____________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥« ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ *** The Little Worker's Newsletter *** Issue of January 2007 Published by CDTTT - The Committee for the Difussion of The Third Testament _________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS: - First Word - Soul Matters - Those 21 Grams... - The Other Body - The Vase and the Content - Last Word ____________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥« ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ - First Word Spirit and soul... essence and sustance... force and energy... Those words have, as you know, a significance, a meaning, although sometimes our human comprehension of things may vary. In this issue of our humble little newsletter, we will embark in a overview of what the word soul could really convey. ____________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥« ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ - Soul Matters If you are over 40 years of age, you probably have noticed that, when it comes to moral and spiritual matters, the word 'spirit' has recently been more and more in use instead of the word 'soul'. You see, there was always a problem with the use of the word 'soul' regarding spiritual matters, which arose from the fact that the translators of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, known as the Septuagint Version of the Bible, encountered a quite difficult challenge when traslating some words, because in the Greek language of that 3rd. Century BC, there were no equivalents to the terms 'rowah or ruwach' and 'nephesh or naphash' - the first meaning 'breath or spirit' and the latter 'a breathing creature or soul' - so they decided to use indisctintly the same word "psyche" not only for both spirit and soul, but also, sometimes, for heart and mind. We have a webpage that covers more thoroughly this interesting issue at http://144000.net/soul.htm Having said this, we then could commence to understand that somehow, in ourselves as human beings, reside both the spirit and the soul. But, how can we differentiate among them, and how do they function? We usually agree in, for starters, that the spirit -which is an essence, an idea - is immortal, while the soul - which is eminently physical - has an end as such. It is not that our own personal soul gets destroyed when the spirit cease its time in the body, but rather it finally dissolves into more basic particles of energy and these particles transform into another kind of structured soul, perhaps a simpler one, or blends with others to form a more complex soul. But it is an indisputable fact that the soul plays a major role in our lives. It is the one that encompasses all our basic body system resources - including the vital energy flow - and it works like the base upon which the faculties and gifts or talents of the spirit - which is an idea, a pure thought originated from God - manifest. In other words, the soul is the sustance of the spirit, being the latter the essence. The following explanation, delivered by the Spiritual World of Light many years ago, will probably clarify this point even further: "Man, his spirit endowed with intelligence and will, began taking his first steps along the road of evolution, so as to reach through self-effort, his development and elevation. In this manner he would be capable of knowing and loving his Lord and returning to Him with the necessary merits after an existence of struggle, to call himself son of God with dignity, because a pure spirit is not the same as a fully-evolved spirit." "To achieve those divine objectives, the Father endowed the material Creation with the breath of life, with that vital force that you call soul." "The soul, my brothers, as like the spirit and every creature in their different scales, also needs to evolve so that, at the end of time, man may reign fully over everything the Father has created for his benefit and fulfills in that manner His divine mandates." "From that breath of life, which vibrates in all Creation, God formed the human soul. But do not confuse the spirit with the soul; the spirit is essence and the soul is substance." "The spirit is part of the Father Himself. The soul is the subtle element by which the spirit manifests himself in the material universe". "Even the soul, being so ethereal and transparent, do you believe that it existed before the material Creation? No, my brothers. It is the spirit who has been in existence even before the material world was and does not need anymore substance than the divine love from whence he emerged". The Guardians. ____________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥« ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ - Those 21 Grams... In a 2003 film titled “21 Grams,” Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu explored the deeper meaning of life and death, and referred to what, for many, is just an urban legend: That the soul actually weighs 21 grams. This urban legend started back in 1907, when the New York Times published a controversial article: “Soul has weight, physican thinks,” read a headline on page 5 of the newspaper on March 11, 1907. The article reported the curious experiment of a certain Duncan MacDougall, a medical doctor from Haverhill, Massachusetts. MacDougall had long been working on the nature of the soul. According to his peculiar logic, if the soul continues to function after death, it must occupy space in the living body. Thus, it must have a specific weight. And so, he decided to weigh dying patients with a weighing machine of his invention. MacDougall placed the first dying patient on his scales one day at 5:30 in the evening. Three hours and 40 minutes later, “He expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end (of the machine) dropped with an audible strike hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound.” MacDougal had to place two dollar-coin pieces on the scale to bring it back into balance. The difference was 21 grams. He repeated the experiment with other five subjects obtaining diverse results. Back then, the opinions of scientists on MacDougall’s soul-weighing machine diverged widely. Some of his colleagues thought the experiments were plain silly; others felt MacDougall had made “the most important addition to science that the world has known” and discussed how his method could be improved. Now, one century later, the notion of the soul weighing 21 grams is just, well, another urban legend and since then, controvery continues: Some saying that there is no soul, therefore there is nothing to be weighed, others stating that certainly there is a change in weigh when a human dies, only that it shows a gain, not a loss, of a few grams. But what exactly is the soul? How