Do you agree with Tesla that humans are nothing more then advanced robots with no soul?

[BillyPilgrim]

I believe without self love and the WILL to transcend your current conditions, you are nothing more than an NPC (non playable character).

I don’t think you are born with a soul. I believe you have to earn the right to be right to be soulful.

To me it doesn’t matter if all of the us were created by God or if it was all an accident, you still have the opportunity to develop character. You can be more.

So instead of trying to discover our “origins” (which is impossible unless you died and went to heaven and came back and are able to tell us universal truths), why not try to be something great?

So how will you choose to define yourself?

Stop placing responsibility on God or science.

Take accountability to become great in all endeavors just for the sake of greatness.

Humans beings have the ability to define themselves regardless of the mysteries of the universe.

Nah got to pick a single endeavor, jack of all trades usually do jack sh1t. It's better to leave a legacy than to simply flex. Imo you kinda need a calling to achieve true greatness. Like feeling if you don't do it ("it" being something specific), you're going to die.

 

[NoBiscuits]

I agree with your statement about the studies getting funding money from the organization that benefits but that still doesnt account for that when scientists press on a certain part of the brain that an out of body experience happens to that person. You avoided the question like a master politican lol. I think you should go into politics if you arent in it already. I mean this seriously

What question? Do you agree with Tesla that humans are just a robot with no soul? I answered no pretty directly and gave good reasons why. I didn't dodge anything.

So what if a brain poke results in the perception of an out of body experience? Really. So what?

What prevents someone from breaking into an innocent person's house and smashing it up? What prevents you from robbing an old woman at her husband's funeral? Why do you feel guilty when eating greasy 3,000 calorie junk food? Why does it feel meaningful to rescue a stray animal? Why do we hate scammers who trick lonely people into thinking they have a friend? Where does all that come from? If you could perform a brain poke and simulate similar chemical reactions to those experiences, then so what?

Of course if you cross wires you can get the same human senses. Do you think the brain does nothing when experiencing soulful activities and behaviors?

 

[Deep Dish]

Look at electromagnetic effect post NDE. People experiencing NDEs have these weird electromagnetic effects that cause electrical items to malfunction around them, along with other weirdness, for the rest of the their lives. This hints at some kind of 'wave' effect caused by the NDE.

I have a book called "Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife", by Mary Roach, which is a great read and has a chapter about studies on Near Death Experiences. There was (or is still going on?) an experiment by Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia of a computer screen in a hospital room. The computer screen had various images and random colors. Most importantly, the computer screen was facing the ceiling, so it couldn't be seen from below. In the experiment, cardiac patients with implanted defibrillators were hit with an electrical charge to derail the heart beat and send the patient to clinical death within a few seconds. At the time of the writing of the book, nobody has witnessed what's on the screen.

Curious about these electromagnetic post-effects, I did a little digging around.

A 2008 study in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, called "Electromagnetic Aftereffects of Near-Death Experiences", by Farnoosh (Faith) M. Nouri and Janice Miner Holden, at the University of North Texas, explains,

"Several possible dynamics might be at work regarding this finding. First, as previously discussed, NDErs might, as a group, exaggerate their reports of phenomena such as NDEs and electromagnetic effects. However, research comparing NDErs' and nonNDErs' mental health and most personality characteristics has failed to yield differences (Greyson, 2000). Nevertheless, the possibility remains that this particular study may have attracted an unrepresentative group of NDErs prone to exaggeration. We think this explanation unlikely, as we will discuss below.

Two other possible dynamics may be at work. As a result of longitudinal research with couples, Kim Buehlman, John Gottman, and Lynn Katz (1992) found that couples who became distressed later in their relationships unknowingly reconstructed their earlier relationships as more distressed than they actually reported or evidenced it to be at the earlier time. Similarly, NDErs who have been plagued with electromagnetic effects since their NDEs may unknowingly perceive and report their pre-NDE electromagnetic effects to be more frequent than they actually were at the time. Alternatively, it may be that the more prone to electromagnetic effects a person is to begin with, if the person has a close brush with death, the more likely the person is to have an NDE and the deeper that NDE is likely to be.

