This question recently has gripped me. I believed very much in a Soul, a life giving essence that each person, maybe even extending deep into the animal kingdom, as far down as the single cell, has. This notion was recently challenged, as I was presented with what seemed to be a series of scientific explanations in sequence to establish a checkmate of sorts, against the notion of the soul. This of course was… annoying, and deeply unsettling. So, I embarked to find myself proof of it’s existence.
I think that I should start this off by saying, I have not yet found evidence for the soul. In this post I am merely laying out of the conditions I believe that if the soul exists, should meet at least on some level. I really do hope the soul exists, and I hope I find proof that the soul exists. I find the idea that we just pop up here, get a nice taste of what life is like, being aware, getting to experience, to laugh, love and live, only for it all to be yanked out from under you, to be not only insulting, but pointless. That all of our chemistry, biology, mathematics, astronomy, geometry, history…. Pretty much everything you can think of, came about through sheer happenstance. A lucky roll of the dice.
When you think about it, each item in the list above represents order and design, yet these things came about according to the same scientists that use them, by random chance. So I can’t help but notice an issue with the same logic that demands evidence for the soul. Nevertheless, many of the questions raised about the soul and when/where it comes into play, are good questions, and if at all possible, should be answered. So let’s begin with the very sequence of events that forced me to question my belief in the soul.
Check!
In order to understand why my belief in the soul has waned, it is probably important to first note I believed it to be a life giving and sustaining part of you that carried on after death. If it was removed from you, you would die. It also carried most of who you are, personality-wise, or at least a soul personality, which I guess would mean the you beyond your physical ego.
Anyways, there was this youtube series I like to watch called “Stuff they don’t want you to know”, and as I watched a few videos, I ran across a two-parter titled ‘The Walking Dead’. The first part was mostly fluff, talking about stuff I had already heard about, the second part however is where the first and second hit came from. At about 1:32 into the second video, they begin talking about a Doctor by the name of Sergei Bryukhonenko, who began doing experiment to revive dead organisms. One of his experiments involved severing a dog’s head, then through an artificial lung and heart, resuscitate the dead dogs head.
Here are links to part 1 and 2 of the video I am talking about, “Stuff the don’t want you to know”.
If that scene was real, then it presents a small problem for the soul. I believed that the soul resided in the heart, but this changed when I discovered heart transplants. Couldn’t be in the heart if we can trade-up hearts and stay alive and the same person. I think after that I settled on the heart region, being the heart is what is physically there, and the soul is what is metaphysically there. Well, as you can guess, that too went out the window when I saw that footage. Can’t bring the head back to life if the soul is resting in the body, more then 10 feet away… can it?
Given that I was resting on the premise that the soul was a life giving and sustaining source, the head shouldn’t be able to revive if the soul isn’t present, right? So at this point, I had to move that location from the heart region to the head region, or more specifically, the brain. The head could be revived if the soul of a person resided in their head, because the soul would still be present. If the soul exists, it being located in the brain would seem pretty logical, as most of who we believe ourselves to be, comes from our minds, and it is also the most important organ in the body, and also the most naturally protected.
Check again!
The second hit, if you watched the video, comes at about 2:15 into it, when they talk about Cryogenics, the act of freezing the body shortly after death. The purpose, as mentioned, is to sustain the body’s condition in hopes that advancements in medical science will progress enough in the future to cure certain diseases, illnesses, damage to the body or maybe even conquer death. The important part to note is the ’shortly after death’ part. What struck me here was, the soul is supposed to leave the body after death. We know that it must not leave immediately, or at least go that far from the body, as there are stories of people having been clinically dead for roughly thirty minutes to several hours, and still been successfully resuscitated.
Maybe it’s just me, but when I sat down and thought about the track record of science, and placed it next to Cryogenics, I figured it was highly probable that at some point in the future, successfully reviving the dead would happen. I can easily picture the future, where the success of resurrecting the cryogenically frozen is plastered all over the news headlines. It would be a sensation. But what does that mean for the soul? The body was clinically dead when it was frozen, and it remained so for a series of decades, and potentially hundreds of years. If the soul leaves the body at death, or shortly after death, then how did it stick around for so long after death, to be there when the person was finally brought back?
Another thing this really hurts is reincarnation (which I did believe in that too). So here we have potentially, a hundred year gap between recent death and returning to life, and we must account for where the soul was. The first I want to address here is reincarnation. If reincarnation is real, then wouldn’t the soul have left behind the frozen body after a length of time to reincarnate? If it does, then only one of two things could happen. 1.) upon revival of the frozen person, the soul is ripped from the current incarnation of the soul, and dragged back to the reawakened person. 2.) nothing happens, because again you can’t bring back someone without a soul, and that soul is currently occupying another body.
If we don’t include reincarnation, then again one of two things could occur. 1.) the soul is hanging around in the spirit world, not doing anything really in particular, therefore it isn’t busy when the scientists come knocking for revival. 2.) the soul is actually anchored or tethered to the body in some way, and can’t actually leave until that tether is broken.
