Of a religious, political, or of any other nature for that matter, humans taking sides in a debate that turned into a dispute accept by default as true every single claim made by the members of their adopted community. Also by default, they cry "False!" about everything stated by an opposition they were made to see as the enemy. The mentality behind that kind of attitude is, we are always right and the others are always wrong. To the unattached observer, since they are not seen through an ideological filter, things are the way they look.
In line with this at times annoying reality, not everything stated by a human universally accepted as being an evil person is false, and not everything ever written or claimed by someone whose knowledge and judgement society has come to admire is true. Let us take, for example, the case of British philosopher Bertrand Russell and his opinion on immortality and soul.
The focus here is going to be on his What Is the Soul? A piece he apparently originally wrote in 1928, there is an 1947 and a 1957 version of it and while he made several stylistic and terminology related adjustments, one thing these three versions have in common is him being wrong about mind/soul and physical body being one and the same thing.
In the 1928 version, right from the beginning Russell admits that "When I was young we all knew, or thought we knew, that a man consists of a soul and a body." Not all people knew that but this is what he thought was the case. What happened next, apparently unbeknownst to him, an extremely reductionist materialist segment of the scientific community hijacked the conversation, something done under the guise of addressing the false claims made in religion about the immortality of the body, not of the soul though. Indeed, only a few would notice, Bertrand included, when in the middle of a heated debate, that the immortality of the body is something completely different from the immortality of the soul.
'The rising of the dead' still preached in many churches implies that currently dead human bodies will one day rise in spirit and body from their grave, the other rather vague implication being that the soul and the body are one. In essence, the position taken by reductionist materialist scientists and church theologians is similar, and much to many rationalists' disbelief they are more than once on the same page. The only difference consists in the kinds of stories they tell about what both erroneously describe as fact.
The way empiricists have found it fit to address this rising of the dead nonsense in the Bible was by assuming that either such a thing as soul does not exist, or that since the soul and the body are one, when the body decomposes after our passing, so does the soul. The soul, however, is energy, and as the First Law of Thermodynamics says, energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. It can only be altered in form, transformed in a different kind of energy. In other words, soul energy is immortal, and since we are the soul within the body, we too are immortal. The immortality of the soul, on one hand, and the impossible immortality of the body, on the other hand, preached by some religious institutions but not by a Paul who, as you are going to see in the book, in one of his letters rightfully declares that the perishable could not ascend as imperishable, are different notions materialist scientists participating in the effort to protect the status quo by, among others, keeping Earth-humans unaware of their spiritual nature decided to treat as one and the same thing.
Without a doubt, not only that materialist evolutionists and theologians are wrong about the soul, the fact that they both directly or indirectly deny the reality of a soul residing within the body but being apart from the body, as well as the immortality of the soul is no accident. One major way of controlling the people of the planet, this was a coordinated misrepresentation of the true nature of being human, part of a scheme meant to hide from the Earth-humans their true potential. This false perception of reality determines the way they live, the way they understand their relation to the out there, the consequence of that being the state of almost constant state of crisis humankind has been experiencing for thousands of years.
With the advent of quantum physics, many scientists would conclude now material reality is not really material, or real, and that what we perceive as material is a holographic multi-dimensional projection, a mind over "matter" phenomenon. In plain words, the observed at the sensory level material reality, something that is nothing but energy, is basically an illusion. As a result, philosophers relying heavily on good science were of the opinion now that, in a sense, the body too was a product of the mind, and that meant the mind was something apart from the body. However, as Russell admits in 1928 without drawing the rational logical conclusion, "The philosopher (...) was not taken seriously, and science remained comfortably materialistic." Same as others at the time and even later, he would not realize that not everyone within the scientific community was "materialistic," with some theoretical physicists, by 1925 we would enter the modern quantum theory era, making actually a very strong case for intelligent design, on one hand, and for the origin of what we perceive as material being in a non-physical phenomenon, on the other, a non-physical phenomenon subdued by some of the members of highly advanced cosmic civilizations that have in contact with us for thousands of years. Some quantum physicists would make a scientific argument for the existence of the soul and for consciousness, the essential aspect of all life forms and the true creator of what we only perceive as a material world.
