body mind soul spirit

8/14/2019 Body Mind Soul Spirit

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What Do We Mean by Body-Mind-Soul-Spirit?

Copyright (c) 1996 by Timothy Conway, Ph.D.

It is now becoming something of a clich in various circles of modern lifefrom religion topsychology to holistic medicineto use the nifty phrase body-mind-soul or body-mind-spirit when referring to our totality as a human being.

But what do we mean by this phrase? What is the body? What is the mind? What issoul? And what is spirit? If we are not careful, each of these words can be used soglibly that the wondrous reality denoted by each term is ignored and neglected.

I submit that we need a much fresher, deeper understanding of each component ofour totality so as to help us awaken from the somnambulist trance of ordinary,

unenlightened consciousness lest we all fall into a limbo of mediocrity.Lets start with this aspect of ourselves we call the body. From the usual viewpoint, thebody is this fleshy, bony thing that we awaken to each morning. We wash it and brush itsteeth, we walk, drag or drive it around through the day to the various places we need to go,we (hopefully) give it adequate exercise, we shovel (hopefully) healthy food and liquids intoit, we let it relieve itself of accumulated wastes. We might allow it various forms of pleasure(ranging from nature walks to ecstatic dancing to massages and other delights, dependingon ones fancies). Finally, we lay it down to rest at night in sleep. For too many doctors, thebody is coldly viewed as merely a biochemical machine, needing to be fixed when it breaksdown (usually by pumping drugs into it or invading it with surgery, chemotherapy, radiationsuch interventions often quite helpful, even life-saving, but also far too often aninappropriate way of dealing with the roots of the problems). From a mercenary point ofview, the body is just a skinbag of water (comprising two-thirds of the body), plus carbon,calcium and other materials, with an overall cash value of about $8.

But now, from a more up close biological viewpoint, the body is this utterly marvelous,living assemblage of exquisite organ systems, whose simultaneous, relatively-smooth functioning is a major miracle. Consider this: what is the fantastic Power thatfertilized a pinpoint-sized egg cell in mamas womb and grew it for nine months into a fetusunfolding 10,000 generations of genetic memory, and differentiating this single little cellinto various kinds of cells such as muscle cells, nerve cells, blood cells, and so forth? What isthe Intelligent Power that then brought this organism from the womb into the world, sincewhich time it has grown from infancy into childhood into its present adult form of about fiveor six feet tall, comprised of some 75 trillion cells for the average body (155 pounds)?Incidentally, the configuration of these approximately 75 trillion cells is rather unusual: onlyabout 3.4 trillion cells are tissue cells, and another 31.5 trillion cells are native non-tissue

cells, mainly in the form of erythrocyte red blood cells (~28.5 trillion), plus platelet cells,white blood cells, lymphocytes, macrophages, and other reticuloendothelial cells. Beyond allthese native cells, our bodies contain, on average, about 40 trillion foreign cells, mostlybacteria in our colon. As scientists like Robert Krulwich have pointed out, "there are morebacteria in you than there is 'you' in you.... Aliens from outer space might conclude thathumans are just one big chain of microbe hotels."

Each of our native cells is on average 1/1000th inch in diameter, ranging from tiny plateletsand red blood cells to much larger neurons, some of which are huge. Each of these cells is


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awash in a sea of water inside and outside, with a miraculous membrane of phospholipids.Each cell is made of a number of atoms equalling approximately 10 to the 27th power--onethousand million million million million! Each cell makes some 2,000 proteins per secondand, given that each protein is comprised of a few hundred amino acidswe see that eachcell is selecting 500,000 amino acids per second, organizing them, joining them, checkingthem, and shipping them.

And of the various kinds of cells, consider the electrically excitable nerve cells or neurons,the core components of our brains, spinal cords, and peripheral nerves. Running through thebody are a million miles of nerves (each made of vast numbers of neurons), a total length40 times the circumference of the earth. Some 200 billion neurons are found transmittinginformation in our central and peripheral nervous systems. The brain alone has ~100 billionneurons. Our body's neurons mostly process information either in an outgoing or incomingdirection, with many neurons in the brain functioning interneuronally in both directions.Each neuron has from 1 to over 1,000 dendrite "branches" and axon protrusions culminatingin synapses, across which "synaptic gap" flow a variety of neurotransmitter chemicals to thereceptors of other neurons. (We have up to 500 trillion connecting synapses in our centraland peripheral nervous systems.) These neurons and their neurotransmitter chemicals allowus, along with the mystery ofconsciousness (see below), to receive various sensations

(sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile and kinesthetic sensations, sense of balance, etc.),build upperceptions out of these sensations, experience emotions, make value judgments,think thoughts, contemplateplans, store and retrieve memories, and enact motor behaviorswith the body.

On another level of the body, what is this Intelligent Power that is right now beating myheart, pumping blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels (roughly 55 million gallonspumped in a lifetime), oxygenating tissues, growing hair, digesting food (despite the junkyfood one might choose), eliminating wastes, managing the 22 internal organs,growing/renewing 600+ muscles and 206 bones, operating the lymphatic system, and so onad gloriam Dei?

