Mind, Body and Soul
In this paper, I will tell you of the philosophical adventure that I took inside my mind, to try and figure out my own theory on humans as individuals, death, and the life after. Numerous times throughout this semester, I have found myself pondering whether I believe the body-based theory, or the mind-based theory; and whether I believe in the soul? I asked myself, “What are we as humans and what makes us, us? In addition to that I wonder what happens to us after we die, and when is it that we actually “die”. After copious discussions in class, several conversations with an assortment of people in my life, and reading about the theories of many of the famous philosophers in history; I still could not understand what I myself believe in. It is arduous to question oneself with these type of questions and find an answer in beliefs in a quick matter; it only came to me after I took a deep look down inside myself for me to realize what I truly believe I represent in this world, when this world for me can possibly end, and what, if anything is left to me after “the end”. To me, we are a combination of our body, our mind, and our soul; and if we lose any one of the three components, we cease to exist from that point on. After that our “soul” lives on merely as a memory of us by the people we know and just as a wind inhibiting our earth. It is vital for us to understand the clear definition of each of our components and of the word death.
We begin with the mind, called by many the “motherboard” of our wonderful human ship. Our mind is the set of mental processes of human being, including thinking, perceiving, remembering, dreaming, and imagining. Everything that we do, or think of is first processed through this motherboard. I believe that our mind creates thoughts, thousands at a time, receives input from our body and its five senses, and initiates us to take action in life. With lots of transactions happening in our mind at the same time, one might sincerely ask “How is it organized, filed, and filtered?” Our mind is a combination in itself of three different levels, the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, and the Super conscious mind; all are interconnected and work together in order to process all the activities that go on in our mind. Other than those three levels of the mind, I believe there is a general “manager” of our brain; which supervises all the activity going on between the three levels of consciousness, as well as helps us put thoughts together, file others, and giving direction for action.
Let’s start off with the idea of the conscious mind; root word conscius meaning “having joint or common knowledge with another, privy to, cognizant of”. Rene Descartes, who says that “I am a mind”; defined conscience in one of his work as an internal testimony. The conscious mind combined with the actual muscle of our brain receives “data” from our five basic human senses; smell, sight,