do we have a soul?

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Now please read this post carefully before replying.

I do necessarily mean in the religious sense.

I mean to we have some spark in our brains that makes us who we are?

People here for example with moderate autism may struggle with verbal communication but their posts display a different person.

What I am asking is do we have a personality trapped behind our autism.

People with moderate autism have shown by their posts here that they understand way more then people think.

For people with profound autism the thought that there is a personality trapped inside is a scary and sad idea.

Lastly when I say do we have a soul? I mean humans not just people with autism.

Also again by soul I mean a conciseness that is uniquely us not necessarily something supernatural.

Now I may not have worded this the exact why I wanted it to come across but if anybody else wants to clear it up a bit be my guest.

There's no difference between my "soul" and my "autism."

I am what I am, and I'm not "trapped" behind anything.

If I broke my arm, it would still be a part of my body. Ditto for "autism."

sharkattack,

I think the thought that autistic people - who are or are perceived as being at any functioning level - lack a personality to be a scary and sad idea. It is all too common to deny humanity to people on the basis of outward appearances.

Well as sad as it be I think lots of us here have been treated like dirt due to our autism.

My problem has always been waaaaaay too much personality.

By the way when I say I don't just mean in the supernatural sense I do include it.

I wounder is a brain a biological computer that is operated by our sprit.

There I said it I do believe in God.

I totally agree. Being treated like dirt is pretty common, although it takes different forms depending on how obviously autistic one is.

A popular belief that contributes to this I think is the idea that autism is a cage that traps the real person inside, especially applied to more severely/obviously autistic people, but often it becomes clear that such autistic people are definitely present and exist. Carly Fleischmann, for example, has communicated quite a lot about who she is once she learned how to type.

Also just to comment on it - I did catch you didn't just mean in the supernatural sense. And believing in a deity is your prerogative. No one can or should take that from you.

THere's nothing wrong with believing in God, but you probably should have put this in the religion section then.

I don't believe in god, but I do wonder about the physics of thought and all that. A lot of atheists pretend that has been solved, but I don't think it has.

Yes. Exactly. Autism is a part of who I am and does not mean I am any less than anyone else.

Well, it may strike some as mystical, but those who have had experience with hallucinogens will know what I mean - I think "who we are" is MUCH BIGGER than the 'you' that is currently manifesting through your physical vehicle. The brain is a lens through which a being of immortal energy/consciousness directs it's focus into the hologram that is the material world. The personality that you and others know by your birth name is just a mask in a role-playing game. One of the rules of the game is that you check your memory at the door when you come in and start playing. When this vehicle wears out or is destroyed, your character is out of the game, but you don't cease to exist.

If you haven't had the experience of opening the "third eye" in the pineal gland, you have never had the experience of sensing this directly (your mask prevents it), but once you've seen it, it's such a "duh" moment, you can't believe you weren't aware of it all along. Reality isn't real. It's all an elaborate illusion that we as a collective consciousness have built out of mutual assent. To ask "do we [each] have a soul" over complicates the truth. We are the universe and the universe is us.

Everything is soul.

One enormous cosmic ocean of consciousness, that throws up temporary individual droplets of spray, which rise, live suspended briefly, and die, falling back into the undulating waves.

Here's Tom with the weather...

I don't feel like I have a soul. I feel like a floaty thing just going about my day to day business. If we didn't have souls though, we probably wouldn't care to talk about it. I see souls as being empathetic. I'm not empathetic, but I could be worse. I'm not absolutely cold, I can just be an a**hole sometimes, because I'm too blunt/too honest etc.
I know this is an Aspie thing, but I do wish I could stop it. It doesn't help me out at all.

Willard you understood my question.

I would love to have an experience like you described.

^ I think kind of like this. I have not met anyone who I haven't thought has a 'personality', that I know of. Everyone seems to be as individual and 'themselves' to me as the next, if that makes sense. Also, even if someone doesn't appear particularly communicative, I don't read that as them not having a personality...

How do you see it? Now I'm intrigued.

e said hallucinogens. That usually means LSD or mushrooms.

True story, make of it what you want...

I had a shiatsu person come to my home every fortnight. Had met him through a contact and he was good. On par with some of the best I had had up to that point over the 20 years before I met him. He was still learning his trade though and charged very little so that made him affordable.

He was also interested in spiritual Taoism and his ultimate goal was spiritual immortality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoism_an ... mmortality He went to China to practice inner alchemy in a Taoist monastry eventually.

He returned 4 months later and I started my shiatsu sessions again. He told me had learned a lot and had go his meditation to the point he had been able to 'see' the meridians system and that they were pure white. Anyway.

The second or third session after his return he did my massage and at the end he wuld always wind down slowly. He took longer than usual this time around and had his hands near my ribcage (can't remember where exactly, been blown by the rest of the experience ever since).

I totally trusted this guy with massages so there had been a long silence where and as the silence was broken he told me he had just seen my soul. As I was lying there, without a second thought, I asked him what colour it was! Not the reaction he had expected I suppose, he might never have meant to tell me that but he answered my question anyway and told me it was white.

I couldn't hide my initial disappointment as I would have expected soul to be a colour He did a few more massages after that but I always had the feeling he felt he overstepped the lines after telling me what he did. And eventually he returned to his Chinese monastry. Not had contact with him since.

That was 8 years ago though. Done a lot of thinking about this since and all that I will further say on the subject is this...

Is my pupil a black hole? Are there 2 event horizons, one observed by the naked eye and the other observed through technology? What happens to light after it disappears beyond the limits of technology?

The photons that enter our nervous system have both particle and wave properties. I can accept that the wave property gets assimilated by our nervous system but what happens to the particle bit? I'm useless at maths though so I will probably never know...

Last edited by guzzle on 24 Mar 2014, 8:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.