This question of causal factors in the dynamics of NDEs and their aftereffects is an important one for future investigators to clarify. If the "reconstruction" hypothesis is supported, then electromagnetic effects actually are not greater prior to the NDE, indicating that something about the NDE itself causes the person to become more prone to electromagnetic effects. Conversely, if the "preexisting sensitivity" hypothesis is supported, then some underlying factor may be causing or contributing to all the observed phenomena: the pre-NDE electromagnetic effects, the NDE and its depth during the close brush with death, and the even greater post-NDE electromagnetic effects."

A 2015 study in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, by the aforementioned Bruce Greyson, called "Electromagnetic Phenomena Reported by Near-Death Experiencers," explains,

"People who claimed healing abilities, but not comparison groups who did not, were able reliably to imprint some form of radiation into distilled water that modified the physical characteristics of the water as measured by electrophotography (Berden, Jerman, & Skarja, 1997). So there is considerable evidence that at least some people’s bodies respond, with or without conscious awareness, to external EM fields, and some data suggesting that at least some human bodies emit EM radiation. What remains unexplored is the relationship of these phenomena to NDEs.

Some explanation for these EM aftereffects was offered by NDErs in this study five times as often as by nonNDErs. That difference may reflect the fact that EM phenomena were sufficiently frequent and/or sufficiently disruptive in the lives of NDErs to motivate them to give these effects serious thought and to try to understand them, whereas EM phenomena may have been so unusual or mild in the lives of non-NDErs that they were able to dismiss them as meaningless events not worth further thought...

Actions and reactions that were not clearly EM were also reported by NDErs in this study three times as often as by nonNDErs, whether or not those nonNDErs had ever been close to death. These were most commonly described as calming or healing effects on other people and as becoming more sensitive to others’ emotions and unconscious issues. Because the mechanism(s) of these effects are not known, it is conceivable that some of these effects that are not clearly electromagnetic may in fact turn out to be so, such as the effects on and sensitivity to other people’s conditions. In support of that hypothesis, experienced non-contact therapeutic touch therapists, isolated from ground and surrounded on all sides by copper walls, have been shown to produce measurable electrical surges a thousand times greater than the skin potential changes seen in emotional arousal (Green, Parks, Guyer, Fahrion, & Coyne, 1991).

Alternatively, it is conceivable that, although these other after-effects are not in themselves electromagnetic, both they and the EM effects are caused indirectly by some other change in the individual that alters both their EM interactions and these other, non-EM interactions. For example, it is possible that increased sensitivity to and engagement with the external world could lead both to EM effects and to interpersonal effects, or that a loosening of the physiological filter that regulates the brain’s access to consciousness (Kelly & Presti, 2015) would magnify both EM and interpersonal effects, or that awareness of EM and interpersonal effects only appear to be increased among NDErs as a result of increased mindfulness following NDEs, making experiencers more attentive toward themselves and their environment and more attuned to their impact on, and responses to, the world around them (N. Tassell-Matamua, e-mail communication, February 28, 2016)."

 

[FlexpertHamilton]

I do not believe in a soul.

The western notion of a soul is an artifact of mind-body dualism, which is a flawed idea. Westerners think that a "self" is riding around in the body, behind our eyes and between our ears, a silent controller that thinks thoughts, sees sights, hears sounds, and feels feelings. This idea that our body is nothing but a vessel for the soul seems to be common sense in the west, but eastern philosophy would say otherwise. We say we "have" a body, but the truth is that we are a body.

The mind is is not separate from the body. The only reason the notion of a soul exists is because people want their consciousness to go on after death, without realizing that our consciousness requires a body and brain.

If a soul exists, then why do people's personalities radically change after brain trauma?

