Is your soul owned?

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This is an interesting question to use to pry into the nature of the soul.

We first need to distinguish soul from spirit. The soul is what gives a thing essence. The spirit is what gives it life. Essence is the irreducible, unsharable, and impossible to fully articulate character of a thing. The essence of French cuisine is somehow different from Italian cuisine. But spirit can be shared. The nationalistic spirit that swept up Germany in the run-up to WW2 was also spreading throughout Europe.

Spirit came from the Roman word for breath. It’s the life that God breathed into us. It’s the breath that gave power to ships during the Age of Sail.

Soul is eternal, timeless. Spirit is temporal, tempestuous.

To talk about a person’s soul is to talk about something truly unfathomable. The essence of French cooking is far far easier to talk about than the soul of a person. You can think about your soul, visualize it, even ask God to show you your soul. But you can never touch it. You are its projection. You could no more touch your own soul than a movie character on the screen could touch the projector.

Souls project, spirits enliven.

My favorite way to picture the soul is as a jewel facet. The jewel is made up of math. Math is timeless, impossible for any kind of agency, even God, to conquer. You can use math to conquer things that are not math, like countries and the hearts of women. But you can never conquer math.

The jewel of which we are a facet of, one can shine a light through and it shows a picture. That picture is us, the uniqueness of our conscious existence. This uniqueness imprints onto our lives in countless, unfathomable ways.

To speak of ownership over a soul, over math, can never be anything but silly.