I was just pondering through the different Hypercosmic Gods through an example, trying to make sense of what it means.
Let's take a dog. A dog, being animate, has a Soul, but it must be an irrational soul, and so it is not immortal. Therefore, when the dog's body dies, it's soul doesn't last forever. Where does it go? Presumably where it came from, which must be the part of Mind corresponding to "dogness" (that is, what is means to be a dog).
This suggests a dumb metaphor to my mind. Mind has within it somewhere a great big bucket of soul labelled "dog." When a dog is born, a ladle is dipped into the bucket and a ladleful of dog-soul is pulled out and "poured" into the dog to animate it. When the dog's body ages and dies, the dog-soul seeps out of it and back into the big bucket. So in that sense the dog-soul is conserved, but isn't immortal—it just returns to the dog-mind.
As for rational souls, since they're immortal, they don't return to a human-mind-bucket, but remain regardless of whether there's a body to animate or not. Presumably, since they need to animate something (since that's what soul does), you get the doctrine of reincarnation neatly falling out of the basic principle of immortality.
At least, I think? This is mostly just thinking out loud...
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Date: 2021-12-23 12:13 am (UTC)Let's take a dog. A dog, being animate, has a Soul, but it must be an irrational soul, and so it is not immortal. Therefore, when the dog's body dies, it's soul doesn't last forever. Where does it go? Presumably where it came from, which must be the part of Mind corresponding to "dogness" (that is, what is means to be a dog).
This suggests a dumb metaphor to my mind. Mind has within it somewhere a great big bucket of soul labelled "dog." When a dog is born, a ladle is dipped into the bucket and a ladleful of dog-soul is pulled out and "poured" into the dog to animate it. When the dog's body ages and dies, the dog-soul seeps out of it and back into the big bucket. So in that sense the dog-soul is conserved, but isn't immortal—it just returns to the dog-mind.
As for rational souls, since they're immortal, they don't return to a human-mind-bucket, but remain regardless of whether there's a body to animate or not. Presumably, since they need to animate something (since that's what soul does), you get the doctrine of reincarnation neatly falling out of the basic principle of immortality.
At least, I think? This is mostly just thinking out loud...