If souls are independant of our bodies, then why do we even need bodies in the first place?

We are the product of millions of years of evolution and environmental conditions that were condusive to complex life, and that's not trivial, we are quite special, and may be exceedingly rare. You could say the Universe has become aware of itself by crystalizing awareness inwardly through biological instruments.

Tesla sounds like an ego-narcissist, hmmm is that why Edison out maneuvered him?

An ego narcissist?

I could argue people who believe in a soul are more narcissistic because they cannot conceive of a Universe where they do not exist.

 

[NoBiscuits]

I do not believe in a soul.

The western notion of a soul is an artifact of mind-body dualism, which is a flawed idea. Westerners think that a "self" is riding around in the body, behind our eyes and between our ears, a silent controller that thinks thoughts, sees sights, hears sounds, and feels feelings. This idea that our body is nothing but a vessel for the soul seems to be common sense in the west, but eastern philosophy would say otherwise. We say we "have" a body, but the truth is that we are a body.

What a wild post. The Western idea of dualism is what created the scientific revolution to begin with. Prior to the Enlightenment, understanding of the soul and spirit was driven by ideals of creating harmony, order, and stability. It was Descarte ("I think therefore I am") who was most responsible for tearing down this old logic system and replacing it with one that would pave the way for the scientific revolution.

The new logic system, pioneered by Descarte 1600's onward, is what created the Western idea of the mind and body being separate worlds (subjective world vs objective world). The belief in the objective world led to Christians exploring the natural sciences and thinking along the lines of the scientific method. The subjective was gradually dismissed over the centuries as inferior to the objective. CS Lewis talks about this in Men without Chests (his predictions were spot on) and laments how and why the West just dismissed the subjective as merely "emotional bias" without even questioning if it's correct to do so.

It's like dismissing complex numbers (C / 'i') from mathematics without a second thought because they're "just imaginary." Sir Roger Penrose has a detailed chapter in The Road to Reality that shuts down any arguments that complex numbers aren't canon to math. (It would be beneficial to our grandchildren if someone wrote such an essay about how the subjective world got the same treatment.)

Today, we have gone so far as to dismiss the subjective from daily life almost completely (Abolition of Man), but some Jewish intellectuals such as Edward Bernays and sigmund freud (no, I won't capitalize his name) picked it back up for managerialism use in the early 20th century, where the understanding of the soul had the scientific method applied to it. Psychology is a much emptier discipline than any medieval texts on spirit because it's mostly studied to serve a material ends (advertising, crowd control, political policy acceptance, etc.) instead of understanding the honest truths of the universe (remember, Tesla and Darwin were both Christians and they thought in that framing when they made their discoveries).

IMO, if Descarte put the nail in the coffin when it came to us understanding the soul, then freud buried the coffin and built a shopping mall on it. Now all we know is the shopping mall. And it's all we will know for the next century because everyone likes to think knowledge works in Darwinian terms. "Text from a monk in 1230 AD? Well, clearly, the reason we don't study it today is because it didn't survive the evolution, right? Everything is Progress, so the knowledge and logic system we have in front of us right now must surely be superior, right?" No. The past just got buried and forgotten.

If I get into what happened at the end of the Mouse Utopia experiments, this post would be enormous. But in short, their strange environment caused the mice to forget how mice would normally socialize over time. This happened after the last generations with memory of how to behave in a non-urbanized environment died off. Today, most of us have no clue about the spiritual world and believe the soul is just some statistical outcome of a chemical reaction. This isn't a way of living, it's a way of dying.

How you somehow managed to reach the conclusion that the soul doesn't exist through rejecting dualism is beyond me. Do you know your own history?

We say we "have" a body, but the truth is that we are a body.

