GENUI TE

10/2015
 D Vautier

So there are about three ways of looking at souls.

1)  For Christians the answer is that the soul is immortal created at the moment of conception and sticks around forever after that.

2)  Others believe the soul starts out sometime when the body gets conscious then evaporates after death.  I think these would be called materialists or something.

3)  Then you can believe that God created all souls and keeps them around forever.

Psalm 109 suggests the third idea and I kind of like it.  So why would an infinite God have to go to all the trouble of creating souls all the time for all living things.  Just do them all at once and be done with it.  Jewish tradition has it that the Guf ha-Briyo or Hall of Souls contains the raw materials and that a baby gets in-souled sometime from this vast depository sometime at self-awareness.

The Soul Theory

With regard to the soul theory, there are three kinds of teachers in the world:

- The first teacher believes in the existence of an eternal ego-entity that outlasts death: He is the eternalist.

- The second teacher says a temporary ego-entity occupies live which evaporates at death: He is the materialist.

- The third teacher says there is neither an eternal nor a temporary ego-entity: He is the Buddha.

I was just browsing on Wikipedia when I came across an article on the Guf, or t, the Treasury

[Illustration: Doves suffused in radiance, Die Bucher der Bibel, E.M. Lilien]

The Well of Souls, entered pop consciousness with the 1988 apocalyptic film, The Seventh Sign, starring Demi Moore. The movie was very peculiar and had already been flagged as needing some attention, so I took a turn at tweaking it. This is more or less what I wrote:

The word Guf is derived from Hebrew for "body/corpse". The Guf can also be referred to as the Otzer (Hebrew for "treasury"). It is the source of every human soul. In some traditions the Guf is located in the celestial plane of Aravot.  At other times it is located beneath God's Throne of Glory, which resides "above" Aravot. Though some cite Isa. 57:16.