soul

Home/Tag: soul

Cartesian Dualism, Kabbalah, and Quantum Mechanics

Cartesian dualism, or mind-body dualism, formulated by the French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), holds that the body and the mind (which he equated with consciousness, or the soul) are two distinct ontological substances with nothing in common.[1] They exist in different worlds and do not interact or communicate with each other. This position presents a serious problem—if the two have nothing in common, how can they have the causal connections they seem to have? How, for example, can the mind causally direct the body? And, vice versa, how can the body communicate sensations, such as pain, to the mind? This valid criticism proved fatal for Cartesian dualism, which has been all but relegated to the dustbin of history. The Jewish theosophical doctrine of Kabbalah takes a very different approach. It [...]

By |2023-01-22T00:12:47-05:00January 22nd, 2023|Kabbalah, Philosophy, Quantum Theory, Soul, Spirituality, Uncategorized, Wavefunction|2 Comments
Read More

The Soul – Part IV. The Whole vs. the Parts

This is the fourth installment in the series of essays on the nature of the soul. The first three installments can be found here: What Is a Soul? I. The Spiritual vs. the Materia What Is a Soul? II. Anatomy of the Soul What is a Soul? III. The Many Souls of Man At the dawn of classical philosophy, there were two leading schools of thought: holism and atomism. Holism holds that a system (e.g., physical, chemical, biological, social) should be viewed as a whole rather than a collection of parts. Atomism, in contrast, holds the reductionist view that every system is a collection of parts, and the system can be known only by studying its parts. Holism[1] essentially stands for the proposition that the whole is greater than the sum of its [...]

By |2022-06-26T17:19:08-04:00December 27th, 2021|Biology, Kabbalah, Klal and Prat, Soul, Spirituality, Uncategorized|1 Comment
Read More

What is a Soul? III. The Many Souls of Man

  …[H]e who tries to cure the soul, wishing to improve the moral qualities, must have a knowledge of the soul in its totality and its parts…Maimonides[1] Maimonides opens his introduction to The Ethics of the Fathers with this statement: Know that the human soul is one, but that it has many diversified activities. Some of these activities have, indeed, been called souls, which has given rise to the opinion that man has many souls, as was the belief of the physicians, with the result that the most distinguished of them states in the introduction of his book that there are three souls, the physical, the vital, and the psychical.[2] While Maimonides lists three souls—the physical (tiv’it), the vital (chiyunit), and the psychical (nefoshit)—he believes them to be aspects of one soul—“Know that [...]

By |2022-01-25T15:40:55-05:00December 15th, 2021|Kabbalah, Neuroscience, Reincarnation, Soul, Spirituality, Uncategorized|0 Comments
Read More

What Is a Soul? II. Anatomy of the Soul

In the biblical story of the creation of Adam, the Torah states: Then the Eternal G‑d formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.Genesis 2:7 The word translated into English as “soul” in the original Hebrew is nefesh. This is the first and the lowest level of the soul given to Adam. The taxonomy and anatomy of a soul in Judaism are quite complex. Original biblical sources speak of three levels of the soul: nefesh (“soul”), ru’ach (“spirit”),[1] and neshamah (“breath”).[2] The Kabbalah speaks of the five levels of the soul: nefesh, ru’ach, neshamah, chayah, and yechidah. This is based on classical rabbinic sources. As stated in the midrash, “By five names is the soul called: nefesh, ru’ach, [...]

By |2021-12-31T15:00:28-05:00November 5th, 2021|Ezekiel, Kabbalah, Names of G‑d, Sefirot, Soul, Spirituality, Uncategorized|2 Comments
Read More

What Is a Soul? I. The Spiritual vs. the Material

Introduction Most Americans believe in an immortal soul.[1] Most scientists think the soul does not exist. Why do so many people believe in an immortal soul? Why do scientists not believe in it? What is a soul, anyway? Do we need a soul? We will explore these and related questions in this essay. The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes famously said “If philosophers were always in agreement about the meaning of words, almost all their disputes would evaporate.”[2] There is hardly a better example to demonstrate this truism than the concept of a soul—one of the most misunderstood and ill-defined concepts. A soul is perceived as spiritual, spooky, and otherworldly. While there is nothing spooky or otherworldly about a soul, it is indeed a spiritual concept. However, that knowledge does not help us, [...]

