The soul is the home of the mind.
The soul exists in perfect symbiosis with the body. The soul is the home of the mind, which means the brain is an organic modem that allows the soul’s mind to interact with the body.
Kabbalah teaches that created substance takes two interconvertable forms. One form is physical, with each tiniest particle of our being (monads) held together by unseen forces, two of which we scientifically term nuclear and electromagnetic. The other form is spiritual, with its monads held together by the light of creation. Spirituous substance is just as real as physical, but is so very different in its composition from the physical, that we cannot detect it with our five senses. There is a word for something actual but entirely undetectable; entelechy. One powerful analogy is energy itself. We know that energy is actual from what it does. All processes in the universe are powered by energy. But, we literally have no idea what energy is, and we cannot detect it, even with our most powerful technologies. We detect its operation through its byproducts; heat and motion. Heat is not energy itself, but rather the effect energy has on physical objects as it shifts between thermodynamic levels. We measure temperature changes in the world around us, which gives us positive, unmistakable proof that energy is at work. Motion is not energy either, but rather the effect energy can have on a physical object's location or position. But, what it is that is powering all processes in the universe is unknown. Energy is actual, but itself undetectable. Energy is entelechical substance. In fact, Einstein himself describes energy as “certainly something entelechical.” Thus, we find that entelechical created substance necessarily exists. Spirituous substance is yet another entelechical reality.
The soul is made of entelechical created substance. Kabbalah teaches that the soul is formed in the pattern of a physical body, so that when a soul enters a physical body at conception, it perfectly matches the physical in its image. And, the blending of body and soul is so subtle, but perfect and total, that we cannot “feel” our soul when we are awake and not sleeping. The 17th century Christian Kabbalist, Viscountess Anne Conway, termed this perfect blending “admixture”. When we are awake, the consciousness portion of our brain makes us constantly aware of the non-stop operation of our five senses, feeding information into our brains. This totally overwhelms our awareness so much that there is no possibility of being aware of ourselves as soul while we are awake. But, when we “fall” asleep, the falling sensation is actually a disconnection from conscious awareness, and we immediately experience ourselves as soul, especially in our dreams. We disconnect from our physical bodies when we sleep, which is why Zohar teaches that sleep is “one sixtieth of death”. When sleeping, are you ever aware of your physical body laying in bed? Of course not. How can this be if we are no more than physical beings? It is because we are not only physical. We are two beings, one physical and the other spirituous, perfectly blended in the most intimate form of cosmic symbiosis. We become aware of ourselves purely as soul when we sleep, but not when awake. Do we have souls? Of course we do, and we experience ourselves as souls every time we fall asleep.
Kabbalah teaches that “soul language” is not the same as physical language, but the two have considerable similarities. They have two different but overlapping languages, much like the different but overlapping dialects of Chinese. This accounts for why our recollections of dreams seem so strange. The dreams are not strange to us while we are having them. In fact, everything seems remarkably logical and “normal” while we dream, no matter how bizarre the dream might seem when we recall it after we awaken. It is only after we awaken and reconnect with the consciousness portion of our brain that we judge our dreams to be eerie, weird, strange, and/or bizarre. The reason is the difference between the logic of conscious physical awareness and the logic of pure soul awareness.
This accounts for why science, specifically psychology, has such a terrible problem with trying to explain our sleep and dream states. Yes, our brains shift into a different mode when sleeping, but it is not the alternative physical functioning of our brains that controls our dream state experiences. The dissimilar physical machinations of the brain that occur during sleep, and the subtle, unusual body functions that happen during sleep, occur as result of continued, but quite incomplete interconnection of our souls to our bodies. These bodily operations, like Rapid Eye Movement (REM), are little more than physical reactions to our sleeping and dreaming.
But, the brain doesn’t cause our dreams. Some portions of the brain literally "turn off" when we fall asleep, but no portion of the brain "turns on" when we begin to dream. Our souls do it all. This seems to strongly suggest that the human mind is not located in our brain, but rather that the mind exists as the thinking aspect of the soul. This relegates the brain to be an evolved organic modem which allows the language of the soul to be transmitted directly into the body to control voluntary actions, and also allows the physical language of the bodily senses to be transmitted to the mind for memory storage and analysis. Scientific researchers and theorists cannot identify the mind as a part of the brain, so they try to explain the phenomena of the human mind as merely a psychological effect of the sum-total operation of our brains. In other words, science tells us the mind is a universal psychological illusion of cognition. They can't find the mind itself to be a part of the brain, so they resort to this sort of whimsical gestaltish hypothesis. The problem is that entellechical created substance cannot be detected using physical technology, so the mind as a part of the soul cannot be scientifically proven. The mind is not brain function. The mind is soul function.
Since the operation of the soul cannot be detected by physical technology, science cannot experiment on it or test it in any way. Science can only test the physical reactions of our bodies resulting from the soul-controlled sleep state, but not the soul itself the controls the dream state. It’s like science being able to study the by-product of energy in operation, heat, but not being able to detect what it is that causes the changes in the levels of heat (energy). Scientists do not trouble themselves with questioning the existence of energy, but they do question the phenomena of sleep and dreams, and trouble themselves with trying to find a physical, brain-caused reason for it. Only the Kabbalists, down through history, have identified sleeping and dreaming as purely soul functions. The rest of the world hopelessly strives to prove that sleeping is nothing more than a machination of the brain. Wide acceptance of Kabbalist understanding can, and should change all that.
references:
1. Manhar, Nurho; The Sepher Ha-Zohar (Book of Light); Edited by H.W. Percival; Theosophical Publishing Company, New York; 1914. http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/zdm/zdm000.htm (Books VIII, XXIII, XXV-XXVI, LII, LXXXVII-LXXXVIII)
2. Leibniz, G.W.; The Monadology; “Discourses on Metaphysics and Other Essays”; edited by Garber and Ariew; Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, Indiana. 1991 (Ppg. 68-81) 3. Einstein, Albert; Relativity : The Special and the General Theory; Late Institute for Advanced Study; Princeton, New Jersey; Crown Publishers, Inc.; Random House, New York. 1956 4. Conway, Vizcountess Anne; The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy; edited by Peter Loptson; Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague; 1982.