Yes. That was how the Christian monk in 1230 AD thought. There was no "objective world" outside of him. He was as part of the hierarchy of the universe as much as God was, living in harmony. There was no split between emoitonal bias and reality ("Depression" as a mental illness also didn't exist, think about that). How did you start from this logic and somehow make your way to essentially saying you yourself don't exist / you're just chemical reactions? It makes no sense.

Too much Richard Dawkins, eh?

 

[BackInTheGame78]

No.

 

[FlexpertHamilton]

What a wild post. The Western idea of dualism is what created the scientific revolution to begin with. Prior to the Enlightenment, understanding of the soul and spirit was driven by ideals of creating harmony, order, and stability. It was Descarte ("I think therefore I am") who was most responsible for tearing down this old logic system and replacing it with one that would pave the way for the scientific revolution.

The new logic system, pioneered by Descarte 1600's onward, is what created the Western idea of the mind and body being separate worlds (subjective world vs objective world). The belief in the objective world led to Christians exploring the natural sciences and thinking along the lines of the scientific method. The subjective was gradually dismissed over the centuries as inferior to the objective. CS Lewis talks about this in Men without Chests (his predictions were spot on) and laments how and why the West just dismissed the subjective as merely "emotional bias" without even questioning if it's correct to do so.

It's like dismissing complex numbers (C / 'i') from mathematics without a second thought because they're "just imaginary." Sir Roger Penrose has a detailed chapter in The Road to Reality that shuts down any arguments that complex numbers aren't canon to math. (It would be beneficial to our grandchildren if someone wrote such an essay about how the subjective world got the same treatment.)

Today, we have gone so far as to dismiss the subjective from daily life almost completely (Abolition of Man), but some Jewish intellectuals such as Edward Bernays and sigmund freud (no, I won't capitalize his name) picked it back up for managerialism use in the early 20th century, where the understanding of the soul had the scientific method applied to it. Psychology is a much emptier discipline than any medieval texts on spirit because it's mostly studied to serve a material ends (advertising, crowd control, political policy acceptance, etc.) instead of understanding the honest truths of the universe (remember, Tesla and Darwin were both Christians and they thought in that framing when they made their discoveries).

IMO, if Descarte put the nail in the coffin when it came to us understanding the soul, then freud buried the coffin and built a shopping mall on it. Now all we know is the shopping mall. And it's all we will know for the next century because everyone likes to think knowledge works in Darwinian terms. "Text from a monk in 1230 AD? Well, clearly, the reason we don't study it today is because it didn't survive the evolution, right? Everything is Progress, so the knowledge and logic system we have in front of us right now must surely be superior, right?" No. The past just got buried and forgotten.

If I get into what happened at the end of the Mouse Utopia experiments, this post would be enormous. But in short, their strange environment caused the mice to forget how mice would normally socialize over time. This happened after the last generations with memory of how to behave in a non-urbanized environment died off. Today, most of us have no clue about the spiritual world and believe the soul is just some statistical outcome of a chemical reaction. This isn't a way of living, it's a way of dying.

How you somehow managed to reach the conclusion that the soul doesn't exist through rejecting dualism is beyond me. Do you know your own history?


Yes. That was how the Christian monk in 1230 AD thought. There was no "objective world" outside of him. He was as part of the hierarchy of the universe as much as God was, living in harmony. There was no split between emoitonal bias and reality ("Depression" as a mental illness also didn't exist, think about that). How did you start from this logic and somehow make your way to essentially saying you yourself don't exist / you're just chemical reactions? It makes no sense.

Too much Richard Dawkins, eh?

I am not a materialist or an atheist, and in fact I tend to disagree with most of western philosophy as a whole, which is why I started my argument by critiquing them. I don't think people like Dawkins, Harris, or most scholars/scientists in general have any business talking about the subjective, moral, and metaphysical realm (assuming they don't have straight up contempt for it).