Biologists, chemists and physicists know that this wondrous body is composed of, asmentioned, some 75 trillion cells, each in turn composed of various molecular substances

such as DNA and RNA which, in turn, are composed of zillions of atoms (circa 10 to the 27thpower) which are composed of countless subatomic particles which need to be moreaccurately designated wavicles because they are mysteriously both discrete and alsodiffused in spacetime (defying all Western logic). Moreover, modern physics has shown usover this last century that the atoms which constitute our bodies are largely(99.9999999999999%) composed ofempty space! On the bodily, physical level, we are aplay of light, more akin to dreamlike no-things than solid somethings.

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Turning to that aspect of ourselves we call the mind, we find the psyche actually rangesfrom lower mind computational functions all the way through the higher mind functionwe might call the soul. The former, which can be categorized as the normal mind,consists in 1) perceptions which organize raw bodily sensations due to various kinds of bio-

electro-magnetic vibrations into familiar entities such as recognizable colors, sounds, tactileand kinesthetic sensation, smells and tastes, movements, processes, places, objects,persons, etc.; 2) scanning for relevant, meaningful data in ones environment or withinones own memory banks or reservoir of knowledge; 3) value judgments and emotionalreactionsthe former basically dividing good-bad, appropriate-inappropriate, the latterdividing into emotional charges associated with like and dislike, attachments and aversions,and all the permutations thereof: joy, elation, euphoria, delight, fear, anger, shame, guilt,envy, jealousy, trauma, shock; 4) memories of a constructed past; 5) anticipations of anexpected future; 6) abstract philosophical concepts about the world and the meaning of


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certain events; 7) linguistic mental processing structured by grammar and syntax, deployedeither to speak or understand speech; 8) mathematical mental processing; 9) dreaming,daydreaming, fantasizing, modeling, planning or creative channeling of new ideas.

Associated with both the lower mind and higher mind (see below) are some ratherwondrous, "extraordinarily ordinary" powers of consciousness that most folks simply takefor granted. For instance:

Neuroscientists (psycho-physiologists) are entirely unable to satisfactorily account for thesubjective, phenomenologicalexperience of seeing color, hearing sound and music, andfeeling emotional states such as love, happiness, sadnessmerely in terms of neuronalprocesses in the brain. Such physiological states can be correlated with these subjectiveexperiences, but descriptions of physiological events cannot adequately account for theextremely vivid immediacy and emotional richness of these noetic experiences. Thisphenomenonbetter to say noumenonfascinated the eminent Canadian brain surgeonWilder Penfield, who raised these philosophical issues back in the 1970s, issues that havenever been adequately accounted for by neuroscientists, asserts a contemporaryphilosopher of science and consciousness, David Chalmers.

Notice how mysterious it is that efferent impulses are initiated and enacted, such as

suddenly having the mental idea, I am going to move my left hand, and then executingthis as an actual physical movement of the hand in a feat of, literally, mind over matter.The late Roger Sperry and Sir John Eccles, Nobel laureates and fathers of the modern fieldof neuroscience, always reminded their reductionist colleagues in the field (from FrancisCrick to Daniel Dennett, et al.) that we dont have a clue how such efferent impulses arelaunched in the silent area of the neo-cortex. There is simply no satisfactory way ofexplaining these initiatory mental events in physiological terms. Again, there may beneuronal correlates for these mental events, but it is foolish to claim that the brain matteritself launches the efferent impulses.

Notice the strange, wondrous ability to switch attention from one sensory or cognitiveinput to another. For example, you can switch your auditory focus from one sound toanother sound. This is the cocktail party phenomenon: you can inwardly elect to listen toone conversation over another and then switch back and forth if you choose. Or notice howyou are able to switch your kinesthetic focus from one body sensation to another, say, fromsensations in your left hand to those in your right hand. Such subjective switching occursthrough a mysterious inner attuning process whereby you suddenly isolate one input asfigure while all the other massive sensory information instantly becomes background.But precisely how do you do this? No neuroscientist has the faintest clue how you initiatethese changes, though scientists can observe with their PET-scan technology various partsof the brain lighting up when you do this.

The multi-faceted phenomenon of memory continues to be quite mysterious in importantaspects of both storage and retrieval, for both short-term working memory and long-termmemory. For instance, despite recent findings that regions of the bilateral parahippocampalcortex and pre-frontal cortex are involved in encoding sensations, experiences and ideasinto lasting memory, no one knows yet what prompts the greater mental activity that

seems to cement something in memory. We dont know the source of those smalldifferences in neural activity, as one science journalist has observed.

Witness the positive and negative effects that mental visualizations and intentions canhave on biochemical processes in the human body, especially neuropeptides and theimmune system. This anomaly has ushered in an entire field, psychoneuroimmunology, orPNI; also known as mind-body medicine. This is, truly, another form of mind over matter.

