Does the brain have anything to do with the soul?

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The soul is consciousness turned inward on itself. Consciousness is abstract, it radiates out into the world, starting with the brain and carrying on outward to the body and the rest of the world.

A common holding in spiritual parlance is that the mind is more powerful than the body. This is true both in the sense that the mind can command the body to do things but also in subtler ways, such as a stronger mind also tends to have a less sickly body. Nothing beats the laws of physics but in a very real way, abstract workings in your mind affect abstract happenings in your body.

Consciousness is more powerful than the mind. In this case we’re referring to will. Will can dominate the mind, the problem usually is that will is limited. Where it is present, it can override things like you being tired or not in the mood.

So you see a hierarchy of will -> mind -> body. But this extends outward into the rest of the world. The mind affects many things about your world, such as what kind of jobs you can hold or what your relationships are like. These things have reciprocal effects back on the body, mind, and consciousness.

So, as you can see, you are far more than your individual body parts. Many parts of you are in fact abstract, they have no counterparts in the real world.

I believe your mind carries on outside the body after you die. The way I see this working is that you have two bodies, a physical one and one made of spirit. When your physical body dies, your spirit body detaches and continues existing by itself. Your spirit body and mind retain all the abstract aspects of yourself, such as your personality.

Consciousness, however, has no form. When you can no longer maintain the will to exist in the afterlife, your spirit body and mind fall apart and experience stops. This happens progressively, like you’re drifting off into a dream. You soon find yourself in a new body, and the dream ends with you starting to identify as a new person in a new world.

These things, your brain, body, external aspects, form a collection of things that I call your being. Imagine it like a large computer, one much larger than you need to actually do what you need to do. Your consciousness is like a beacon of light filtering out through the rest of your being. Everything it touches becomes part of your identity. Your identity only touches some of your being. For example, you might be extremely athletically talented, but the only thing you do is play basketball. The fact that you would also be really good at football is part of your being, but not part of your identity. Your identity is limited to the number of things you can be conscious of, but your being is truly endless.

The soul is an abstract repository of all the things that you’ve ever identified with. Being abstract, it doesn’t actually exist anywhere physical, but it’s a part of your being regardless. If you’re particularly spiritually aware, it can also be a part of your identity.