Does anything not biological have soul? That is the dividing line between science and religious believers and metaphysics. The latter in which I hold a Master degree, holds that everything has soul, you, me and the bedpost.
There has been films about cars with souls (remember Herbie the Volkswagen Beetle?) Then there are the films about robots that are 'alive'.
We have to readjust our thinking here, for how can those things be, even many of us, having an affinity with our cars etc, can get the things going when no one else seems to have the knack.
What is it about those people? What 'extra' do they have that most others don't have? Simply it is a belief that soul, whatever that is, is in everything.
Well what does metaphysics have to say about it? I can speak only from my own perception of metaphysics, for like new-age believers, metaphysically beliefs go from the scientific to the sublime: from the sensible to the non-sensible. I try to keep my own metaphysical beliefs as near as possible to what can be proven. Now this isn't anything like as simple as it sounds.
Take quantum mechanics, string or 'M' theories of science for instance. My own view is that those theirs belong more to Metaphysics than they do to physics, though a physicist will get 'hot-behind-the-collar' at the mere suggestion.
A physicist, a word derived from 'physical', is a person who believes that there is nothing that isn’t physical. Of course he is right for ‘things’ are of a physical nature. Yet we are talking mainly semantics here for other than words like soul mind or spirit we have no words to describe something that is not ‘physical’ in the accepted sense of the physics of a hundred or so years ago. Now physics is changing, but oh so slowly, because the nature of what is physical is changing also with what Quantum Physics , String Theory and ‘M’ Theory are exploring with their mathematics.
In the search for the smallest particle physics is finding that electrons, for instance, appear to possess two states, one is as a ‘physical’ particle, which we can fairly easily picture in mind, and the others states, which is described in physics as ‘smeared out’ is not. How can a particle exist at all places in the universe while also possessing the ability to ‘collapse’ (another scientific term) into a particle seeming on demand or need?
Not quite so easy to visualize is it. Still that is where physics is heading and it why I believe that it places it strongly into the realms of Metaphysics.
So what is ‘soul’ and do inanimate objects possess it? Religions’, believers in soul on the whole, say not. Science does not believe in soul at all with all scientists except for a few, denying its existence vehemently.
But what is it?
My own view is that soul is the database of mind. It is where all of what we think and do is encoding as energy that can be recalled and added to with the end result being that soul evolves.
Mind too is physical in this sense since mind is the ‘brain’ of the soul. Now In metaphysics we would call it the higher mind. This is because our individual consciousness, which is made ‘individual’ because of that database of memories we call the soul, is focused finitely, which means that it is universal consciousness focused down to an individual ‘point of view’.
You see everything can only be individual in two ways, or two ‘points of view’. One is as an overview, or ‘wide focus’ view, of the universe; which in metaphysical we would call ‘The Universal Mind. The other is as infinite numbers of individual ‘points of view’ which vary from a ‘collapsed particle’ such as an electron, to all individual ‘forms’, which of course includes life-forms that vary from a simply single-celled organism to each and every multi-cellular form.
Conscious is universal which becomes individual by the encoding of information derived from a unique ‘point of view’ such as those of you and me. We evolve that database of information through living, thinking and acting on life. That evolving database is our uniqueness, it is what make us what we are. It is also that unique database that survived the death of the body.
So does a yacht have soul? From the foregoing I would say yes it does, to the extent that all ‘things’ from a particle to a human being does. In the wide-focus mind of the universal database, nothing is forgotten, nor is it forgotten in our own database of our unique souls, which are a part of that overview one.
It is through the universal mind, which religions call ‘God’, that everything is connected, you, me and the smallest ‘collapsed’ particle’. Though that mind we are all ‘One’.
A retired hypnotherapist and lecturer, Tom Leigh is a graduate of the University of Metaphysical Sciences with a Masters degree. He is currently continuing his studies while writing a thesis for his doctorate. He loves sailing and owns a yacht that is two years older than himself, a classic cutter called Cloche d'Or, which means 'The Golden Bell'. It was built in 1939 in Holland. The Rhiannon Blade: http://www.psi-aware.com
