What ideas like souls, free will, consciousness, etc. lack any clear definition and why?

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No word has a clear definition. Every word is subject to definition creep. I like to spend time with each concept for a few months and really get a good feel for it. Right now the word of the season for me is meaning. At various points I worked through context, absolute, existence, reality, inverse, consciousness, growth, non-physical, experience, ego, surrender, unmanifest, subconscious, evolution, mind, God, and others.

It’s not so much the words that are really squishy, it’s how people use them. Enlightenment, for instance, is more often used by people to indicate a kind of moral superheroism rather than non-dual perspective. (How could Osho have 93 Rolls Royces!!) You can try to get real finicky with the definitions or you can just roll with it. Personally if someone insists on every enlightened person being a moral superhero I’ll just adjust for the sake of discussion.

Consciousness is often used to refer to both the brain capacity for awareness as well as the advancement status of the soul. I do this because I simply cannot think of a better word to use for either meaning, and also the more I do it, the more using the same word for both concepts feels right. Your mind just wraps around the contours of the meaning.

I don’t think it’s so much our minds that are the problem, we can nail down concepts pretty well when we want to. The problem is communication. I played this game once where the characters thought ghosts were the same thing as souls. So they were absolutely horrified when a ghost split in two and disappeared. They were used to bringing lost souls to the big light and having them go through.

Nothing has clear definition because when you get right down to it, the underlying nature of existence is unknown. I have my own ideas about how things are structured, and my own logic for thinking about it, but those ideas are really hard to convey, and it took me years to nail it down.

So ideas have to evolve over time. Idea evolution is interesting. How did Jesus go from being a revolutionary trying to push the Romans out of Judea to being an apolitical moral superman? It happened slowly over time, with literally millions of people working with it. The world just didn’t need a revolutionary any more, it needed someone to tell you to turn the other cheek. When you get right down to it, manners are more important than revolutions.

Back to the game, in order to make a story work, you need consistency in the world. That consistency is composed of rules. The process of thinking about those rules, and coming up with interesting scenarios for stories to tell around them, that’s a great way to consider the ‘absolute’ nature of the concepts. When I was playing it, I had all kinds of insights about non-physical existence and why we have bodies. There’s a reason why ghosts always seem lost, and why the ones that aren’t lost are usually evil.

So the meanings of ideas, words and concepts have to shift over time, to accommodate the shift in the way we think about them. Language is a direct interface into our minds, the words we use affect our mind just as our mind affects the words. And there are billions of people who need them.