The roots of my argument is in a combination Buddhist/Taoist beliefs. The idea of a "soul" or "human spirit" is certainly something real, but in a metaphorical, subjective sense. Also, I firmly believe the subjective matters more than the objective. After all, the obvious answer to the question "if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?" is NO, because sound = vibrating air with an instrument (human or otherwise) to process it into the subjective experience we call noise. I could take this a step further and say that the Universe does not (and maybe cannot) exist unless there is someone to observe it.

I am not saying we are "merely chemical reactions". The subjective experience is real and more important than the "objective" world. Consciousness is mysterious and special, and best explaination I have for it is this: consciousness a ubiqituous, inevitable component of the Universe that is focused/crystalized by complex instruments (biological or otherwise) to have a feeling of subjectivity/centeredness.

 

[kavi]

The Kavi Resonant Frequency Information Framework will revolutionise our understanding of the Universe. In this Framework, Consciousness is a type of informtion related to a universal resonant frequency permeating the universe that has remembered and encoded information since the beginning of time.

This higher resonant freqeuncy is related to Dark Matter, or more accurately Dark Matter is attached to it, which seems to permeate the universe in a web-like structure. This is the Information superhighway of the Universe. All information that encodes our universe moves through this highway by way of the resonant frequency.

The human soul or spirit is related to this Resonant Frequency, and gets absorbed into it at the end of LIfe. The purpose of Life is to refine, or increase the complexity and information of this structure, which then gets absorbed into the universe. This is an on-going process in the universe, one mechanism to increase complexity and information, of which there are many.

A novel approach utilising information organisation in entropy systems with resonant interactions and harmonic coupling, explains Dark Matter, Inflation, Dark Energy and particle physics, via re-coding.

In the Resonant Frequency Information Framework, all energy is information.
Entropy, the movement from a lower energy state to a higher energy state, is the increase in information capacity.

So, in a closed system of ice, the system is configured with least information capacity. As we add energy, we increase the degrees of freedom, movement in the underlying space which allows encoding of more information. Fruther increasing energy results in a maximum level until ice begins turning to water. As we continue to add energy it remains as water until this system can no longer hold additional information (energy). It then turns into gas that allows holding yet more information.

So energy is information, and entropy is the spreading out of information into the universe.

In the earlier Universe, evreything was bigger and more chaotic with high energy. These are waveforms which overtime develop into resonant vibrations. The resonant vibrations span the system in a lattice structure. This resonant structure can absord any energy from the rest of the system, but it has to remain in a coherent resonant structure, a resonant frequency, This structure run acorss the system, and on the outside, is energy not harmonic or not attached to this system, it could be random energy.

The grid like structure is internalising all the information it gets from all the resonant interactions it is made up of, over its network. It can replicate and propogate information. Most of the information is repeated so it is not necessary. So like code, this structure can self-organise. This is called re-coding.

The structure in the earlier universe had absorbed information by the resonant interactions it was composed of, spanning the system. This was before particle physics. This lattice like structure had encoded all this information into its resonant frequency, it was in a consistent, stable state, having absorbed most of the structured information it could, having mostly random energy left out. The stability of the system has an effect similar to a vacuum, as most of the information is in the resonant frequency, it is tied up in the tension in the existing field.

Now, evolution, or re-coding of this frequency causes Inflation. The existing structure, itself made of smaller structures attached to its lattice, recodes this whole lattice. It only has the existing energy or information that it has absorbed into the resonant frequency. It can divide this energy and produce a new configuration, discarding the waste energy into space. This encoding always causes the energy to get smaller, but we can continue to divide energy.

The waste energy can be thought of as the expansoin of space. Because energy is information, the energy going out is the loss of information, or degrees of freedom from the system. This increases the information, or degrees of freedom on the outside. so the scale of space increases. It is just information degrees of freedom moving from the inside to outside.

Dark Matter is a postulation of matter to account for missing gravity. In our system, Dark Matter is the underling lattice of the original Resonant Frequency. This cloud or superstructure is what connects the Laws of Physics, as information in our universe. Outside this cloud, there is just empty space and quantum fluctuations. This code came from the recoding to the earlier energy resonant frequency.

