Philosophy: Mind, Soul, Consciousness, Body - Part 1

Mind – Soul – Consciousness – Body

Introduction

When I, as a 13-year-old, devoured the book "Himmelskunde für Jedermann", I was fascinated by a picture that I have never forgotten since and which I had been thinking of again and again in the following years and decades. It is printed there with the caption "Breakthrough of man through the heavens and knowledge of new spheres (woodcut around 1520)" [Translation by the author] - [Krause & Fischer, Himmelskunde für jedermann, Fig. 209, pg. 287]

About 40 years later, when I read Israel Regardie's great book, The Tree of Life, An Illustrated Study in Magic, I found that picture again. There it is printed with the caption "The Experience of the Inner Worlds". [Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life, An Illustrated Study in Magic, Fig. 80, pg. 224]

Today I know that both captions actually say the same thing.

Meanwhile, I also learned that this image is a woodcut by the French astronomer Nicolas Camille Flammarion, which he made in the style of the 15th century and published it in his 1888 book L'atmosphère météorologie populaire, and I became aware that Flammarion also dealt with parapsychology and argued that the soul exists independent of the body and has abilities unknown to science, also that he was co-founder and member of the French branch of the Theosophical Society, and president of the "Society for Psychical Research ".

When I wrote this article, I came across this picture again, looking for a specific quote while leafing through some of my books. This time I found it with the signature "Dissolving the Membrane. The ancient alchemists sought ways to dissolve the barrier between the reality they believed was an illusion and the imaginal they thought was real." (F.A.Wolf, Mind into Matter. A New Alchemy of Science and Spirit,  pg. 19, Figure 1.1).

For some years, the picture hangs in my living room.

L'atmosphère météorologie populaire (German.: Himmelskunde für das Volk.)

Nicolas Camille Flammarion, Paris 1888

When I, as a young physics student, found a notice on the bulletin board of our institute titled "Spirit dissolves the myth of matter", I thought to myself, "Such a nonsense!" That's about 40 years ago.

When I started writing this article, I had been studying this topic for some time and thought I had enough material to cover it from different perspectives. But when I sat at my desk and really wanted to start, my head was suddenly pretty empty and I did not know where and how to start. But a few hours later, I had gathered an extensive collection of materials, but not only was the central theme missing, much worse, there was no reasonable order; the manuscript was pretty messed up.

The task of somehow sorting out the clutter once again made me ask myself with what to begin, and so I finally decided to start with the ancient Greeks, who of course should not completely be excluded from this topic, and subsequently to address the scientific perspective, not least of all because the question of how we perceive and interact with the world around us, how our consciousness relates to our body and the material world, and vice versa, must not be excluded in an essay on the topic "Mind - Soul - Consciousness - Body". In addition, the topic also explicitly includes the word body. Body implies matter and the material world, and the world in which we live - the world that seems to surround us, is evidently material. The study of matter and the understanding of its laws is seen as a classic topic of sciences, just as consciousness, mind and soul are seen as classical subjects of the humanities, but also of religions, at least when it comes to the immortality of the soul - or expressed a bit more abstract - to the immortal portion of man.

But no fear! I will not present a scientific paper and I will not provide any mathematical formulas. Instead, I will take mysticism into consideration, and it should be kept in mind that sometimes contemporary scientific thinking and millennia-old mystical ideas are not so far apart.
to be continued