Re: OK, Fortunate, back to your long list of questions.

All my comments are based on the KJV version. I'm not saying it's the only version which will lead a man to God but it's the one that was always the center of my study because I believe it is without error and perfect for God to do his work in my heart. As I said before there are two types of life and two types of death, physical and a spiritual. Without God's Spirit to testify in the heart a man can not believe and accept Christ as his savior. It can not happen.

As said previously, all from Adam to the birth of Christ were 'saved,' or believers of a coming Christ. I find no reason to believe they knew his name was Jesus. I further find no reason they needed to know. However, details of his power, life and death were on display from the garden.

The most important thing I bring here is that I have met him. I have met the Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit of The Father who was sent by the Son. I commune with both Father and Son daily. I am not certifying myself here; I certify and testify of The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit. I want no go between nor do I need one but those who pray for me are greatly appreciated.

It is my intent to C&P all your questions which remain so that we can continue without distraction or omissions and allow you to dig deeper into questions and comments at your leisure. I don't want to miss anything so I'm revisiting a couple to start.

7) Then God says this: "But for Adam no suitable helper was found." What does that mean? Did he have multiple choices that he turned down? Who were the unsuitable helpers? Wouldn't God know what Adam would find suitable? What was Adam looking for? A blonde? A redhead? In the Jewish and Mesopotamian traditions Adam got Lilith before Eve. But she was booted out of the Garden, by herself, for disobeying Adam, not for disobeying God. Was her episode edited out? And why? Some editor decided along the way not to include Lilith. Why?

God created genders before he created Eve when he said 'let them bring forth after their own kind,' on day five. Chapter 1:

23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.

25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Since God, while described as having physical attributes, a mind, a hand, a foot...is not a physical being. Why any artist ever wasted a canvas and oil trying to portray him is beyond my understanding. God is a spirit. When he said let us make man in our image and 'let them...' he was saying let us make man a living spirit, 'living soul.'

Idk if Adam was made in the garden or not. The garden isn't mentioned in the first chapter which is 'the generations of creation,' which makes me now believe that the garden was planted exclusively for man after the week of creation.

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

God's plan to furnish a redeemer for mankind was in process at previously to creation for he was addressing my Savior with those words.

Adam divorced Lilith for not doing what he said? Wonder who judged the matter and that judge's wife felt about it. Pardon my lightness in this reply. My first encounter with the concept of Adam's first wife was while watching the Netflix series 'Lucifer.' It's great entertainment putting a ton of myth on display. I can't address other versions of the Bible unless they deny Jesus. Any other dispute dispute would put me on offense against the believers of those text; neither do I defend God's Word. I believe the KJV is perfect for me. A preacher once jokingly said, 'That's the version the Apostle Paul carried.'

Sorri bout mispelin your handal, bro. Imo, apoligy was meritid

Message was edited by: ClemsonTiger1988®

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Feb 27, 2022, 4:33 PM

Hi 88.

clemsontiger88

This is a post-script. I didn't intend this to be as nearly as long as it is, but I got excited and into it and just couldn't stop. So we have yet another book. What an outflowing of thought the two simple words "Define Soul" has created. Sorry about that <img border=

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+++++++++++++

I've been pondering your question of "Define Soul" for the last day or so, and it's such a tough task I don't know if I can. At least not in an adequate way. But I'll try. I mean, the simple, pat answer, and I think what most would immediately say, would be your "life force", whatever that is.

But there is so, so much more to it, particularly if you believe the soul it persists beyond life. So it can't be just that. In fact, it might not even be the life force at all.

I've got two tracks running through my head right now, and I'll kind of interweave them as I go to explain as best I can. I'm going to put a lot of this in a future post at some point tied to history, instead of me, so I hope you don't mind reading stuff twice.

****Part 1****

I've been enthralled the last few years with the Egyptian concept of the soul. It is astonishingly complex, and it took a very personal loss in my life to begin to fully understand it. It's not the understanding of life, death, or soul you can get from watching death on TV, or from someone you are unfamiliar with.

You have to intimately know the person you are speaking of to begin to understand Egyptian view of the soul. It is very nuanced and quite deep.

In our modern world, we tend to think of the soul as a singular "thing." But I'm not so sure that is the best way to do it. Just like we think of our body a a "thing", when in fact it is a collections of separate organs working together, mostly in harmony, wrapped by yet another organ, the skin.

Similarly, the soul may be a "team", if you will. Not a thing. Just like our physical body is a team of organs.