E=mc2. Where is all the energy of particles in our universe? As waves their energy is clear, but as particles the energy is not doing anything or radiating, so where is it. The energy is used up by the forces, gravity, dark matter etc. The gravity energy of dark matter can come out of the total energy of matter. This is the energy that runs the information superhighway. Gravity accounts for much less. I am not sure about the other forces.

Redshift, CMB, Dark Matter can all be explained by a recoding configuration that gives us our universe and its laws. That recoding put random energy out there as quantim fluctuations. Redshifting is a loss of energy, or information, due to the shedding of noise information into the intervening space.

 

[NoBiscuits]

I am not a materialist or an atheist ... to have a feeling of subjectivity/centeredness.

I'm just not getting where you're coming from.

My point is this:

1. When it comes to the soul, there's the pre-dualism understanding of it (eg. Great Chain of Being) and the post-dualism understanding of it (subjective world vs objective world).
2. The pre-dualism way has been lost to time and forgotten.
3. The post-dualism way has led to conclusions such as "I don't exist" or "I'm just a chemical reaction," which are obviously insane.
4. Because these insane conclusions have become so popular, there is something broken with post-dualism logic (or, something taken for granted with pre-dualism logic has been lost).
5. The meta of how we collectively think needs to be fixed first if we're ever going to understand the soul

Otherwise you're sharing nuclear launch code files from a corrupted hard drive. This has been my main point throughout the thread.

---

So, If I'm going to be honest, it seems like your reasoning is all over the place and coming from mashing things together. It's not coherent. You can't pull Eastern philosophy into Western society any cleaner than slapping an AMD CPU in an Intel motherboard. Even if 80%+ of what we understand about Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism WASN'T known through inadequate or lazy translations during the 1970's (Allan Watts got a lot of heat for doing this), then it wouldn't fit into our way of thinking of the soul (of lack of one) today which is built on dualism, Enlightenment philosophies, skepticism, and remnants of Christian philosophy.

I am not a materialist or an atheist ...
I tend to disagree with most of western philosophy as a whole ...

No, you actually agree with it but don't know it. The West is secular

The roots of my argument is in a combination Buddhist/Taoist beliefs. The idea of a "soul" or "human spirit" is certainly something real, but in a metaphorical, subjective sense.

That's not Taoism. If you're going to translate to Western dialect, the Tao is objective. Also, religions can't be mixed and matched at will by the indidivual. Either they're top-down or they're not divine. When they're mixed, it usually means one peoples conquered another and something just couldn't be let go (eg. Pagan winter solstice mixing into Christimas).

Also, I firmly believe the subjective matters more than the objective. After all, the obvious answer to the question "if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?" is NO, because sound = vibrating air with an instrument (human or otherwise) to process it into the subjective experience we call noise.

Then you're closer to Satanism than Buddhism orTaoism

I could take this a step further and say that the Universe does not (and maybe cannot) exist unless there is someone to observe it.

Then you're an atheist because your creator can't exist without you existing first

You can't just mix East and West a la carte like that, or any religion for that matter. Here's why:

Progressive: "Our civilization started when the first humans developed technology. Time should be used to measure a linear advancement of material and scientific development of all different humans combined as a whole. We should begin year 0 at 12,000 BCE to honor Humanity."
Christian: "Our civilization started when the son of God was sent down from heaven to forgive our human failings and provide us with instructions for the next era of Earthly existence. Time should be used to measure how long we've been in this grace era. We should begin year 0 at Jesus' birth to honor the Holy Trinity."
Agnostic Centrist: "It's so great how we can have different views and still get along! I think both of you are right! Some people beleive this, while other's believe that! As long as we respect each other! "
Everyone: "Ok... So what year is it? 2023 or 12,2023? Also, Juneteenth or not? And Priest is saying prostitution threatens the soul while Scientist is saying prostitution is liberation from the Priest. So can I make an OnlyFans?"
Progressive: "Yes! Priest is wrong about the soul. The soul is you as you are on the inside, unique and special. Unhindered self expression of your soul is the ultimate purpose of your existence, and evil is defined as those who impose limits on that self expression."
Christian: "No! Scientist is wrong about the soul. A set of rules for all good souls to follow has been shown to us. Those orders came from a master that is external to us and above us, given to us so that his creation can be successful. We can't alter these rules. Humans can either choose to follow them or their souls will be harmed. Who is evil are those who encourage disgrace to your soul."
Agnostic Centrist: "Good debate. I think we can all agree here that evil is bad and the soul is precious."

