Thoughts and experiences of life and mental health

The body Part 19

The body is only a vessel for who we truly are.

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As we look around us, noticing the people around us, looking in the mirror at ourselves, what we see is not who we are.

Some people are shy about their bodies, some hate their bodies, and others are overconfident about their bodies. Regardless of how we look on the outside, who we truly are is on the inside.

You might be the most elegant person on the outside, but if you are rotten and ugly on the inside, it will reflect on your physical self.

I always speak about finding your strength from within, and I speak about who we are, all you are comes from within.

I believe our inner self plays a massive role in our lives, much bigger than most would care to admit or understand. Some might call it the soul, some call it the spirit, some call it our conscious, and some refer to our minds as the inner being. Whatever we as individuals or cultures want to name our inner self, the fact remains that who we do not originate from our physical form, rather than what lies within us.

In many religions, philosophical, and mythological traditions the soul is the incorporeal essence of a living being. Soul or psyche (ancient Greek) "to breath" comprises the mental ability of a living being, "reason", characteristics, feelings, consciousness, qualia, memory, perception, thinking, ETC.

Depending on the philosophical system, a soul can either be mortal or immortal. Greek philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, understood that the soul must have a logical faculty, the exercise of which was the most divine of human actions.

At his defense trial, Socrates even summarized his teachings as nothing other than an exhortation of his fellow Athenians to excel in matters of the mind, since all bodily goods are dependent on such excellence.

In Judaism and some Christian denominations, only human beings have immortal souls (although immortality is disputed within Judaism, and the concept of immortality may have been influenced by Plato). For example, the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas attributed "soul" to all organisms but argued that only human souls are immortal. Other religions (most notable Hinduism and Judaism) hold that all living things from the smallest bacterium to the largest mammals, are the souls themselves, and have the physical representation (the body) in the world. The actual soul is the soul, while the body is only a mechanism to experience the karma of life.

Thus, if one sees a tiger then there is a self-consciousness identity residing in it (the soul), and a physical representative (the whole body of the tiger, which is observable) in the world. Some teach that even non-biological entities (such as rivers and mountains) have souls. This belief is called Animism.