Mind, Soul, Spirit, Psyche and Self. And Breath.

Mind, Soul, Spirit, Psyche and Self. And Breath.

I have a number of times thought about the interpretation of the first five words in my heading. Depending on what I have been reading or writing I have sought to develop an understanding of what they are and their distinguishing properties. Most of the worlds dictionaries have an ambition to see them as synonyms, although, they also provide individual priorities for each of them, which of course, are coloured by the environment in which they are used; philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, religion etc., etc.

A few examples: 

The original of mind was the faculty of memory, not of thought in general. Hence: call to mind, come to mind, keep in mind, out of mind, to have mind of etc. “The generalization of mind includes all mental faculties, thought, volition/will, feeling and memory and was gradually developed over the 14th and 15th centuries.” (Questions are being raised whether mind also can be property of some types of man-made machines.)

“Spirit comes from Latin “spiritus” meaning breath.”

“Even soul with its Indo-European root means breath.”

“Psyche was Latinized to anima. Traditionally, anima could have been rendered in English as soul, but in modern usage the term psyche is preferable.”

“Freud and Jung both used the German word Seele which means both psyche and soul.”

It is an interesting fact, that during the time, I was tormented by my epileptic stigma and allowed the repressed emotions to ascend, I never thought of the variety of intellectual definitions and psychological jargon that surrounded me, in more or less qualified versions. I felt, then, instinctively that it was an escape from my goal to live my repressed pain. For me, the patient narratives in Arts books, with their direct pain-related language, is an important part of his ingenious explanation of Evolution in Reverse / the Primal Principles. Only later did Arts, more intellectual, links to the Neuroscientific knowledge, tempt me.

That the Neuroscientific knowledge is difficult to apply and locate in the Mind, Soul, Spirit, Psyche, Self and Breath, that is something I can live with. I feel though that with the help of the Primal Principle I have become a much more integrated soul.

Jan Johnsson