Most recently it has become clear that our minds are synchronized, with brain cellsflickering in time with a regular electrical oscillation or gamma wave, occurring among


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widely dispersed neuron cells throughout the brain with no apparent spatial pattern, andmuch too rapidly to be explained by far slower neurochemical reactions. Moreover, thesegamma waves issue from each neuron's supposed "inputs," not its output areas, and thereare inter-neuronal interconnections among these gamma-producing "inputs/outputs,"suggesting the existence of an altogether different set of neuronal networks than ourlongstanding brain maps show; hence, current brain maps cannot explain consciousness.

Finally, as Stuart Hameroff argues, trillions of computations per second are occurring in theextensive circuitry of the micro-tubule "scaffolding" that underpins each neuron, meaningthat the brain's processing speed is likely 10 to the 28th power operations per second, fullya trillion times fasterthan is generally thought.

The bottom line is that almost nothing is known about how our brains produceconsciousness. The idea that neuroscientists are just several years away from explainingconsciousness in terms of material brain processes, or anywhere close to creating self-aware or even just sentient robots through a successful Artificial Intelligence (AI)program-- is utter fantasy.

(Note: the above section on powers of consciousness is adapted and excerpted from mylarger essay on Consciousness, posted at the Science & Spirituality section of this website;see that original article for more anomalies and for endnote references.)

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Now, there is a higher-mind or what might be called the psychic soul aspect to ourpersonality or consciousness which deserves to be distinguished out from the normal orlower mind. Some of this entails simply going more deeply into aforementioned aspects ofcertain normal mind functions, such as delving so deeply into memories that, with orwithout the aid of hypnosis, one taps into full-blown past-life memories. Or else going sodeeply with certain kind of creative visualization and/or creative channeling that one beginsto access information from paranormalpsisources in what has been termed ESP or extra-sensory perception. This can take the form ofremote viewing (seeing distant places,without the use of eyeballs and normal light-refraction off visible objects), telepathy,clairvoyance, precognition (knowing aspects of the future), retrocognition (knowingaspects of the past), discernment of discarnate subtle-plane personalities (ancestors,ghosts, devas, spirit guides), etc.

At this higher-mind or psychic level it becomes obvious that we are each more than just adistinct, discrete bodymindrather, we aresoul personalities that evidently dont everdie and can have access to states of nonlocal consciousness that deliver paranormal formsof information about other places on earth, other planets, other (subtler) planes or realmsof being, other time-periods for these locales, and so forth. And, along with this paranormalpower of knowing or information-collecting can come paranormal powers of doing such ashealing and remotely influencing beings, objects, the weather, destinyeither for the betteror worse. This last area, of course, is the domain of white magic or black magic.

As souls, we are capable of a much wider array of experiences than when we are identifiedmerely with bodily and (lower) mental aspects of being. We can associate with multiple

levels of manifestation, from the earth planes to the highest heavens, and all kinds of subtlerealms in betweenpleasant or unpleasant.

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Beyond the dynamics and manifestation of body-mind-soul is Spirit or Open Awareness. Ifwe are to use the word carefully and strictly in a meaningful way, in line with what so muchof the Perennial Wisdom Great Traditions would suggest, we can say that Spirit is thedomain of authentic spirituality, beyond mind and magic, beyond space-time, beyondstructure and parts, beyond energies, no matter how subtle, celestial or heavenly, andbeyond any form of egocentricity or selfishness.
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The various Perennial Wisdom Traditions would say that Spirit is none other than the God-Self, Absolute Awareness, Transpersonal Consciousness,Atman-Brahman (Self-Reality),Buddhata (Buddha-nature), Shunyata (Openness-Emptiness), Dharmakaya (Truth Body),Tao (Source/Way), Purusha (Divine Person). This is the Divine Self-Nature, the I Am ThatAm, sheer Isness-Aliveness-Awareness, what Hindu Vedanta tradition calls Absolute Being-Awareness-Bliss (Sat-Cit-Ananda), what Jewish mysticism terms theAin Sof(Ein Soph,

Boundless Divine No-thing), what Muslim Sufi mystics call al-Haqq (the Divine Truth) orDhat(Absolute Essence).

Being truly Absolute, nondual or non-relative, there is only one Spirit or Awarenesshere, Infinite and Eternal. This is the One Spirit that wondrously, magnificently conjures upthe cosmic play of multiple phenomena, the one Spirit that dreams this Divine Dream of auniverse. This Spirit, in truth, is the One Actor playing all the soul-roles, the One Selfdisplaying as all selves, the One Being manifesting in the disguise of all beings.

In sum, while there are many souls, there is only this one, nondual Selfor Spirit or DivineReality, call this whatever you wish.

That this God-Self or Buddha-Nature can emanate a world of such endless varietyfrom thesubatomic quarks to the periodic table of chemical elements to complex molecules to living

cells to large cell-clusters-in-the-form-of-organs to the bodies composed thereof (fromworms to whales to humans) to the various conscious minds and souls associated with thesebodieswhat a wonder! What a fantastic, amazing wonder!

Let all body-mind-souls praise this single, nondual God-Self from Whom all blessings flowand from Whom all beautiful and bewildering manifestations emanate.Allelujah!Alhamdulillah! Jaya Jagadeesha Hare!

body mind soul spirit

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