Brooks Agnew – It is mortal to think of the soul existing inside the body. It is immortal to realize the truth. The body resides in the soul. In the context of scholastic teaching that man is composed of body and soul, the question arises how the relationship between these two elements is to be conceived.

Man’s soul is spiritual in nature, so how can such a spiritual principle be related to the matter of the human body? The disproportion between matter and spirit seems so great that it is difficult to conceive how both can be joined in man to form an essential unity.

Once a human becomes self-aware, around the age of 9 or 19 usually, there is an instant realization that the spirit is much larger, faster, and older than the body. You have met children who were old souls. Yes? Of course you have. Because they are.

And, the memories exist from three sources.

Star Memory:

All third dimensional matter is formed by stars. They are the factories that turn energy into matter. All the matter formed by any one star in entangled with all the other matter, because the protons all have a star fingerprint frequency that resonates on a sub-space level (far faster than light) with all the other protons from that star. Hence, when that matter is used to form a physical body—yours for instance—all that matter is tied to that star formation. That is your star memory.

Chemical Memory

Your body is the result of a program written on a chromosome that is the result of two haploid sets of DNA; one from your mother, and one from your father. Females carry two sets of haploid DNA; one in the mitochondria (female and male), and one in the egg.

Males carry one set of haploid DNA in the sperm (either male or female) and one set in the mitochondria (all male). Only females can transmit female mitochondrial DNA to their sons or daughters. This memory carries traits from the parents to the child. Muscles memory, bone length, hair texture and color, eyes etcetera are sifted down to 46 bits of information that are the program to which the matter is assembled to make the human body. That is your chemical memory.

Light Memory

This could just as easily be called your energy memory, but it is your individual soul address, and it is older than worlds. This began, if there is such a concept, as the original spark of source from the square-root function that separated your energy from God’s. It was very close to the value of 1. Like 1.000000012. And there were two of you.

But from that moment on, you began to receive experience. It was simple at first, and then more and more complex. Your spirit learns when it is in physical form. It reflects when it is not in physical form. It has a concept of time in physical form, and it does not when it in spirit form.

The only memory that does not vibrate in light form is pain. That only exists in physical form. We cannot recall pain. You can develop into a being of light, or a being of darkness, but it is your choice. I believe you and I are a mixture of light and darkness, and we struggle every day to master the choice. I think most of us reject that choice being made for us.

If we can remember who we are, in spite of our parents, schools, governments, masters, and lovers, then we can use those memories while in the mortal form. This is light your memory.

Greek Thought

With the discovery of a spiritual dimension to reality, as in Plato’s world of ideas, however, the problem immediately came into focus: how can something spiritual, characterized as it is by its independence from matter, be essentially bound to something material? Such a union seems contrary to the very nature of spirit. Influenced by this line of thought, Plato considered the union to be a punishment for some sin committed by the soul in a former life. The soul moves and directs the body as a pilot does a ship—a relationship that remained somewhat extrinsic and accidental.

Aristotle criticized this teaching of his master as inconsistent with the facts. Man is one substantial reality, not an accidental union of two different substances.

Thomistic Explanation

St. Thomas Aquinas took over the Aristotelian formula and used it to derive a more accurate conception.

(1) The basic reality to account for, as Aquinas saw it, is the essential unity of man. This unity is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the same concrete man who is given to one’s phenomenological experience in his bodily presence is also a person who thinks. The spiritual activity of thinking and the material givenness of the body are both manifestations of one and the same human reality.

(2) Again, the transcendence of the spirit over material reality is manifested by the immateriality of thinking; this means that the soul, having an activity that is intrinsically independent of material conditions, cannot have a mode of being inferior to its mode of acting. In other words, it must be essentially independent of matter.

(3) On the other hand, man is really material, and this not only accidentally: the body belongs essentially to his nature. How can one reconcile all three seemingly contradictory, but equally certain, data?

Soul-Body Union

Taking into account all three aspects, St. Thomas proposed a precise and ingenious solution. He refused to admit a contradiction between the spirituality of the soul and its union with a material body. The soul, as spiritual, really exists on its own account and in its own right.

In other words, it is not dependent on matter in the very fact of existing. This, in turn, does not entail that the body belongs to man only accidentally. The body is a real and essential part of man’s nature, but not in such a way that the soul is essentially subjected to it or ontologically dependent upon it. On the contrary, the body is dependent upon the soul and exists in virtue of the soul’s existence.

On this one point I agree. The body actually exists inside the soul, and not the other way around. The body is the drinking straw through which the spirit draws its experience. Your challenge is to make the straw into a fire hose and take it all in, and then make your filters as you see fit. Not all images belong in your head, just so you can choose. You can choose the keep certain images out of your head, and thus prevent sorrow, pain, perversions, etc.

There are demons who are spirits dedicated to destroying you. They have killed your body many times, but that does not stop you from living again. What we all must do is learn to fight off the demons, so we can experience joy in the flesh.

Joy is something quite different than pleasure. It is a spirit happiness that can only exist as a gift. We give or receive it, but we have a very hard time surprising ourselves with a gift that brings joy. So, give to one another, and please accept the gifts with gratitude and joy, so the giver does not regret it.

Peace, Earth Explorers.

SF Source Brooks Agnew Nov 2023