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Countless millions of human beings who have lived and loved, suffered and rejoiced upon our planet. What is left of them today to guarantee their existence in the past, and their continuing existence in the present? A few bones, a few buildings, and later, traces of their historical influence. They may have left behind beauty in the field of literature, of architecture, of painting, and in those forms in which they have embodied their thought and aspiration, their visions and their ideals. No man possesses a perfect mechanism, but owns one that must inevitably break down at some point. It fails somewhere, to meet it's physical, emotional, and mental needs. This speaks of the sum total of the united cell life; of the environment in which a particular form finds itself. Of a life, impersonal and abstract in nature, which pervades it, of a temporary and impermanent self. |
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Is there a "Immortal Entity" who is "the Dweller" in the body? |
Belief in the soul is understood as being a matter of temperament, of the wish and desire of the ages wherein man struggled and suffered and relieved the strain of living by constructing a body of thought around a happy immortal being. Man would be free, eventually and finally, from all the difficulties of physical existence. The soul can be regarded as a beautiful vision, an hallucination, its existence resting on no sure foundation. |
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Belief,
verbal testimony, hope, curious and psychic happenings, untrained opinion
and the findings of visionary people are not enough to prove the fact of the soul. |
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Belief in God and Heaven and in an immortal future have grown out of the ancient awe and ignorant terror of infant humanity. The result of a man's effect upon his deity provided man's destiny, which was either good or bad according to the reactions of this Gods to man's deeds. Thus, the origin of the heaven or hell complexes of the present religious faiths. From this grew, the idea of a persistent entity called the soul, which could enjoy heaven or suffer hell at the will of God and as the result of actions done whilst in the human form. As man grew in sensitivity; as he became more and more refined under the influence of the law of selection and of adaptation; as group life grew closer and the group integration was improved; so that ideas of the Divine grew, and likewise ideas of the soul and of the world, man's concepts of reality grew richer and deeper. Today we have thought inheritance of concepts, ideas and intuitions which deal with the immaterial and the intangible. These in some mysterious way produces thoughts and dreams and imaginations, which, find expression in a dim view of The Divine Plan. The underlying mystery pervades in the simple everyday life of the ordinary human being who lives and loves, works and plays, bears children eats food, earns money and sleeps. There is no true justification to an agelong belief in a "Soul and its Immortality" |
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"Where then is the Soul?" |
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