By |2021-11-18T22:42:50-05:00October 22nd, 2021|Soul, Space, Spirituality, Uncategorized|2 Comments
Read More

Yom Kippur—The Day of Pure Delight

Yom Kippur means “The Day of Atonement.” Some view it as a frightening day full of regrets of the past and anxiety for the future. However, Chasidic philosophy sees Yom Kippur as the day of pure delight. On a simple level, Yom Kippur is the day of forgiveness--the day when we all going to be forgiven, cleansed, and atoned. What is not to be happy about? Moreover, it is a day when we get our personal rendezvous with our Heavenly Father, and with ourselves. The last prayer of Yom Kippur is called Neila ("closing"). It is usually interpreted as the closing of the doors of prayers when the penitent feverishly trying to squeeze another prayer before the doors are shut. In Hassidic teachings, the Neila is viewed completely differently—it is the most cherished [...]

By |2023-09-24T00:35:40-04:00September 15th, 2021|Uncategorized|0 Comments
Read More

Noah’s Ark—Three Layers of Being Human

A light shalt thou make to the ark, and to a cubit shalt thou finish it upward; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. (Genesis 6:16)   As mentioned in the previous post, “The Noah’s Ark—A Model of a Living Cell,” Noah’s ark was a microcosm. Structural parallels have been drawn between Noah’s ark and the Holy Temple in Jerusalem (Bet HaMikdash), Tabernacle (Mishkan) (each of these sanctuaries is also called microcosm in its own right), and Mount Sinai—all based on the parallel between three levels of Noah’s ark, on the one hand, and three levels of the sanctity of various areas in the sanctuaries and Mount Sinai, on the other. In the previous chapter, we investigated [...]

By |2020-10-25T19:22:21-04:00October 23rd, 2020|Genesis, Noach, Parshah, Pentateuch (Chumash), Uncategorized|1 Comment
Read More

The Soul is in the Blood

For the life of the flesh is in the blood." (Leviticus 17:11) The word translated here as “life” in the Hebrew original is nefesh, i.e., “soul.” Torah appears to be telling us that soul of every live creature is in its blood. Indeed, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi says so explicitly in the Tanya: The abode of the animal soul derived from kelipat nogah in every Jew is in the heart; in the left ventricle, as it is filled with blood, and it is written, 'For the blood is the soul' (nefesh)…. just as the blood has its source in the heart, and from the heart it circulates into every organ…" (Likkutei Amarim, 9)[1] The animal soul is primarily vested in the blood (from where it spreads to the whole body and beyond). What does [...]

By |2021-12-31T14:54:36-05:00May 4th, 2020|Acharei Mot, Biology, Ezekiel, Kabbalah, Leviticus, Names of G‑d, Parshah, Pentateuch (Chumash), Science, Sefirot, Soul, Spirituality, Uncategorized, Zohar|6 Comments
Read More

In the Beginning — It’s All About Change

In the beginning G‑d created the heaven and the earth. (Genesis 1:1)   The first verse in the Torah is key to understanding the fundamentals of creation. As far as physics is concerned, there are three key words in this verse, which are highlighted in bold: In the beginning G‑d created the heaven and the earth. According to Nachmanides, these three words—“beginning,” “heaven,” and “earth”—represent, respectively, time, space, and matter. It is easy to see that the “beginning” stands for time, because the “beginning” is clearly a temporal concept that sets off the beginning of time; that “heaven” is a metaphor for space, because the stars and the planets are perceived to be in the sky (i.e., heaven) when, in fact, they are moving in space;[1] and that “earth” is emblematic of matter, [...]

By |2020-10-15T23:02:15-04:00March 11th, 2020|Bereishit, Bereshit, Creation, Ezekiel, Genesis, Kabbalah, Parshah, Pentateuch (Chumash), Relativity, Sefirot, Space, Spirituality, Time, Uncategorized|4 Comments
Read More

Cosmic Symphony

Strings vibrate, Souls tremble, Angels are running and returning, G‑d is touching and not touching – The rhythms of the universe… Nothing stays still… all is in flux. The inexorable flow of time is synonymous with the existence itself. Indeed, everything exists in time. However, from where does the time come? This is, perhaps, the greatest mystery of science. In modern physics, we do not know what time is, let alone from where it comes. We only know how to measure it – by counting the number of periodic intervals, which we accept as a unit of time. For example, in antiquity, people used a night-day cycle as the basic unit of time. This cycle was born out of observations of the apparent rotation of the sun around the earth (although, in reality, [...]

By |2021-12-15T20:45:38-05:00October 30th, 2019|Bereishit, Creation, Deuteronomy, Devarim, Ezekiel, Genesis, G‑d, Soul, Spirituality, String Theory, Time, Uncategorized|1 Comment
Read More
Copyright 2019 QuantumTorah.com
Toggle Sliding Bar Area

Archives

Categories

DON’T MISS A BEAT

Be the first to know when we publish a new post.

Go to Top