thought upon the matter.

Here is the paradigm I apply. It is hard for me to articulate and I apologize if it makes no sense.

The outer world is an illusion created by mind through its sensory functions.

The mind is derived from an individual self (the awareness that one is, and is distinct from others) that could be called a soul -- but it has no transcendent function -- it has no life after death and does not enter into another body or plane of existence. It could also be considered one's unconscious.

All individual selves are illusions formed by some sort of transcendent, timeless, singular, fundamental consciousness. It alone transcends the physical world.

What is "soul" and what is "spirit" is an issue of semantics. If I were to use the terms I would say that "soul" is individual and illusory whereas "spirit" is collective and limitless.

I don't believe in a soul. The act of consciouness (and the construction of a mind) is a physical effect caused by the brain.
I am most definately a materialist in this sense.

The embodied mind. The "soul" is reliant on brain chemistry and the perceptive functions of the body. The disembodied mind and body paradigm with this external transcendent soul concept is a major failure of Western philosophy for explaining real human experience. Its about time to stop rejecting the body and buying into the idea that we can somehow seperate our bodies from our minds.

The soul is the mind, body, and everything.