can we define or describe it? ____________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥« ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ - The Other Body Some call it 'the etheric body', others call it 'the astral body or being', and also there are some that call it 'the vital body'. Since ancient times, men in many parts of the world had the intuition that there was a driving force at work in the Universe. For example, in the Vedantic thought the prana-maya-kosha (sheath made of life-force), could be considered equivalent to the soul... or etheric body, whichever name you prefer. The Chinese call it 'chi', and the Japanese know it as 'ki', although there are discussions whether if it exists as a force separated from matter, or if chi arises from matter, or if matter arises from chi. Some Buddhists and Taoists sustain the third belief, while some other branch of Buddhism has the particular belief that matter is just an illusion. The Mayan people called it Ki-nan [pronounced - keynan] which is the Mayan word for ‘the energy of the sun’. Similar to the concept of Chi or Ki, Kinan is also used to refer to the energy force in the individual. There is no culture in the world that hasn't had this notion (ka for the Egyptians, mana for the Polynesian, maban for the Australian aborigines, Waern for the Druid, etc.), so we can call it a universal concept that can be found practically everywhere. And everybody seems to agree in that this driving force is an energy, which manifests in all that is matter. It was invisible to the human sight, but in 1939, Semyon and Valentina Kirlian discovered a camera system that bears their name. This camera system is based in the principle that all living creatures generate and emit radiations. Photons of light, electromagnetic frequencies, heat, sound, and scent are all emitted from our bodies in direct relationship to our internal states. This wonderful and subtle system of exchange contains a wealth of information. Kirlian photography introduces a high frequency, high voltage, ultra low current to a subject being photographed, which naturally produces a corona or aura of multifrequency energy waves- from low infrared to well past the visible spectrum. At the end, we have came to understand that what in Western civilization has been called 'the soul', is precisely this other body. ____________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥« ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ - The Vase and the Content First, almost everybody will grant that the soul is, in fact, an energy, a physical one. Subtle? yes. With wonderful and somewhat unusual atrributes? agreed... but physical, nonetheless. It seems that, because of being of such an elevated state of the matter, the word 'metaphysics' could apply to it ("meta" = beyond, "physics" = what is produced in material nature). Also, all things material posses a soul. The fact that, somehow, particles and molecules organize in such a way that they can become 'things' (beginning from the most basic elements up to the more complex objects), clearly indicates that something is pulling all these particles and molecules together. Thus, all things have a soul, whether simple or complex, but a soul. Scientists, for ages now, have been trying hard to explain themselves this phenomena, and when they do, they find themselves abandoning the field of raw physical science to enter in a higher way of understanding things and then, inevitably, they get philosophical. You know, as happens in all aspects of existence or being, when passing from one state to the other, there is always a border, an edge, a threshold. Sometimes this threshold is so gradual as a gradient, that both states seem to blend, though if you look closely - with the eyes of your mind, of course - you can identify where exactly a state cease to be to give place to the next state. Look at the threshold of your door that leads from one room to another. It gets quite difficult to stablish where one room exactly ends and begins the other, but they do at some point. The soul has magnificent attributes, many of which are the ones that control our body through our brains - oh, yes, what we call the brain is in reality a system of brains - in an automatic fashion. As per today, human science has not yet reached the point in which they clearly understand that what they call 'the subconcious' is mostly the automated functionality of our autobrain, which in turn, is regulated by our soul. The reason why early psychologist researchers chose to call it the subconcious is because, for them, it worked beneath or under our 'normal' wake state, but if you think about it, this amazing and complex funcionality actually takes place beyond our conscient self. Perhaps the word "metaconscius" could be an even more precise term to describe it but that's another ballgame. The connection between our soul and our body is so close, that it appears as they were a single entity when in fact, they are two, although not independent: The body depends on the soul as this depends on the body to both fulfill their mission. And what is this mission? To work as a vase, as a receptacle for the most sublime creature this universe has ever known: The spirit. It is the spirit, the essence, the one that has the capacity to govern the soul, the sustance, and thru it, the body, using any means necessary: Energy, thoughts, feelings, sentiments and at the most basic level of the physical body, instincts, emotions and all kind of mechanisms and processes to make it work almost by itself. Usually, when left to its own by the negligence of the spirit or because a disorder, the soul (and/or the body) tends to work way too much by itself, but it is in its nature to be obedient and weak before the superior will of the spirit, when this functions at its best. You see, free will is a spiritual gift that pertains to the spirit only, not to the matter; and remember, the soul is from material nature, as is the body. Take for example what happens when a person has a severe ashtma attack: It is the soul-body trying to protect the person from an outside attack that is deemed as dangerous or life-threatening, via an strong immunology system response. But this quick response could lead exactly to what it was supposed to be preventing in the first place: The death of the protected person. This reverse outcome happens because the system soul-body has not the capacity of a superior intelligence that could abstract from concrete events, make inferences and deductions and reach more complex rationales. And since the spirit was probably the one affected by a negative emotion of the body or by it is own wrongful reasoning, which caused the weakness that opened the door to the alien atack, the soul-body has been left to