Ensoulment - when and how does it occur?

[Amphigorey]

I am interested in hearing your ideas on when you think ensoulment actually occurs. Is it at the time of "conception"? When exactly is that? What happens if the zygote splits and you have zygotic twins? What happens when two zygotes combine into a single embryo?

[RevJP]

I believe it happens at birth.

[bb79jb81]

For us to try and answer that question is tough. About as tough as trying to figure out definitivly if we have a soul at all.

If we have a soul, what is it? When do we get it? When does it leave us? What was it before our earthly body existed? How long did it exist without a body? Why am I the lucky recipient of this particular soul? Is it possible to accidently get the wrong soul? Could I have your sould by mistake and you have mine? Is there such a thing as an evil soul? Did I maybe get the deviant soul of a would be hitler? Did I get the sould of a would be Pope?

See the can of worms you just opened up?

I am not going to go into everything I would like to, but I will say this. This is strictly my opinion. I think that if we all have souls, we must have gotten them at the first time we realized that we were concious beings. That split second that we discover that we are we, that is when it happens. When a baby is born it looks up at you, maybe smiles maybe cries. I have to small children, they both had different reactions to me at birth.

Much the way a dog or a cat looks at you, is the way a newborn baby looks up at you. Ever forgiving at that point, incapable of wrong doing. A perfect little being waiting for the arrival of its soul. Ones sould could also be called his or her personality, the very fiber that makes us, us.

We are capable of emotions, guilt, sadness, love and joy. I believe that without a soul we would be incapable of such emotions. When such a tradedy occurs, I beleive that it is the soul itself that hurts inside you. At what point to we receive our souls? It would have to be at first conciousness.

[BeHereNow]

Ensoulment - when and how does it occur?

When did my personhood/soul enter my being?

We need to define “being” or possibly “my being”. I want it to mean my material existence.
By material existence I want to mean those tiny particles which make up our physical structure. I don’t think it is important what you call them or how small you want to make them. I do not mean true particles as in the particle theory. I just mean something that occupies space in some sense. If we need to get into string theory vs particle theory, so be it, but I don’t see that as being necessary.

So, the question becomes, at what moment did the tiny particles that make up my being come into existence. If we trace back the tiny particles that make up my being, at what point do they materialize out of nothing? At what moment can we say “Just a moment ago these tiny particles did not exist neither in their present form nor in another form?”

My position is that that moment in time would be Creation, big bang, infinity, whatever you consider to be “The Beginning”. I do not believe it matters how you define “The Beginning”, but I may be wrong.

So, if the material body has existed since The Beginning, when has the soul/personhood entered?
I say, regardless of your philosophical starting point, the logical answer is “The personhood/soul entered at “The Beginning”. This alone is an absolute moment in time (even for infinity, although that may be a tough row to hoe), all other moments along the continuum are completely arbitrary.

[Amphigorey]

Thank you all for your entries.

BeHereNow, you're a member of the Deist group, but sometimes I get the impression that you're a Buddhist or you share some Buddhist perspectives. I have read that Buddhists liken the transfer of the soul from life to life to a candle's flame that is past from candle to candle. And that this is distinct from the Christian's notion of a "personality" that is past. Is this how you see it? Perhaps either you or another Buddhist here can explain this.

However, I posed this thread's question specifically with Christians in mind. I see the process of conception as taking place over a few days with there being no instantaneous moment. I do mention two special cases to consider. Perhaps there are others?

[BeHereNow]

I consider my self to be Zen (Buddhist) Jeffersonian Christian Deist.
Buddhism has no particular belief in God. A personal god certainly never appears. It is often considered more of a philosophy.
Zen is Buddhism meets Taoism.
Zen can be eastern, which relies heavily on the sutras and other Buddhist scriptures.
Western Zen realizes that eastern philosophy is foreign to the western mind and often bypasses the eastern terms and concepts that Buddhism traditionally espouses. In the fifties the beatniks latched onto Zen and popularized it. The various works in Chinese and Japanese started being translated into English from the 30’s forward, but are more scholarly (D.T. Suzuki, others) than the 60’s and later writings (a la Zen Flesh, Zen Bones).
All Zen attempts to boil down Buddhism to its essence.
In Zen there are Atheists, Agnostics, Deists, Christians, more.
Thomas Jefferson was a Deist that believed Jesus was a great moral teacher and his bible consisted of only the sayings of Jesus. He called himself a “Christian in the truest sense”, but he was a product of the industrial revolution, did not believe in miracles and the resurrection, did believe in an all powerful creator, so would be considered Deist. I feel I have the same understanding of God, Jesus and the Bible.

The candle analogy is very difficult to explain.
A student asked his master some question about the soul, and probably rebirth (my memory is fuzzy). The reply likened a candle whose flame was used to light another candle. And Another. And another. And so on, for a hundred or a thousand candles. Is that last flame the same as the first, or different? So it is with the soul.
It is hard to add much to that. I tried to express my understanding in my previous post.
A Buddhist may be able to explain it better.
A Zen koan (riddle leading to enlightenment) is “What is your original face (nature) before you were born?”

[ST88]

I am interested in hearing your ideas on when you think ensoulment actually occurs. Is it at the time of "conception"? When exactly is that? What happens if the zygote splits and you have zygotic twins? What happens when two zygotes combine into a single embryo?

I think that our culture is caught up in defining discrete moments in time, when in actuality we are caught up in an continuum. We want to believe that there is this snap of the fingers and then something is different. But really there is only the moment where our perception of it is different, it has actually been changing all along and we only became aware of it at some point.

I hedge here by saying I do not believe there is such a thing as a "soul", but I do think that this desire to define discrete moments in time leads us to consider such questions as "When is our soul created"? or "When does a fetus become a person"? as legal terms of art. We would like to go back and say that at this moment, it was not true, but here, at this next moment it suddenly became true, and here's why.

In my opinion, this type of thinking only leads one down the path of deception, as complex processes that require thorough understanding become easy-to-deal-with sound bites of information.

Like BeHereNow, I would call life itself a continuum of conservation for the initial spark of life, whatever that may have been.