Now, this sounds crazy AF at first. And the way the Egyptians present it is to us is somewhat childlike... with little birds floating around and magic statues and such. But they were having the exact same problem we have today. What tools do you have to explain something that can't be explained? You can only make a crude attempt to explain it using what is around you. I get that now.

It's like trying to replicate a Monet, but you have no fine brushes. You only have open cans of paint to splash on the canvas. So it's very, very difficult to replicate. Your tools are too crude.

***Part 2***

My mother-in-law died a few years ago of a cerebral hemorrhage. The event was very sudden, over Christmas, and Mrs. Fordt and I, and M-I-L Fordt's family were all with her at the time. We all went to sleep Christmas night, and the next morning of Dec. 26 we found her unconscious, on the floor beside her bed. It looked as if she stood up to get out of bed, and collapsed on the floor right there. 911 sent an ambulance, but everyone knew it was too late even before the ambulance left the hospital. So there were no lights, no sirens, just silence.

When M-I-L Ford got to the hospital, she was still alive. At least by our current medical definition. She was still breathing, her heart was still pumping, her hair and nails still growing, presumably.

But "she" was gone. The doctors hooked her up to "life" support, because she was still "alive". But they explained she was never coming back. Her brain was flooded by her own blood, like a choked carburetor, or a sponge you can't get to to squeeze dry, and there was simply nothing that could be done - ever.

***Part 3***

Fortunately, she had left explicit instructions on what she wanted, and so her blood kin made the crushing decision to pull the plug. The doctors said she could have laid there, for who knows how long, "living", but to what end?

And so it was there that she finally "died". With her distraught family standing beside her holding her hand, her heart took beat its last beat and her lungs took their last breath.

***Part 4***

So, the soul can't just be the life force. It's different than that. I have seen it with my own eyes and felt it in my own heart. The life force is separate from whatever "soul" we might have. I have no doubt about it. I stood by her bed, holding her hand at my turn, watching her life force work on. I could still feel the warmth of her living body in my hand. But there was no soul there. “She” was gone.

The Egyptians were already on this 5000 years before I experienced it myself. The Egyptians would have called her physical body, the flesh itself, the Khet. Not the life IN the flesh, just the flesh itself.

What I have been calling the life-force they would have called the Ka. Then animating force. It's the difference between a living tree and a piece of deadwood. And the difference between a warm body and a cold one. But it's nothing more than an animating force. The battery pack which eventually runs out in all of us. That's a key distinction.

But what about "her"? This gets even more nuanced and more complex now. I have so, so much respect for the Egyptians thinkers. Because as I was learning what they thought, I was thinking "I have felt and seen and thought this all personally now, independent of reading about their interpretation. I was like a child following a path others had laid out for me.

What I have been referring to as "her" can partially be described as the Egyptian Sah, but not entirely. This is where you really have to move outside your way of thinking. I am fond of saying "why you think what you think" and this is an example of that. This is just not what we have been conditioned to think. It is outside of what we normally learn.

The Sah is most easily thought of as the "soul" that we usually think of. But it's not the life-force that powers the Khet, the physical body. That's the Ka; the battery; the impersonal power source. The Sah is something different, that can fly around like a spirit and even occupy stone statues with its presence.

That is why when the Egyptians prayed to a statue, they felt like they were praying to the person themselves. Because that person's Sah might very well be in the stone statue. It didn't have to be, because as a spirit it could go anywhere it wanted, but it could very well be in the stone representation of the person's Khet.

That was also a reason to build statues. To give a home to all the spiritual Sahs floating around. Because the spiritual Sah could only interact with humans through a statue, or an artificial “body” of some sort.

The reason the Sah is so reclusive, and needs special help, ie, a statue to communicate with others, is because it’s the TRUE you. The you only you know. And since we some hold some part of ourselves ourselves secret in life, the expectation was that we would do the same in death.

When alive and in your flesh body, your Khet, your Sah could always choose what to tell others whatever it wanted to, but as a floating spirit now, you no longer have that option. No mouth, no hands, no eyes. So you need a proxy to share your deepest thoughts...a statue.

There was a reason for this, because the part of you that interacted with people without a statue was yet a different part of the soul. I’ll explain in a second. If the Sah didn't have a "replacement" physical body like a statue to inhabit from time to time, it was doomed to be a transient spirit forever. Trapped in an alternate existence, and unable to contact or interface with those still here on earth.

