Considering we all have souls, if we clone a human (if we have not done so already) do you believe the clone would receive a soul by Universal Law? Or would it b a living breathing soulless being? Also if it does receive a soul is it reincarnated?

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Souls preexist people, they aren’t created for each individual body. What happens is the body ‘attracts’ a soul to ‘imprint’ on it. Souls are finite in number, while the amount of things they can potentially imprint into is infinite. I have been told that not everything that could potentially have a soul actually has one. I’ll have to take his word for it, I can’t make that work in my brain. Souls can imprint onto multiple things at a time. More than one soul can imprint on a thing. Souls can imprint more or less strongly onto a thing.

My favorite soul metaphor to use is cars. Cars are made and designed by people working for companies, which deconstruct their creations down to the final detail. We can speak of the “soul of a BMW,” and how well individual BMW models have that “BMW soul.” There’s a lot to examine, from the styling to the interior to the mechanicals. This massive ‘surface area’ of potential detail gets filled in by people working for the company making the cars.

When you buy a car, you make that car your own. Maybe you hang dice in the mirror, or use a fun steering wheel cover. These things are you imprinting your soul onto the car, which already has BMW’s imprint due to its manufacturing. You may decide that you’re a BMW kind of person, and only buy BMWs from here on out. BMW has thus become part of your identity, you let a little bit of the company have a say and ‘imprint’ on your life. Your life is an amalgamation of countless ‘soul contributions’ from everything you’ve chosen to be a part of your life, and each contribution impacted your life to a greater or lesser extent.

I am attracted to the idea of human souls as collectively forming a kind of crystal, each soul being a facet of that crystal. This makes the number of human souls finite, even though each human is unique. This falls out of the car metaphor. At the end of the day, there are only so many ways to attractively package automobiles, and so there is only so much room for automotive brands. In the marketplace, if new companies or industries are very close together, eventually they will merge together to form one identity.

The concept of clones has been covered pretty well in fiction, and fiction is another way to examine the concept of souls. Characters can be portrayed very differently in different productions, and they can be defined in various ways in order to make them recognizable. Comic books play with this more than anyone else. Multiple characters can wear the same suit. Bruce Wayne is the iconic Batman, but nothing has ever stopped anybody from writing stories in which other characters put on the bat suit and fight crime, and so the soul of Batman lives on in other incarnations.

The way to look at it is that an identity is organic, it can be taken on, cast off, molded to an intention. Selves create identities.

Souls create selves. The second Dick Grayson put on Bruce’s suit, he wasn’t just assuming an identity. Bruce Wayne, without ever being there, exerted an ineffable force on Dick, patterning everything Dick did going forward. Dick was somebody before he put on the bat suit, and he became someone different after he decided to be Batman.

Selves are created and destroyed, while souls are eternal, patterns of existence that can exert influence on anything they touch.

Now, you didn’t use this word, but a lot of people think that the soul is the same thing as a spirit. That the soul can leave the body or whatever. The word spirit comes from the Latin word for ‘breath’. It’s an ‘animating’ force. In some cosmologies, God breathed the world into existence.

The way it works is that self derive from soul, and spirit derives from self.

When you die, your spirit continues on in a spiritual realm, this spiritual body developed alongside your physical body through a heavenly mechanism called correspondence. Whenever you dream, dream versions of yourself are created, these are spirits, animated through you in a manner that can be likened to breath, just as how this universe and the Big Bang can be likened to God’s Word. You exist and experience as these dream spirits for a short time, then they dissolve and you find yourself back in your body when you wake up. Those experiences happen in the language of correspondences and this is what makes dreams a useful tool in a therapeutic context.

Everything that happens here has a dense, rich heavenly correspondence, and affects our spiritual bodies. It’s similar to soul imprinting, but is a continuous process, while the souls influence largely happens at conception, eventually self takes over. Spirits can last long enough to develop identities of their own. Dick Grayson didn’t literally become Batman when he put on the suit, Dick’s Batman is still Batman, but Dick put his own twist on the hero.