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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul


Soul

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In many religions, philosophical, and mythological traditions, the soul is the incorporeal and immortal essence of a living being. According to Abrahamic religions, only human beings have immortal souls. For example, the Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas attributed "soul" (anima) to all organisms but argued that only human souls are immortal.


Etymology

The Modern English word "soul", derived from Old English sáwol, sáwel, was first attested in the 8th-century poem Beowulf v. 2820 and in the Vespasian Psalter 77.50. It is cognate with other German and Baltic terms for the same idea, including Gothic saiwala, Old High German sêula, sêla, Old Saxon sêola, Old Low Franconian sêla, sîla, Old Norse sála and Lithuanian siela. Further etymology of the Germanic word is uncertain. The original concept is meant to be 'coming from or belonging to the sea/lake', because of the German belief in souls being born out of and returning to sacred lakes


Philosophical views

The ancient Greeks used the word "alive" for the concept of being "ensouled", indicating that the earliest surviving western philosophical view believed that the soul was that which gave the body life. The soul was considered the incorporeal or spiritual "breath" that animates (from the Latin, anima, cf. "animal") the living organism.










https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece


Ancient Greece

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to c.5th centuries BC










https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens


On the Heavens

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On the Heavens is Aristotle's chief cosmological treatise: written in 350 BC it contains his astronomical theory and his ideas on the concrete workings of the terrestrial world. It should not be confused with the spurious work On the Universe (De mundo, also known as On the Cosmos).

According to Aristotle in On the Heavens, the heavenly bodies are the most perfect realities, (or "substances"), whose motions are ruled by principles other than those of bodies in the sublunary sphere. The latter are composed of one or all of the four classical elements (earth, water, air, fire) and are perishable; but the matter of which the heavens are made is imperishable aether, so they are not subject to generation and corruption. Hence their motions are eternal and perfect, and the perfect motion is the circular one, which, unlike the earthly up-and down-ward locomotions, can last eternally selfsame. As substances, celestial bodies have matter (aether) and form (a given period of uniform rotation). Sometimes Aristotle seems to regard them as living beings with a rational soul as their form (see also Metaphysics, bk. XII). This work is significant as one of the defining pillars of the Aristotelian worldview, a school of philosophy that dominated intellectual thinking for almost two millennia.










https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Heavens


On the Heavens

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On the Heavens is Aristotle's chief cosmological treatise


Historical connections


European philosophers had a similarly complex relationship with De Caelo, attempting to reconcile church doctrine with the mathematics of Ptolemy and the structure of Aristotle. A particularly cogent example of this is in the work of Thomas Aquinas, theologian, philosopher and writer of the 13th century. Known today as St. Thomas of the Catholic Church, Aquinas worked to synthesize Aristotle's cosmology as presented in De Caelo with Christian doctrine, an endeavor that led him to reclassify Aristotle's unmoved movers as angels and attributing the 'first cause' of motion in the celestial spheres to them.










https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres


Celestial spheres

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others. In these celestial models the apparent motions of the fixed stars and the planets are accounted for by treating them as embedded in rotating spheres made of an aetherial, transparent fifth element (quintessence), like jewels set in orbs. Since it was believed that the fixed stars did not change their positions relative to one another, it was argued that they must be on the surface of a single starry sphere.

In modern thought, the orbits of the planets are viewed as the paths of those planets through mostly empty space. Ancient and medieval thinkers, however, considered the celestial orbs to be thick spheres of rarefied matter nested one within the other, each one in complete contact with the sphere above it and the sphere below. When scholars applied Ptolemy's epicycles, they presumed that each planetary sphere was exactly thick enough to accommodate them. By combining this nested sphere model with astronomical observations, scholars calculated what became generally accepted values at the time for the distances to the Sun (about 4 million miles), to the other planets, and to the edge of the universe (about 73 million miles). The nested sphere model's distances to the Sun and planets differ significantly from modern measurements of the distances, and the size of the universe is now known to be inconceivably large and possibly infinite.