+++Part 5+++

But there's more....
You can see why I need to make this its own post. It's very, very in depth. Just so impressed with Egyptian thought I can't fully express it.

So far, we have the

Khet - the purely physical, unanimated body
Ka - the animating force for the Khet. And nothing more, the purely mechanical life-spark you might say
Sah - the "spirit" if you will. The closest thing to our current concept of a soul, I believe. But it's only one metaphysical aspect of a person, and not the only one, as I’ll get to.

***Part 6***

Now we start to get really, really nuanced. You might think of the Sah as the "true" person. What they know of as themselves in their own heart and mind.

The public part of my M-I-L that I could interact with, what she chose to show others, was called her Ba. It was her her personality if you will, and her attitude, her demeanor, and to some extent her reputation. So how I knew my M-I-L, versus how she knew herself, would be the difference between her Sah, her inner self, and her Ba, her outward self.

The Ba was also depicted as a winged bird because it could travel, like the Sah. So when the Egyptians said a person’s reputation really gets around. They REALLY meant it...in a literal, like bird flying from location to location, way.

But here’s where it gets different. Your Sah inhabited a statue, when it wanted to. You had to go to it to communicate.

But when you when you speak of someone, or remember someone when they are no longer alive, it's their BA that is coming to you. Their outward, gregarious soul. How they want you to remember them. This is upside-down to how we think now.

YOU might think you are remembering someone. But in Egyptian thought, THEIR BA is visiting you. So what you think of as a memory of a loved one is in fact a visitation BY THEM. You are simply hosting, in your mind, a beloved BA that has come to visit you. That's kind of a different way to look at it.

And it works for reputation to. Say you have an unpleasant memory of kid beating you up as a child. That's not YOUR memory. That's HIS BA coming back after his death to torment you yet again. Like I said, very, very different.

So you got to a statue to converse with the Sah, the person’s secret self. But the Ba, the person’s outward, gregarious self comes to you when you remember who they were (or who they wanted you to think they were by their public persona.)

***Part 7***

But there's even more. The Egyptians REALLY though all this stuff through.

Assuming you got to the afterlife, your Ka, your physical life force, was already extinguished. I held my M-I-L's hand as hers drifted from her body. But you needed a replacement life force to power your spirit in the afterlife, where you "lived" on. It couldn't be the Ka, because that has obviously passed. So you also had your Sekhem, which was sort of like an afterlife battery for your spiritual Sah.

The Egyptians had even more parts. They noticed, for instance, that your shadow was a permanent part of you and always with you, even in death, so they attributed it to being a part of your soul also, and called it your Shut.

Your heart was extremely important, because to them it was the seat of your emotions, your virtues, your honor, and your integrity. It was how you were judged after earthly existence.

So it was not your life force, your Ka, or your spirit, your Sah. It wasn't even your personality, your Ba, but rather the underlying essence which created the personality that you exhibited to others. It was your core values, in effect. They called it the Ib.

And the part of you that lives on not as a personal memory to others, but more of as a public legacy, your name in fact, they called your Ren. It's like when you go to a cemetery and see the names on the tombstones. You may not have known those people personally, so you have never interacted with their Ba, but you know they existed, and in that sense they live on through their Ren.

*******

To me, the Egyptian concept of the soul is the most complex and comprehensive version I know of, in all the readings I have done in my life. And it really, really, touches me on a personal level, because I have experienced so many of the aspects they are trying to explain.

Now, do I believe little birds are flying around? No, but I understand what they were trying to convey, and what they saw in the world that they were trying desperately to explain. And if you move past their metaphors to see their message, it is just a beautiful, beautiful expression of human thought.

So in summary, like I said earlier, they saw the soul as a team of entities like the body is a team of organs.

1. The Khet - the purely physical, unanimated body

2. The Ka - the animating force for the Khet. And nothing more, the purely mechanical life-spark of the flesh

3. The Sah - the "spirit" if you will. The closest thing to our concept of a soul. The "you" only you know

4. The Ba - your personality. The "you" that everyone else knows.

5. The Sekhem - the Ka for your Sah. The power source that animates your otherworldly existence, like the Ka, which so clearly dies, powers your worldly existence

6. The Shut - your eternal companion, in life and death, your shadow

7. The Ib - your moral core

8. The Ren - your legacy, by which you are remembered even after all those who could remember you have died themselves

So as you can see, it's a whopper. But it's the best definition of a the "soul" I know of

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OK, Fortunate, back to your long list of questions.