*200 year war starts*

Pick one. Study it in detail for what it is, as it is. Not as it is known by, or seen in pop culture as, or how popular it is. Find the oldest texts you can of early writers and read them directly (we have internet, you can do that now). Find scholarly responses to it over the different eras of history. How did people of different eras see the soul? Etc. Don't try to make chef's salad out of it, and don't try to "translate it" to fit modern times. Modern times could be dead wrong for all we know.

You can only ever really understand one religion at the end of the day, and it will usually end up being what you were born into (unless you're a woman who married into another). All other ones will become more and more foreign as you better understand yours. That's why Protestants and Catholics still argue despite both being Christians.

Don't be shy about it. I think a lot of Westerners get into Buddhism as a hobby because they're too shy to just commit to Christianity, but they feel a deep sense of existential thread and hope to latch on to something. That's likely because of how boomer-like, gay, and superficial the church has gotten ever since it tried to modernize itself. The church used to be able to perform its own executions, sanction wars, and break up bad families as it saw fit. Now some man who thinks he's both a boy and a girl can shoot up one of its schools with a gun and get protection from the White House, declaring the murderer was the victim of the Christian kids instead. It's really embarrassing how pathetic it's gotten.

PS.
Regarding this line: "Unhindered self expression of your soul is the ultimate purpose of your existence, and evil is defined as those who impose limits on that self expression."
Now that I've pointed it out, you will never stop noticing it.

 

[FlexpertHamilton]

I'm just not getting where you're coming from.

My point is this:

1. When it comes to the soul, there's the pre-dualism understanding of it (eg. Great Chain of Being) and the post-dualism understanding of it (subjective world vs objective world).
2. The pre-dualism way has been lost to time and forgotten.
3. The post-dualism way has led to conclusions such as "I don't exist" or "I'm just a chemical reaction," which are obviously insane.
4. Because these insane conclusions have become so popular, there is something broken with post-dualism logic (or, something taken for granted with pre-dualism logic has been lost).
5. The meta of how we collectively think needs to be fixed first if we're ever going to understand the soul

Otherwise you're sharing nuclear launch code files from a corrupted hard drive. This has been my main point throughout the thread.

---

So, If I'm going to be honest, it seems like your reasoning is all over the place and coming from mashing things together. It's not coherent. You can't pull Eastern philosophy into Western society any cleaner than slapping an AMD CPU in an Intel motherboard. Even if 80%+ of what we understand about Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism WASN'T known through inadequate or lazy translations during the 1970's (Allan Watts got a lot of heat for doing this), then it wouldn't fit into our way of thinking of the soul (of lack of one) today which is built on dualism, Enlightenment philosophies, skepticism, and remnants of Christian philosophy.


No, you actually agree with it but don't know it. The West is secular

That's not Taoism. If you're going to translate to Western dialect, the Tao is objective. Also, religions can't be mixed and matched at will by the indidivual. Either they're top-down or they're not divine. When they're mixed, it usually means one peoples conquered another and something just couldn't be let go (eg. Pagan winter solstice mixing into Christimas).