Albert Van Helden has suggested that from about 1250 until the 17th century, virtually all educated Europeans were familiar with the Ptolemaic model of "nesting spheres and the cosmic dimensions derived from it". Even following the adoption of Copernicus's heliocentric model of the universe, new versions of the celestial sphere model were introduced, with the planetary spheres following this sequence from the central Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth-Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.










https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-experience/201610/the-impact-death-our-everyday-lives

Psychology Today


Robert Firestone Ph.D.

The Human Experience

The Impact of Death on our Everyday Lives

The conscious or unconscious fear of death can alter many aspects of behavior.

Posted Oct 21, 2016

Most people, including mental health specialists, have failed to recognize the full significance of the impact of death on life. The fear of death arises as each child becomes aware of death’s inevitability. It is too painful to face our personal mortality directly without protecting ourselves, therefore some form of defense formation against the painful realization of death and dying becomes essential. Death awareness affects our lives in ways we may not be consciously aware of; in fact, many people would tend to deny their fear and say something like, “I don’t think about death very much.” Nevertheless, the fear of death influences fundamental aspects of their lives and motivates many of their actions.

Early in childhood, even before we are conscious of death, we develop defensive strategies to cope with emotional frustration and primitive separation anxiety. When faced with death awareness, these same defenses are intensified. As we continue to use these defenses in an attempt to avoid emotional pain and block out negative experiences, we inadvertently shut out feelings of exuberance, happiness and fulfillment as well. Although defenses do help to avert anxiety states, they are costly in that they tend to distort our experience, damage our adjustment, and deaden our emotional investment in life.

Defensive reactions to personal trauma, separation issues, and especially death anxiety impact our lives at three distinct levels:

(1) on an individual level, our reactions predispose withdrawal into a more inward, self-nurturing, and self-protective lifestyle;

(2) on an interpersonal level, our responses can trigger a retreat from love or loving relationships and/or a generalized reaction or avoidance of intimacy and sexuality; and

(3) at the societal level, our fear reactions reinforce the need to give up our individuality, conform to the conventions, beliefs or mores of a particular group, institution, or nation and subordinate ourselves to charismatic leaders or authority figures. Furthermore, the in-group identification polarizes us against people who look, believe, or act differently, potentially contributing to ethnic strife, religious persecution, religious wars, or warfare in general.

Empirical Research in Terror Management Theory [TMT]

Terror Management researchers have empirically studied the effect of death awareness (salience) on human attitudes and behavior. They have specifically verified many aspects of Ernest Becker's theoretical formulations described in The Denial of Death (1973). Their findings indicate that after an experimental group was presented with the word “death” subliminally, they more strongly endorsed the worldview of their own ethnic group or nation; at the same time, they denigrated members of other groups whose worldviews differed from their own. Other studies showed that judges exposed to death salience tended to be more moralistic toward people whose behavior conflicted with society's social or moral codes. The group of judges that was exposed to death imposed sentences that were significantly harsher than the control group. Reactions to the word “death” being introduced also affected political choices. For example, two post 9/11 studies found that subjects in the high death awareness group favored a candidate who they perceived as a savior or demagogue and who insisted on an aggressive agenda toward their enemies over one who urged a more diplomatic path.

If the single word “death” introduced subliminally in an experiment can produce measurable changes in subjects' attitudes and actions, one can only imagine the powerful effect of countless events in the real world that remind people of their mortality. Witnessing a horrible accident on the freeway, watching the fatalities of war on the evening news, hearing about the death of a friend or famous person are reminders that seriously impact the nature of the sensitive human being. Even though we have become habituated and desensitized to the visual images of tragedy that we are exposed to everyday, these images still have a profound influence on our unconscious minds and significantly alter our motivations and behaviors.



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 03:38 AM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Wednesday 16 November 2016