If you've ever seen Apocalypse Now, you'd know what I'm talking about intstantly, or you should. Well, f**ked if I know who first came up with the idea of having a shadow soul and a good soul, but C.G. Jung certainly had a few things to say about it. Frued's ideas of the nasty subconcious Id Ego and Superego smacks of the idea. The Egyptains had all sorts of souls in their mythos. But what it comes down to is whether we have one soul, two souls, many souls or if we're just brains that emulate perfectly what is formally described as a soul. Tell me whatcha thinkon the matter!

ever hear of the ba-ra-ka?????

Nope. Nah-ah. Not that I can remember. I honestly expected you, Dyshade, to say that there is no soul.

My opinions and beliefs tend to sometimes be at odds......
The ba-ra-ka are the three distinct levels of the Soul....
As far as the Babylonians?? I think... it may have only come about during the times of the Egyptian Dynasties yet seeing as How the Egyptians took alot of thier cultural ideals directly from the Babylonians who in turn took thiers from the Sumerians I do believe it may be traced as far back as Sumeria....

First is the Ba.... which is the Vegetative state... akin to Trees.. which we have as those automatic functions of the mind... breathing... heart beat and such...
Second is Ra.... which is the Animalistic state..... these are our instincts and survival abilities....
Third is Ka.... this is the Reasoning State...... this is the part of our mind that actualizes our perceptions.... gives us the ability to communicate and describe experiences and form concrete conclusions.....
All three form the Soul or Spirit of Man and all that lives around him.....
I do believe we have a Soul... or Spirit... though what I believe of it would invariably incite debate I am sure....

well i agree with the whole energy thing...y'know the soul is nuthin but energy...blah blah blah....well i dont see how u could have more than one soul.....thats just not right to me. u have one. whether its bad or good, is ur descision....

as far as the ego things, thats just more like split personalities...the wanting and/or trying to be something/someone you're not...

as for Freudian psychology... the Ego/SuperEgo/Id arent exactly seperate souls (ie-ur good soul and bad soul)...

the three are layers of a sort...

the ego is the reality based layer hovering at the top of concsiousness, it is where reasoning occurs and where concious decisions are made...

the superego is the moral ideal of the soul... the socalled "perfect version" of a person (or rather, what a person subconciously percieves as being their perfect self)... it sets the standards by which compare our decisions with the impulses offfffff....

the ID...

by far the most interesting (in my opinion) of the Triumverate as according to freud... the id is responsible for all our unconcious desires and impulses... according to freud it is the root of all our intentions and ultimate behaviors... it is here that we subconciously yearn to fulfill our mating imperatives and seek to destroy our compitition...

nifty, neh?

Well, I think that the Id, Ego and Superego have more to do with the tiny little voices that say "You aren't good enough" or "Those people should just shut up" or "Youare SO stupid!" The subconcious things that hold you back. The Id says "I want" the Ego says "love me" and the Superego says "I'm such a bad person"

not quite bubba...

He beat me to the post!

and im right too... heheheh

Of things, there are two sides of the same soul, the dark and the light. That, with the complexities of the mind, form one's personality.

perhaps you are extrapolating too much... just because everyone is grey doesnt mean they are composed of light parts and drak parts combining to MAKE that grey... we are wholly grey and imperfect because that is our nature, not because two elements are combined...

make any sense

But I think that we are gray only from distance, up close, we are fragments of black and white.

explain... fragments

Have you ever seen things that look like checker boards but more composed of random shards than of squares?

then what ur saying is that a soul in the sum composit of its good and bad experiances?

I mean that the soul is the base good an bad that all of us have that cannot ever be changed or altered. It is our arcane, ancient, pre-natal, pre-genesis being. All souls have the same duality and same level of good and evil, it is how the mind (and I DO make a distinction between soul and mind) chooses to act that makes one good or evil.

tabula rasa eh? works in theory, but how does it explain the extreme cases... if everyone had the same chance then wed be seeing many more john wayne gaseys in a population as big as ours... the next best explaination is that in some cases people are just plain good or just plain evil...

Not the soul. Evil is in perception. Hitler, at all but the top layers, was evil. The soul is in the layer just above that.

oh really... ou mean hitlers soul was neutral... does that mean that all insane people are niether good souls or bad souls?