Comment by TheAceOfHearts
1 day ago
I've been thinking a lot about soul cultivation as a concept, and the general structure of the soul, and doing a bit of writing on the topic. I feel like this topic is surprisingly under-discussed and under-explored relative to how impactful it is. By soul I mean "the part of you that is an observer", in case this isn't clear. I think a lot of discourse gets caught up with metaphysical speculation instead of focusing on what is there and what is knowable.
Most recently I was also probing people about how they conceptualize of the soul, making my own drawings, and asking others for drawings. If you have a few minutes I would also be interested in seeing how you would draw a soul, given pen and paper or equivalent materials. It often feels like for a lot of people the concept of the soul gets comingled with very confusing definitions.
There's a general problem where certain concepts become so overloaded that just disambiguating and clarifying what is meant becomes a challenge. I will note that if your first thought or question is whether the soul is even real, you might be confused about the definition or we might be referring to different concepts.
> By soul I mean "the part of you that is an observer"
This is a nice notion, but it's not how the existing literature (going back very long) generally uses the term "soul." Conventionally speaking the term soul is theological and has ties to modes of spiritual salvation as it is considered a substance that persists beyond human mortality. What you're describing seems more like the term "self" or "ego" or "conscious awareness" as those terms are used in philosophy. You're welcome to create your own definitions, but if they trample over the prior art of the terms in literature that is hundreds if not thousands of years old then that's going to almost certainly lead to the confusion you say you're noticing among people.
for what it's worth my drawing of "the part of me that is the observer" would look like some subset of the brain.
Drawing a soul sounds inspiring. I could give it a go sometime. When you asked I realized I still hold a mental model of a spirit animal.