RESTING THE SOOL

This title was suggested to me following a conversation I had with a long-time close friend named SAMIR. He almost forced me to put aside heart and reason, because according to him, the soul is the Boss, and that's what I'm going to try and dismantle in this writing.

I remember, not long ago, writing an article in which I thought the soul didn't exist. The title of my article was: "Does the soul exist?" I'll look it up, reread it and include what's good here.

I'm sure that if you ask anyone on the street if they believe in the soul, everyone will say yes. Why should they? Because everyone has lived with this idea since day one. Almost everyone has a faith. Everyone seems to have it, and the soul is part of it. I'm tempted to evoke a line from Voltaire's Candide that's so close to my thoughts: "Do we even know if we have a soul?
Do we know whether the animals whose blood makes life, as it does ours, who have wills, appetites, passions, ideas, memory, industry... like us, have a soul?

Do you know whether these incomprehensible beings, like us, have a soul as we claim to have one?

Until now, I had believed that there was an active force in nature, from which we derived the gift of life throughout our bodies, of walking with our legs, of grasping with our hands, of seeing with our eyes, of hearing with our ears, of feeling with our nerves, of thinking with our heads. Is all this what we call the soul? A vague word that profoundly signifies the unknown principle of our faculties".

Who wonders what the soul is? I'm sure no one does.

Funny, if I replace soul with star, it makes more sense to me. The billions of stars in the sky could all represent a being here on earth. We see the stars and we see the beings, but we don't see the soul. Some stars are brighter than others and the same goes for human beings, but unfortunately we're not all equal, even if we're told at birth that all men are born equal, I'd be tempted to disagree.

By the way, does the soul find time to rest? A bit like that biblical God who needed to rest on Shabbat? I

I wonder: what is the function of the soul? We know that the soul is not physical, but totally spiritual. It belongs to our spirit. Another big word that needs explaining! Maybe they're the same thing?

 Could it be that the body is the work of the soul, that the soul itself shapes its envelope, hammering it inside like a goldsmith to produce its reliefs? And when the body dies, does the soul die with it? I would think, however, that believers would argue that the soul never dies, that it returns to the heaven from whence it came. Not bad, eh?

To say that since the soul perishes with the body, man can find happiness on earth, provided he frees himself from his passions However, an Indian proverb will tell you that the soul is a fortune that cannot be stolen by bandits, that even men of power cannot take away from you, that it will remain with you even after your death, without ever disappearing.