I figured I’d make a claim, instead of ask a question. But whichever. ‘Being’ or what we refer to as our ‘mind’, including our most basic feelings and most abstract of thoughts, results from the functioning of something physical, our brains.
In my humble opinion, spirit does not inhabit the brain during life and then leave it during death, anymore than the phenomenon of spinning inhabits the blades of a fan when it’s on and then leave when it’s turned off. Spinning, like consciousness, is something that happens. When our brains no longer fire neurons, the grand occurrence that is our consciousness stops. Spirit, mind, or awareness doesn’t leave our body and go somewhere else. It just stops.
Who we are—our thoughts and our emotions and our capacity to perceive—is not something physical. That which we refer to as “myself” and that which does the referring is not a material thing. Who we are is something that happens.
But what about our bodies ? In death, our bodies might remain at least for a while, depending on how we died. But the event we call selfhood has ended.
By that I mean that I’m thinking as if there is a separation from my body and my mind. Deepak Chopra might ask me what it is within myself that says “my mind “ and “my body” and maybe he would say that this part holding all of that together—my physical aspects, my cognitive aspects, and my emotional aspects, is the ‘spirit.’
Assuming he would say that, I would agree that ‘spirit’ is ‘that which brings it all together’ refer to it as my reference point for ‘totality of being.’ However, I still think that this aspect of my being is derived from the functioning of the brain in the skull attached to the rest of this body.
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