I'll just throw in my concept of "soul", and folks can take it or leave it - I'm no one's spiritual advisor.
I conceive if the soul as the animating force of life, animating a body that would otherwise be inert, a "meat suit". It's kind of like a car and driver, with the soul being the driver and the body being merely a vehicle. It's the soul itself that is actually "you", rather than the body. Or maybe the combination of the two at some level is what constitutes "you", but then that would raise the question of whether the soul is still "you" once it has separated from the body at death.
So, in that view, the soul really doesn't need a "by your leave" to inhabit the body, for without it the body would just be a corpse, a meat suit, an inanimate object.
It naturally follows from that that all living things - people, animals, even plants - have what could be called a spirit, because if they had it not, then they wouldn't be living things. They would just be inanimate objects in a tableaux of what could be, but isn't.
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I conceive if the soul as the animating force of life, animating a body that would otherwise be inert, a "meat suit". It's kind of like a car and driver, with the soul being the driver and the body being merely a vehicle. It's the soul itself that is actually "you", rather than the body. Or maybe the combination of the two at some level is what constitutes "you", but then that would raise the question of whether the soul is still "you" once it has separated from the body at death.
So, in that view, the soul really doesn't need a "by your leave" to inhabit the body, for without it the body would just be a corpse, a meat suit, an inanimate object.
It naturally follows from that that all living things - people, animals, even plants - have what could be called a spirit, because if they had it not, then they wouldn't be living things. They would just be inanimate objects in a tableaux of what could be, but isn't.
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