its own resort and autoresponses, thus high abstract reason and the logical sense, who belong to the spirit, are not used at all. The body and the soul are prone to emotions, while the spirit does not, although it is sometimes easily affected severely by their consequences, same as it happens with all kind of material events that are processed thru the brain. And also the spirit is sensitive to more fine and subtle vibrations, such as those emanated from thoughts and spirits (bodied or disembodied), both in their positive or negative fashion. This is why evil, as well as righteousness and kindness, can be propagated as easily as viruses in the atmosphere. The first, entering thru the spirit and mind, and the latter by means of mechanical reactions or energetic vibrations, which the spirit finally perceive also. The soul has material tendencies and instincts while the spirit has spiritual gifts, virtues, powers, potentialities and feelings, and also has sentiments as the soul and the body do too, though their perspective is quite different. And the spirit has a mind, a spiritual one, while the soul and the body share, in us, one human 'mind'. In recent decades, the scientific community has discovered that the mind is not a local phenomena. In other words, the mind uses the brain but it is not the brain. In fact, it doesn't have a form, shape or any physical tangible attribute. When analyzing the brain - by using EGG or electroencephalogram -, the specialists are only measuring the electric activity that the mind unleashes, not the mind per se. You see, perhaps we need to use a different word to describe what the human 'mind' (or brain functioning) really does: Ok, it process thoughts but it does not create them. What the brain do is to "cerebrate" or "cogitate". At first glance it looks like 'thinking' but when you deeply analyze what is truly going on, you could come to understand that it is working with something previously in existance. Where was this 'something' originated? In the spirit. To make a silly but descriptive analogy, is like when someone watches TV and believes that the content or program he or she is watching is originated in the tv set. Of course, if there were not a tv set, the program would be simply impossible to watch, and it would seem it doesn't exist, although it does. But the other way around has the same outcome: If there were no programs or contents feeding, the tv set would be only lines and noise in its screen, and there will be nothing to watch or to hear but noise. And yes, you can measure in the tv set all the processes that are taking place: You can measure the quality of picture and audio, as well as the voltage running in its circuits - sort of a tv EEG-, but this doesn't mean that you are qualifying or analyzing with this the program running thru it in any way. Thr close connection between spirit and matter - the latter understood as formed by soul and body with all their systems -, explains how a non-physical event such as an grief, an affective suffering or a undergoing mental negative reaction, triggers a chemical response thru the soul to the body, which many times gets trapped in an energetic disruption, generating ugly emotions once and once again, with its correspondent manifestation in the body. Thus, illnesses and maladies appear. Of course, beautiful emotions can be generated too, only not as a disruption, since the source for all this is, basically, in the memory that belongs to the spirit. The main memory pertains to the spirit; what we call the 'mind' of the soul and body are in reality devices, wonderful devices, that function as the in and out mechanisms for the main memory, which is eternal, everlasting and that subsides even after the soul and body are dissolved. Once they cease to function together, the soul as well as the brain and its cells keep the physical traces of what once was a full working memory only for a brief amount of time. The impressions and memories in the soul, tend to last a little longer than those of the physical body, until they get integrated in another soul, where all the remaining traces of the former full spiritual memory, are blent to form a new entity, more complex, more evolved, more beautiful, more wise. All those tiny bits and traces of past memories and experiences that survived in the soul, are like an heritage for all creation. But in the spirit, unlike the soul and the body, all things, events, memories, actions, sensations and thoughts get imprinted in an indelibly fashion, they never vanish, diminish or dissapear. They are a treasure, an increasing wealth of experience and knowledge acquired through lives and existences that the spirit has had. So, although wonderful and awing, the soul and the body, the vase, dim before the brigthness and splendor of the spirit, the content. ____________________________________________________________ «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥« ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ - Last Word Dearly beloved: Whoever you are, whatever your present condition is, you have within you the power to change the world: You have the power of prayer. With it, you can irradiate the light that, even if not strong enough to affect the lives of those far from you, at the very least could have a positive impact, in a beautiful manner, in those surrounding you: Your family and friends, your neighbors, your colleagues at work or at school, just as it does over the myriad of disembodied spirits that surround us in desperate need of a light and an good example that could lead them to better realms, and you can be that guiding light for them. I beg you: Use this power. Use it with devotion, with faith and persistance, and the impossible could be soon as possible as that tomorrow that is next to arrive. With love May the peace of my Father be with all my brothers Your brother in the Lord The Little Worker ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ - Past Topics ** The Origin of Us http://www.144000.net/newindex/topics/0/the_origin_of_us.htm ** Does hell exist? http://www.144000.net/newindex/topics/2004/01/does_hell_exist.htm ** The Seven Seals http://www.144000.net/newindex/topics/0/the_seven_seals.htm ************************************************************* Join as an spiritual volunteer to the Spiritual Corps of Workers http://www.144000.net/cuerpo/ ************************************************************* PASS THE WORD: If you find this humble newsletter interesting enough, feel free to copy it and send it to your friends, family and colleagues... and why not? Start your own mailing list! **** PAST ISSUES AT http://144000.net/newsletter/ **** ************************************************************* UNSUBSCRIBE (instant!): http://144000.net/remove.htm