Then you're closer to Satanism than Buddhism orTaoism

Then you're an atheist because your creator can't exist without you existing first

You can't just mix East and West a la carte like that, or any religion for that matter. Here's why:

Progressive: "Our civilization started when the first humans developed technology. Time should be used to measure a linear advancement of material and scientific development of all different humans combined as a whole. We should begin year 0 at 12,000 BCE to honor Humanity."
Christian: "Our civilization started when the son of God was sent down from heaven to forgive our human failings and provide us with instructions for the next era of Earthly existence. Time should be used to measure how long we've been in this grace era. We should begin year 0 at Jesus' birth to honor the Holy Trinity."
Agnostic Centrist: "It's so great how we can have different views and still get along! I think both of you are right! Some people beleive this, while other's believe that! As long as we respect each other! "
Everyone: "Ok... So what year is it? 2023 or 12,2023? Also, Juneteenth or not? And Priest is saying prostitution threatens the soul while Scientist is saying prostitution is liberation from the Priest. So can I make an OnlyFans?"
Progressive: "Yes! Priest is wrong about the soul. The soul is you as you are on the inside, unique and special. Unhindered self expression of your soul is the ultimate purpose of your existence, and evil is defined as those who impose limits on that self expression."
Christian: "No! Scientist is wrong about the soul. A set of rules for all good souls to follow has been shown to us. Those orders came from a master that is external to us and above us, given to us so that his creation can be successful. We can't alter these rules. Humans can either choose to follow them or their souls will be harmed. Who is evil are those who encourage disgrace to your soul."
Agnostic Centrist: "Good debate. I think we can all agree here that evil is bad and the soul is precious."

*200 year war starts*

Pick one. Study it in detail for what it is, as it is. Not as it is known by, or seen in pop culture as, or how popular it is. Find the oldest texts you can of early writers and read them directly (we have internet, you can do that now). Find scholarly responses to it over the different eras of history. How did people of different eras see the soul? Etc. Don't try to make chef's salad out of it, and don't try to "translate it" to fit modern times. Modern times could be dead wrong for all we know.

You can only ever really understand one religion at the end of the day, and it will usually end up being what you were born into (unless you're a woman who married into another). All other ones will become more and more foreign as you better understand yours. That's why Protestants and Catholics still argue despite both being Christians.

Don't be shy about it. I think a lot of Westerners get into Buddhism as a hobby because they're too shy to just commit to Christianity, but they feel a deep sense of existential thread and hope to latch on to something. That's likely because of how boomer-like, gay, and superficial the church has gotten ever since it tried to modernize itself. The church used to be able to perform its own executions, sanction wars, and break up bad families as it saw fit. Now some man who thinks he's both a boy and a girl can shoot up one of its schools with a gun and get protection from the White House, declaring the murderer was the victim of the Christian kids instead. It's really embarrassing how pathetic it's gotten.

PS.
Regarding this line: "Unhindered self expression of your soul is the ultimate purpose of your existence, and evil is defined as those who impose limits on that self expression."
Now that I've pointed it out, you will never stop noticing it.

Most of what I know about Eastern philosophy is from the book "The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects", and from hours and hours of talks, podcasts, and meditations by Joseph Goldstein and Alan Watts, and I am aware of the criticisms directed to the latter. What I do know is that Zen is not generally something thatwrote about; anyone who claimed to know what Zen is was said to be a charlatan who "stunk of Zen". I think the same could be said for Taoism, but that's my least understood of all of them.

As far as a comprehensive life philosophy goes, I am most well-versed in Greco/Roman Stoicisim, and have read many books on it and find it extremely useful as a life philosophy. However Stoicism does not delve much into human nature/existentialism (besides Seneca to some extent) and the grander meaning of everthing. Western philosophy in this area (grand meaning/consciousness/etc) has always seemed unappealing to me, though I am trying to get into Existentialism. I just picked up Sickness Unto Death but I found it quite difficult to read. Either way thanks for the suggestions and I do think I need to learn more about the subjects. My belief in nondualism still holds though.