MercurialBlack (nprofile…g05m) I don’t think anything exists outside the universe. I think our senses, our mind, our tools, our microscopes and math are tools that measure parameters, and the “soul,” of a person is not transcendant but rather an immanent gestalt of everything that person is, which cannot be defined or understood by any of the parameters we use to measure the world, but rather through our own existence as an immanent gestalt of everything that we are. This is the “thing in itself,” a nearly inconceivable mystery which is irreducible and cannot be turned into any other form. The best we can do with all our parameters is summon it, or lead us to it with metaphor or paradox, or display everything outside of it.
You can completely know someone, but the form of knowing is different from what you expect, since it requires reaching out to them with that part of yourself, that immanent totality of you. This is how great artists, seers, prophets, mystics, etc, approach the world.
This part of you feels transcendant, because it is not beholden to the mind, and as such feels as if it is outside of time, because our linear experience of time is generated by the mind. In reality time has happened, and we are acting through it.
This easily explains the free will conundrum, but it’s hard to understand why without direct experience. The reality is the universe is material, but something else as well, and we can intuit it and share it and act by it and overthrow it, but we cannot calculate it.
You’re sort of right. Paradoxically there is no actual barrier between you and me, and yet there is something material that makes us separate. Everything in existence both exists individually while being a part of and entwined with everything else in existence. This bends reality and reaches beyond time, which is why we can touch a dead man’s soul in his works, or love someone who we cannot touch, or identify with something that is not us.