Yesterday, following my blog, I had an email exchange with a friend about the soul. His argument was that the soul is rather a part of the light and is slightly different than the psyche at Jung, for example. With followers of the latter sometimes the idea is that the psyche and the soul are one and the same. I share that view, but I will examine it briefly here.
The psyche is distinguished in the anthroposophy in soul and spirit. The mind is the core of the personality that directs everything, the soul is the potential of feelings, emotions and desires, needs that work within us. In some philosophical and religious movements, the soul is the immortal in man, independent of the body and immortal. Etymologically, the word soul goes back to air in several languages, for example the Greek . . . . . . . . . . . . . In Hebrew, that's the word "samah"
Today, the soul, as the immortal, unintelligible and immortal, is sometimes seen as consciousness, or vice versa. It is then that which determines our functioning to a great extent and of which one does not really know where it is in our body. In that sense consciousness is also what passes to the next world, the afterlife or whatever you think is after death. Interestingly, Buddhism denies the existence of a continuous soul. Everything is essentially without self, meditation is the way to get away from your core, in this case the less important self. In Hinduism, however, the soul, . .atman . . . . . . . This comes close to the idea that the soul is a vibration that goes back to where and is the same vibration after the body dies. Or the idea that the soul is a spark of the eternal great, Divine, light or is seen as the essence. The miracle of eternal beauty.
Psyche, the lover of Eros in Greek mythology, is so beautiful that no one dares marry her. On the other hand, much more is a concept, a technical term such as Freud, who used to use besides . Freud distinguished the id, the instinctive subconscious motives, the super-ego, the conscience, the internalization of standards and value of the environment and the ego that is conscious and serves as an intermediary between the two. The psyche is seen in psychology, her study more as the total of the conscious and unconscious. Jung uses the term Even with the central archetype, the structure of the personality, the totality of the conscious and unconscious and is autonomous, out of time and space. Jung calls it a "imago dei"
I am still inclined to see a great overlap between psyche and the more spiritual experience of the soul. Perhaps there is an essence in man, partly divine, partly determined by an intangible nucleus that gives us our more personal form. This would make the idea that God is outside and within us that we see God with the same eye as he sees us with. Even when you do not believe in divinity it is possible to see the soul as part of a greater whole, in the end nothing pertains to itself.