Russell navigates at times aimlessly an extremely choppy sea of conflicting ideas, and not once does he mention consciousness. He works, in this instance, with what some had to say on the question of the existence of the soul: "physicists assure us that there is not such thing as matter, and psychologists assure us that there is no such thing as mind." And while under other circumstances (What I Believe, 1925) he would make the case that mental activity is all about chemicals and electrical impulses, he admits now that "there are, however, various difficulties in the way of reducing mental activity to physical activity." As you are going to see in A Time of Change, there is an explanation for how mental activity translates into physical activity, which happens to be a very interesting process the awareness of which is going to give one access to powers many out there did not know we posses, no thanks to our education system, the academia, or the institution of religion. Then within the same paragraph, he makes a stunning claim concerning our physical aspect: "What we can say, on the basis of physics itself, is that what we have hitherto called our body is really an elaborate scientific construction not corresponding to any physical reality."
As shocking a claim as that may be, it is demonstrably true. It is hard to tell if he meant it this way or not, but this is the true meaning of the reality of intelligent design, reason why both creationists and evolutionists do not want design discussed in schools, colleges, and universities, with Russell being no fan of religion. He describes the human body as a work of science and not as a product of biblical or evolutionary miracles, at the same time realizing the process behind this science is associated with some non-physical reality. Once again, he was correct about that. However, Russell somehow concludes that "modern science gives no indication whatsoever of the existence of the soul or mind as an entity." Regarding this matter he was wrong. In his defense, at the time humankind was still in the middle of a dense dark age, one we are only now about to leave forever behind.
It is obvious that same as other materialists, Russell was looking for empirical evidence, for something he could detect with the help of measuring devices that would have proved the existence of the soul. If they could only weigh the soul. Someone did try that, they found out the soul was weighing 21 grams, and then they found out that they were dead wrong about that. The soul and the spiritual in general is energy vibrating at much higher frequencies when compared to the frequencies of the material, frequencies that are inaccessible to our sensory and because of that to our current measuring devices. Energy does not have mass. As a result, a rational logical interpretation of what is observable, there is other kind of evidence attesting to the existence of an independent from the body soul.
After analyzing almost 4,000 cases over four decades, that kind of rational interpretation of indisputable evidence led scientists with the University of Virginia to conclude reincarnation is real, the significance of their finding being the soul is something real. Then we have the new science of transpersonal psychology establishing that consciousness is, indeed, high frequency energy apart from the body.
Had Russell lived for another decade or so, he would have become familiar with how computers work. Computers function based on the same principle everything else in the universe operates on, a principle that was out there from the moment the universe was born. Something acknowledged by many along the time, the human body is a perfect mirror of the universe. As a result, similar to the software making the hard drive into an operational computer, when at birth and not a moment earlier the soul is downloaded to our physical aspect, it turns the new human body into a human being. This is why what we really are is the immortal, the eternal soul energy within the body and not the ephemeral body.
Because he believes that what some call soul or mind is one with the body, and Einstein appeared to have a similar opinion, though as you are going to see, he was misunderstood, Russell is firmly convinced that "There can not be reason for supposing that either a piece of mind or a piece of matter is immortal." His reasoning is based on a number of false assumptions, such as the notion that "the most essential characteristic of mind is memory." The fact is, as most everyone knows today, mind and matter are two different kinds of energies, and what is most significant about that is that they are operating at different frequencies. He then argues that since basically everything related to memory is associated with the brain, another thing that, as you are going to see in A Time of Change is not true, since "this structure decays at death, there is every reason to suppose that memory also must cease." Again, the soul is energy, and the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Energy is emanated from a source, and in the case of the soul, its energy was emanated from the Source all energy of everything there is in this and other universes has emanated from, a Source, a super-consciousness some call Prime Creator while others erroneously call God.
Like most materialists, Russell embraces the position that life is limited to whatever happens between birth and death, and that everything beyond that is completely inconsequential: "we shall have to admit that what is going to happen many millions of years hence has no very great emotional interest for us here and now." It actually does. Past present and future are part of the same space-time continuum, and even though we all live in the present, we are always persuaded in our choices of here and now by what us and humankind has experienced in the past and by what we envision regarding how our personal and the future of civilization Earth should look like.
Not only that but everything we have experienced in the past and everything we experience in the present is in line with what we as spiritual entities must accomplish in the end within this lower world of the Natural Order of Creation.
(Edited January 2, 2024)
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A TIME OF CHANGE - VOLUME 1 OF 3
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A TIME OF CHANGE - VOLUME 3 OF 3