I actually liked number 2. A tether. It would fit wouldn’t it? It could potentially answer the two questions, three if you count reincarnation. If it exists then it would be in the brain, given the dogs brain experiment. It would allow for those cryogenically frozen to be resurrected, because it would preserve the anchor as well. And because the anchor is intact, and the soul is still around, it would prevent the soul from leaving and cheating on the old body with a new one. It fits, yay!
That’s when my memory kicked in and hurt more then helped. ‘What about hemisperectomies?’ some deeper part of my mind inquired. Damn! It made a good point. If half the brain can be removed through an operation, and it can be either half, then where does that leave the tether? I asked some of my friends this very question, and their response was, ‘that the brain as a whole was a receiver, and so long as enough of the brain is intact, it could continue it’s connection with the soul’ (I paraphrased). This actually seemed like a decent answer.
Maybe it was bad luck, or maybe I was trying to sew up some minor issues that were left, but whatever the reason, I went and searched to see if there was maybe a part of the brain that couldn’t be removed, or else it would cause instant death. More or less I was looking for some part of the brain that could potentially be the tether I was talking about. The first thing that came to mind was the Pineal Gland. It is famously said to be the seat of the soul after all, so it seemed like an excellent place to begin. So I searched to see if it was possible to remove the Pineal Gland and live. My hopes were quickly dashed as the results turned back a series of yeses.
Apparently 1% of all tumor based surgeries deal with the pineal gland. Many people claimed that people have had their pineal gland removed and lived, they just needed a special doctor afterwards to replace artificially what the gland did naturally. This was troubling. Again I was soul-blocked. When I thought about it, I didn’t know of any part of the brain that couldn’t be removed. Sure it may cause some issues, but short of the entire brain being removed, you could probably live. I was quickly running out of options.
Checkmate!
Maybe it was the brainstem or something. I remembered hearing that the pineal gland first appears in the a baby fetus at 49 days. I thought maybe if I can find out what part of the brain develops first, maybe I can get a clue as to what the tether might be. It would have to be a very important part and maybe irremovable, and maybe when that part develops, it’s also when the soul enters the body. I was never able to find out exactly what part of the brain develops first, instead, I was met with a new question.
As I searched for what part of a newly conceived baby’s brain develops first, certain pictures of sperm ganging up on an egg (I thought they were trying to end bullying?) was on every page. After that were picture after picture of different stages of the baby’s development. I was reminded of biology, and some of what I had learned about the inherent intelligence of a single cell, especially how cells from our bodies can be taken out, and still function and live without us. We are made up of trillions of these cells, I noticed that many different things begin to develop at the same time, such as the beginning stages of the brain, spine and heart, and it doesn’t take long after that for the other organs and limbs to begin to appear.
Further and further back I delved to see what prenatally there was to indicate some sign of a soul, until finally, I again arrived at the sperm bullying the egg. It felt like a dead end. How can the soul be involved in insemination? The act itself could be completely random, and logic really weighed in against it. To break it down a little further, we have 1 egg, and how many tiny little swimmers all fighting to join the world of the living? Even on a 1 to 1 basis, that still equals 2 lives, that make 1 again?… to grow back into 2 again, and then a trillion or so more… to end up with 1 soul? My head hurts.
Too many questions arise at this point. Do single celled organisms have souls? Then what happens to the thousands of sperm that didn’t make it into the egg? Do they go to sperm heaven?! Do they reincarnate into someone’s….. ok, moving along. If they do have souls, then what does that make us? A collective soul? Made up of trillions of cellular souls, even though on a daily basis, thousands of our cells die and are replaced each day.
On the other hand, if they don’t have souls, and they are alive, or at least can function much the same way we do, then wouldn’t it be possible that we can be alive, and not have a soul? We are after all made up of cells, it wouldn’t be that far of a leap. Does life really need a soul? Or maybe all that is alive, is a manifestation of soul, or maybe spirit? It doesn’t have one, because it is one. But does that concept leave room for an afterlife I wonder.
All this pondering, looking for the tiniest of loopholes, and I realized something. Science is pretty air-tight. From conception to birth, through life and death, the cycle is pretty complete. There are still a lot of different angles that can be looked at, and maybe I will for another post. But for now I will rest.
I still believe there is more out there. A lot more infact. Science is notorious for omitting things that they don’t like or can’t explain. Perhaps left in the vastness of spaces still unexplored, there lies irrefutable proof that this life that we first open our eyes to, and shut them when we go, did infact have meaning.
So in the end here, I can’t say that I believe in the soul still, but I’m not completely convinced that it doesn’t exist either. I hold hope with some unturned stones. I took a pretty hard look at many different fields of science in hopes of finding some clues, and I couldn’t help but notice this very strong sense of order to it all. Nature seems pretty smart to incorporate all that we know and more so beautifully. So, if the soul exists, and science is willing, I think they will find that the soul was right up their alley all along.
Till next time!
